This piece focuses on environmental storytelling, narrative and combat space planning. The player is guided through a mysterious and eerie dreamscape built from their grief and fears after loosing a family member.
Inspired by: The Stanley Parable, What Remains of Edith Finch, Resident Evil 5 (chapter 5-2).
Duration: 4 weeks half-time
Software: Unreal Engine 5.2
Assets: Infinity Blade series by Epic Games
Template: Max Template by Max Forsberg
You play as "the bereaved", a character in mourning who is going through their own dreamscape. Throughout the level you get to a reoccurring hotel room with a giant hole in it that gets smaller and smaller the more the player faces their fear and fights their demons.
Each hotel room represent the player's healing process and functions as a sense of progression. Each road represents the player's fear and is the trigger for each combat scenario. The height is part of the environmental storytelling where the elevation of the level represent the ups and downs of the player's mental state.
I wanted to leave adequate space for both narrative and combat so that the player can focus on the narrative in low intensity areas and focus on combat in high intensity areas. The intensity of each fight is increased the further along the story you get. I wanted the player's fear to be a trigger for each fight which is why the intensity spikes after each "Road".
I knew from the start that I wanted to work with metaphors of grief and that the setting would be a hotel.
I researched and planned which metaphors could be visualized in level design and would fit the narrative.
I sketched out the order of events and planned the streaming.
I set up a scrum board to keep track of my tasks and to help me scope for the set time frame.
In the first iteration I kept the hotel room in the same spot with the different environments around it. The first plan was to stream in changes in the hotel room when you come back to it to show that the space was changing.
The level design was later changed to a continuous journey with the different versions of the hotel placed out in different spots in the level. This change elevated he composition and structured the journey better.
I wanted this piece to be dripping with environmental storytelling and mood. This was something I kept in mind from the start since it would impact the way the ground height and composition was planned out.
When designing the space I wanted the environment to change parallel with the narrative. Whenever the player faces a fear there is a dip in elevation and the light gets darker and dimmer. Likewise, when the player has faced the fear they begin to climb upwards and it gets lighter.
When the player reaches their lowest point mentally or faces the darkest parts of themselves is also when the player reaches the lowest and darkest points of the environment.
Some props consist of items that are generally seen as connected to grief or funerals.
I also wanted to mix in things that were more personal to me or others that might not be as obvious.
The hotel lobby starts off by being quite cramped and small, and the hotel room has a giant hole in it. I wanted this hole to represent the hole in the player's heart. Hopefully that's not too cheesy.
The hotel room and lobby changes as you progress. The further along you are the bigger and lighter the lobby is and the smaller the hole in the hotel room is.
Enemies are hinted at by graffiti and shadows.
The first demon you come across is in a place you can't get to and it poses no threat, but functions as a display of how dangerous they can be.
Issue: The first demon used to be accessible and I wanted the player to walk past them since they have no weapon. However, based on play testing, players still wanted to access the area behind the demon or try to approach it.
Solution: I had two ways of approaching a solution. Either I made it a sneaking section, where you have to sneak past the demon, or I make it a blocked off display that you just move past. I chose to go with the latter since "sneak" was not a play style that came up again and I didn't want to teach the player something they weren't gonna use.
For this piece I pushed myself to take something that was more personal to me and put into something creative. I usually like to do things that are less serious or with a simple premise and elevate that to good level design. However, when researching how people view grief, the imagery gave me so much inspiration that the process went fast and smoothly. And despite the somber topic, I had a lot of fun making this piece.
During this project I also applied what I learned from the first piece and thoroughly planned and scoped this piece to fit the time I had set for myself.
Thank you for taking the time to read! 😊
-Clara
