A Little Loopy
Narrative & Level Designer | Solo Project | Fallout 4
Summary
"A Little Loopy" is a single-player Fallout 4 level. The player meets Ivans, a roaming Institute scientist with a problem: there's an old reactor scheduled to be reactivated, but it's behind schedule, and the player is tasked with activating it by any means necessary. Once arriving at the facility, they can assist the scientists in their tasks to get the system back on schedule, or kill them, take their hands, and force restart the reactor. If even that is too helpful, the option remains, for players hostile to the Institute, to cause the reactor to explode, optionally assist Synths along the way.
Player Agency
One of the core principals of RPGs is the player being able to approach systems how they want. This is a more difficult design goal than a linear pathway, but it is one I prioritized as important for player immersion. Here, the scientist can be helped in a hacking minigame. Or he can just be blown away, and his computer accessed forcefully.
Puzzles and Dialogue Choices
A lot of Fallout 4's systems, while very complex and interesting, can feel very action oriented. As a player and a designer, I enjoy more methodical exploration, and so, in the above video, is a short puzzle on growing a plant, which has instructions nearby, and a prompt scientist to talk to. The result is a sequence that feels satisfying and rewards careful observation.
Satisfying Responsiveness
For a player that spends fifteen or more minutes in an area, it can feel demoralizing to just leave the area and not have a reason to return. I mitigate this by creating a satisfying, meaningful, and responsive final decision. If the player chooses to sabotage the reactor, it explodes in a fiery catastrophe.
Guidance Without Markers
One thing I have noticed that produces satisfying gameplay experiences is when players navigate through an environment without being led by the hand. Yet, at the same time, players hate being lost. I chose to have no objective markers in my quest, and instead carefully color-coded and designed each section to ensure players were confident and content in their navigation.
Factions Within Factions
Fallout 4 is a game with a significant number of factions, and their conflict is what drives many narratives in the game. To ensure consistent game feel and in support of player agency, I designed many logically consistent alternate pathways. In the above video, the player is tasked to eliminate some Synths. They can do so, or they can talk it out, and get what they want anyway, albeit with having to return and kill the scientist instead.
Narrative Objectives
Many dialogue systems suffer from being fluff designed to be skipped. Going in the opposite direction, I have vital information on characters to encourage environment exploration and naturalistic storytelling. The character in the video above is saboteur, and the player, based on their progress with the Railroad faction in other parts of the game, has different responses and prompts, but nonetheless can still receive the same information.
Postmortem
What Went Well?
Pivoting.
I originally planned for the main mechanic to be a time loop: the generator would detonate on its own rather than being caused by the player. In Whitebox, as I was trying to figure out how to implement this mechanic, I found this to be untenable. I took everything I had done so far and just pivoted without losing any work done.
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Responding to feedback.
The quest originally had no combat. Based on play tester feedback, they wanted not only an opportunity to have combat, but also didn't want to be forced to solve the puzzles while completing the quest.
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Iteration and implementation.
Having to open up Papyrus, the Creation Kit scripting language, to adjust behavior I found very slow. I found a quick and easy workaround while building, since I mainly needed bools to check, I had a bunch of floating doors which I would lock and unlock, which allowed me to easily adjust behavior on the fly, allowing me to build the level far faster than I could have otherwise.
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Modular quest design.
I designed the quest to be built in independent chunks. While all tasks have to be completed to finish the quest, they can be completed in any order, and alternate tasks were created and implemented throughout development without having to worry about them impacting the already present gameplay.
What Went Wrong?
Original design document didn't match engine.
I assumed that because I had gotten a few aspects of a time loop reset working in an action block I could easily get it done for a larger scale level. Unfortunately, Creation Kit posed several critical issues due to the time tracking done in engine that were insurmountable in the development time.
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What Did I Learn?
Consider engine choice.
Game engines can be modified a lot with scripting, but there are limits, particularly with a limited development time budget. Be sure to focus on what can be done with the tools available.
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