#gdc18 Level design in Tacoma. Tacoma was one of the really interesting design problems of last year, and by “design problems” I mean “I wanted to fix it but I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to fix.”
“everyone in the business has heard of a level designer but the term is really poorly defined.”
a first-person three-d exploration game. The game is about finding out what happened. It’s communicated in multiple ways.
“Fullbright”, the company name, is a bit of level design jargon. (Have to google it later...)
Inspired by the Punchdrunk style where the audience chooses their path through the space and decides what to pay attention to.
This actually reminds me of lost-phone games where you are following email threads in any order. Only it’s VR “email”.
Wanted to give the player the tools to understand the story as it happens around them.
Their initial design used very traditional locked doors, found keys, and journals — like Gone Home. Mostly linear. This is legit but well-explored.
So a string of spaces, each of which contained one story element. The diaries were holo-diaries, but structurally nothing different from Gone Home. So what else can we do?
A few holo-characters moved around, and this seemed cool. So they wanted to design around that idea. This meant totally redesigning the spaces for that model. Larger, connected, nonlinear spaces (mirroring the writing).
It was, in fact, a complete rewrite. They threw away a “complete” implementation.
So what was involved in this new design? They started with the idea of realistic job-based station layout. What do these people actually need?
it’s meant to be a somewhat compressed environment, with people living in their own workspace. How is this tolerable? (But not comfortable!) And the multitasking, multifunctional spaces support the multithreaded story model too.
The station can’t be sprawling or have long corridors. But working this out required a lot of iterations on graph paper.
Wound up with hubs and spokes, with work spaces near the hub and living spaces farther out. (The mess hall is the hub of the admin wing, e.g.)
Then when you write the AR conversations, they intersect at the hubs and then branch or overlap around that. Fits the space.
They did a lot of subtle tuning of voice volume to fit where the player is paying attention. If you look at someone, they’re louder! Or if someone is yelling for attention, even if they’re far away.
Then there are private moments, or private one-on-one conversations, which happen in the more remote offices and bedrooms.
They were limited on animation resources, so they couldn’t move chairs and things once characters were animated to sit on. No time for rewrites on the animation. This wound up being a physics design constraint.
Although if a holocharacter walks through a real object, you know the object was moved there later in the timeline. (I noticed this while playing! It was cool!)
They wanted AR scenes to be tied to progression. At first they put clues/keys in the AR desktop info, but that led to players skimming the dialogue to hunt for clues. Not the right mode.
So they tried the idea of a slow download process that they have to “wait” for. That gave players motivation to explore in a chill, non-rushed way.
Secretly the download progress bar is tied to rooms entered and journals watched, so you come back to it periodically and see it advanced. But this had to be opaque, not constantly visible!
This progress meter supports exploration without mandating a linear order. The player can check back when they feel satisfied with the area, and it’ll usually be done.
The design process was very back and forth between setting, spaces, story, and progression. But they had to have the spaces blocked out before any writing could start.
The voice recording sessions were ensemble, everyone in a room. (Not the usual game session of one actor in a booth.) Recorded the whole voice track in two days. The voice track was locked 14 months before ship!
That is, they couldn’t start animation until the voice track was locked. So even more dependencies.
That back-and-forth diagram is starting to look pretty optimistic ... they had a lot of ordering constraints. Had to think ahead a lot.
The placement of narrative details has a hierarchy of information. There are important plot points and side details. Background info was used as rewards for optional puzzles and corner hunting.
