Overview
“Old Memories” is my thesis level built inside of Fallout 4. In this level, the player is given a quest to explore their old family home. It is a big estate that was split apart during a great cataclysm. Much of the space is in ruins and it’s up to the player to piece together what happened. It is a meditative level, placing great emphasis on exploration over combat.
Tech Summary
Genre | Role-Playing Game |
Team Size | 1 Developer |
Engine | Creation Kit |
Platform | PC |
Development Time | 3 Months |
Content
Design Considerations
There were two major design choices I made that ran contradictory to Fallout 4’s general design but aligned with the needs of my level. The level focused on exploration, so I deliberately removed combat and questmarkers from the space. Combat distracted from the overall tone I wanted to establish, a meditative walk through an abandoned space. And to create that mood and give players agency, I removed questmarkers so that the player would have to engage with the space and not blindly follow the questmarkers from point A to point B.
Outlining the Space
Before going into engine, I usually pull out pencil and paper to sketch out my ideas. It’s low cost and easy to iterate on. I liked the idea of a mansion split in two by some seismic event. Kind of a literal analogy to the player's broken home life. So I split the space and tried to find a way to link the two through some underground means. This led to four general spaces:
Mansion Exterior
Mansion Interior
Subway System
Workshop
Once those spaces were outlined, I began sketching out the rough critical path. Using this, I worked backwards, highlighting my key points that I wanted the player to focus in on.
Pivoting Off the Subway System
When I got into Creation Kit, I realized that the Subway System was too out of scope for what I wanted and I was having trouble getting it to integrate seamlessly with the rest of the level. The whole point of the subway was to create an organic method of bridging the two halves of the estate. After digging through all the Fallout 4 assets, I decided to use the Freighter asset to act as the bridge. With the large gap between the two estates, it was very easy to insert this large ship in the middle and use it as a crossing point.
Iteration
Once I felt happy with the overall flow, it became a cycle of object placement, lighting, and test. Once I got it to a place I felt satisfied with, I began playtesting. The final result is as you see below:
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