Dreamscape

The level, Dreamscape, is inspired by old text-based adventures from Lucasarts, like The Curse of Monkey Island, with splashes of inspirations from Double Fine & Telltale games. My main design objective was to exercise both narrative and framing of where the player should be going.

“In the far future of Earth exists a world underground. A mystery tasked to a detective to help find out information about the kidnapping of a political figure’s daughter. ”
— Outer Spice

Tools

  • Unity

    • Probuilder

    • Scripting

Roles

  • Level Design

    • Level Whitebox

    • Camera Framing

  • Dialog Implementation

Assets Used

  • Adventure Creator

  • Maximo Models + Rigs

  • Various Art Assets

 
 

Walkthrough

Reference / Mood Board

The main inspiration for the architecture was to go for between art deco with a dystopian sci-fi mix. For story reasons people of Earth now live underground as well. So we went with a few bullet points using the references on the right:

  • Visual clutter! Fill it full of bridges interconnecting buildings

  • Don’t be shy with pipes, wires, and hanging scraps of metal this area is considered to be a poor district

  • The Dreamscape is located pretty deep in the earth, the ventilation is quite hard to bring clean air to the poor. Turn on the fog machine!

Process

For this, I was breaking this level down into three parts if I wanted to create a playable prototype. I decided to do a little pre-production and team up with a writer friend of mine to see if we can get our feeling right, our Characters to be believable, and a world that we want to explore.

Phase 0:

Flowc hart for the Dreamscape and other levels

Flow chart for the Dreamscape and other levels

Within this phase, my partner and I worked on: high-level story beats, player choices, and world-building. We continued this for the next sequential levels to understand what the overall story is supposed to be. This was done by a flow chart (see image right) of what we would think would be interesting to try to make the choices based on the interactions within the world.

  • Goal: Documentation

    • Narrative Beats

    • Characters & Dialog

    • Mood Board

    • Art Themes

    • Cutscenes Descriptions

Phase 1:

This stage is about making the level playable from beginning to end. This is where my partner and I tried to see if the pacing and spacing feel good?

  • Goal: First Playable

    • Whitebox Level Geometry

      • Work on getting it done quickly

      • Proper sizing is correct

    • C̶o̶n̶c̶e̶p̶t̶ ̶A̶r̶t̶

    • Player Focus = What is the player doing when going through the level?

      • Check Dialog

      • Combat? (Peaks & Lulls)

    • Placeholder Set Pieces

    • "Box Level" Dialogs

    • Pop-up Cutscenes

    • Prototyped Level Mechanics

      • Special level mechanics, need to test to see how it works!!

Phase 2: (Next Step)

We discussed what our next step could be and that was to get a gut-check of the most overused question of all time: Can we see the fun? In this case, “fun” is about our main goals that were listed above (our feeling, believable characters, and a world we want to explore.)

  • Goal: Representative Collision

    • Untextured Geometry

    • Dialog Ready for VO

    • Dialogs Cinematically Blocked out

    • S̶l̶i̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶C̶o̶m̶b̶a̶t̶s̶ ̶(̶f̶u̶l̶l̶ ̶c̶o̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶p̶l̶a̶c̶e̶m̶e̶n̶t̶)̶

    • B̶a̶s̶i̶c̶ ̶M̶o̶C̶a̶p̶ ̶M̶o̶v̶e̶m̶e̶n̶t̶s̶

Level Area Flow

In this scene, we open to a futuristic vehicle climbing its way into this parking space. Our protagonist is here to look for an old friend located in the streets of New Baltimore.

Level Objective

After the small cutscene, the player is funneled to an overview of the city where they are shown the objective at afar, the Dreamscape.

Also from this spot, it reveals a path to the left where the player can go. This path is built to show off more of the world and to have some room for side interactions for the protagonist's commentary, as well as, interactions with other NPCs.

 

Partner Interaction

As the player continues down an elevator and making a short walk around the city, they will run into their first real interaction with their partner, Tarkas.

Based on your choices, you will be able to build more into the relationship with your character. If you even play your cards right, you can get a hot dog!

“Note — Ideally items are supposed to be used for future scenes to be used to help further your relationship with NPCs”
 

Main Story

Within the Dreamscape, players can walk around to find the owner, Jimmy, sitting at the back of the club. The main purpose of any of the dialog sequences is to help build an understanding of the protagonist’s background and how they got here. This also sets up more motivation for the characters to go deeper into this story.

 

Chase Sequence

The level design previously is supposed to allow for less of a “time-pressure” give room for exploration (even while still very much linear).

Once the chase begins, there are shots and your partner, Tarkas, to help lead the player through these backstreets of the city to catch the assassin.

As far as the technical side of this sequence (much like the rest of the level), I set up the following triggers:

  • Opening & Closing doors

  • QTE’s

  • Objects falling

  • Ensuring dialogue and other triggers aren’t fired off twice

  • Ai pathing

PLayable BUild

Controls

Walk: W, A, S, D
Jump: Space
Interact: Left Mouse Button
Dialog Selection: Arrow Keys (Up,Down) + Spacebar (Selected Choice)
Exit: Esc
 
“The build below might be horribly optimized for HTML, still working on that!”
— Kyle