Thread by @DanaENight

The fifth thing I worked on at Arkane never saw the light of day. It was a map for The Knife of Dunwall set at our vista landmark, the clocktower. Before I get into my diagrams, here's some history. (1/12)

The clocktower was a fairly late addition to Dishonored. It gave Dunwall an iconic building that you could see from every map to give the world some continuity. But because it came in so late there were never any plans to visit it. So in the DLC, we wanted to go for it. (2/12)

Knife of Dunwall had a scope like an accordion. It started out very ambitious, but soon had to be dialed back, hence the cut. When the scope was later expanded to create what world be the Brigmore Witches chapter, it was too late to revisit this very expensive idea. (3/12)

Here's the basic outline! A lot of this did make it into the game, in very different forms. The characters are the same, and the non-lethal concept was already there. But the centerpiece was to be the clocktower. Daud would have had a secret outpost inside. (4/12)

In a nutshell, you could pick one of three strategies, sniper, bomb, or non-lethal, and trigger a rail switch to move Timsh to the best location to carry out your plan. If you failed, you can do plan B; classic infiltration. (5/12)

We wanted to try "scorched earth" alternate solutions for this DLC, for an optional villainous approach. In the end only one of these made it in, but the "bomb" method here was my version of that. (6/12)

This map did have a gray box, but it was totally focused on figuring out how to make the gameplay space work with the clocktower, without redesigning it. Locations like those below only exist as paper maps. (7/12)

This level was trying to do a lot of things we eventually avoided in future games. The concept of a sniping vignette doesn't work in Dishonored because you're setting up content that implies a specific play style. We try to never do that. (8/12)

The bomb is another can of immersive sim worms. An explosive device in one of our games should be systemic, not a "key" (the bomb) that you use on a "lock" (the single location you can plant it) that opens a "door" (you solved the map!) We did it once and then never again. (9/12)

This chart was fun for me to rediscover because it's similar to how I approach all of my work now that I'm Campaign Designer. It's all about the flow of events and what challenges can be met with what options. (Too high res for twitter!) (10/12) i3.lensdump.com/i/IuMbYe.png

Sadly not much else exists of this map. If it hadn't been cut it would have been an incredible challenge to make work, since it was directly confronting gameplay that Dishonored isn't necessarily good at. Enjoy imagining what could have been. ☺️ (11/12)

I'll try to answer what I can but remember that this was back in 2013 and we only worked on it for a few months, so I may just not remember. 😅 (12/12)