Dev Diary
The Pitch
For this project I wanted to do something different than I had previously done. Before this project I made full levels with AI, Mechanics and covered most aspects of a game dev team on my own.
For this project I wanted to solely focus on telling a story through my design capabilities and using the map to allow the player to interpret the world as they see fit. I wanted to level and the skeletons to tell the story behind them and what happened to the facility before it met its end.
This project was heavily inspired by the world of Fallout and its use of skeletons to tell stories of locations and its inhabitants as the bombs fell. I liked the idea of humanity living in the subway tunnels like the way they do in the Metro games and I wanted to have the playable character be a resident of the subway communities.
The Original Idea and Research
The first idea came when I was conducting research for the project, I was originally going to be making a game inspired by the world of Lord of the Rings where you would have to defend a city like Minas Tirith since i'm a huge fan of everything to do with Middle Earth. However, after researching the scale and the time frame I had, I concluded it wasn’t practical due to the sheer scale and complexity of the project.
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The idea for this project came from looking at my gaming backlog and starting Fallout 4 again, this is when I realised, I was stopping when I saw skeletons around the world of the Commonwealth, not that I didn’t notice them before but they stood out now and I appreciated them more. I discovered a newfound love for the game and the way the skeletons tell the player a story without saying or doing anything. It’s the way they are posed and what is around the skeletons that make you stop and just think about the people they used to be and what they were doing as the world ended. I started researching the skeletons in the Fallout franchise and I found that many people and outlets have noticed the skeletons and the stories they tell. All the articles I read went into detail about how the skeletons made them feel and how impactful they are.
Map Layout
The image below is the original drawing of this project. This was drawn in my notebook while I was in work as I couldn't get the thought of this project out of my head and it ended up becoming more of a passion project rather than a University project. I stuck to this layout as I asked people around my University and my work on their opinions and it was a unanimously positive. The only thing that got changed between the drawing and the final level was the tower on the roof as I turned it into a clock tower as it suited the aesthetic of the building more. The stairs also turned into an elevator as it gave me more room to play with in the building when designing the interior.
