Overview

Narrative/Setting: After finding out what happened to Aramis Stilton, its time we take out the funds fueling Deliliahs reign. We have to deal with Duncan Bayles, Duke Abele’s right-hand man that is in charge of running the stilton mines. Bayles is enforcing Duke Abele’s work quotas for the miners, which results in the many deaths of the miners due to exhaustion, mining accidents, and dust-related diseases. Furthermore, the increased mining operations have created the dust storms that have been plaguing Batista, which is now informally called the dust district. The extra mining’s profit has only been going into Duke Abele’s pockets, which helps solidify Queen Delilah’s control of the kingdom.

When the player arrives at the city, Bayles has ordered increased security for his mansion and areas around it. He has invited an up and coming singer to his mansion to perform for him. There are also rumors and gossip that many women have suddenly disappeared around these parts. Bayles has ordered an investigation into it but there has been no news.

Requirements/Constraints: This will be a small level exploring stealth game/level design. There will be no fighting mechanics. This is mainly a stealth level with the following mechanics: Blink powerup, climbing up walls, crouching, and detection from NPCs.

Platform: Windows PC

Engine: Unreal Engine

Language: Unreal Blueprints

Tools Used: Unreal Engine, SuperGrid, First-person starter content

Team Size: 1

Role: Concept, Greyboxing, Lighting, Pacing, Scripting, Prop and Texture Placement

Download Options:

Google Drive Zip

Blockout Images

To see more: You can visit my twitter’s media page! From January 7 to February 27, I made a tweet (mostly) everyday about the progress of this project!

Twitter Media Page

Goals & Restrictions

My goals with this project are:

Work on this project every day no matter how little time I have
Learn about Stealth game level design
Create a layout that also reflects the narrative setting
Improve my Unreal Blueprint skills
Explore multi-path level design by allowing the player to have multiple approaches to reaching the mansion and inner section of the city.
Learn how to promote exploration of the map without getting the player lost or confused
Learn how Dishonored 2 subtly hints and guides the player to explore

There are also restrictions on this project. These restrictions are to help me get a better scope of the project as well as to give myself a doable deadline. These restrictions are:

No combat mechanics
Sneaking, leaning, double jumping, ledge climbing, and blinking are the only special mechanics that the player has
Enemy/Guard NPCs that can chase and hurt the player if the player is fully detected by the enemy

City Layout

Here are my initial paper layout and final version of the city section.

Anything below the Wall of Light (Yellow text “WoL”) is the outer city section and anything above is the inner city section.

The main purposes of the outer city section are to allow the player to:

learn more the narrative of the level
stock up at and/or rob the black market
discover the side quest to gain access to an alternative way to enter the mansion
enter the inner city section by either two routes: through the Wall of Light or Bloodyfly Apartments

Routes

There are two routes in the outer city to get into the inner city.

Route 1:

From the start, find a way onto the roof of the Guard barracks. Some ways are:
- Sneak through the entrance
- Climb onto the roof with blink
Once on the roof, turn off the windmill
Head back to the main street and sneak through the Wall of Light

Route 2:

From the start, turn left and head into the alleyway
Players can take avoid guards by taking to the rooftops or slowly sneaking behind crates on the ground level
Head into the apartment to the left of the alleyway and go upstairs
Find the balcony and blink across to the other apartment
Sneak through the guards to reach the vantage point at the end of the apartment

From the inner city, the player can get to one of two vantage points and spot out ways to get into the mansion.

Here are some design changes from initial to the final layout:

I removed the area behind the guard barracks because I did not have enough space to fit it between the barracks and the Inner-city street. If I kept it in, it would reduce the space of the barracks and increase the length of the northeast Inner-city street. The increased length of the street would feel too long and awkward for the player to walk through.
The Inner-city section only had one vantage point from the Bloodfly Apartments. It was hard to access due to its placement. So, I added a rooftop portion as another vantage point.
The length of the Bloodfly Apartments is increased north-east wise. This is to give its vantage point a better field of view of the Inner-city street. This also allowed me more space in the stealth section portion of the Bloodfly Apartments to play with.
This hidden door building didn’t feel needed after making the sewer entrance into the mansion as the reward for finishing the side quest. I replaced this with a rock wall path for another way of entering the mansion.
I added an entrance in the alleyway to split the space of the alleyway in half. This allowed me to use this new space to increase the difficulty of getting into the apartments by ground level and promotes traversal on the second floor.

Mansion Layout

This mansion was inspired by “The Crack in the Slab” level from Dishonored 2 and various victorian mansion pictures found in google. This section is for:

housing the villain that the player must deal with
exploring the twisted nature of Duncan Bayles via
- listening to guard conversations
- reading letters/memos
- interacting/seeing a “famous” singer at this mansion
- discovering disturbing rooms
learning how to design a space fit for assassinating a target while fitting the requirements of a luxurious living space

With all that said, I felt that I’ve learned all I can with this project and decided to end this project after the blockout of the mansion. I will explain what this section would be if I had more time to invest in it.

Narrative

As the player explores the mansion, they will feel that something feels off. There aren’t any guests than one would expect when having a celebrity invited to a home. There are also odd letters and memos detailing what areas are off-limits to guards for the night. As the player explores these off-limit areas, they will find various items belonging to the recently missing women displayed as trophies. The player will also find a spy room that has a one-way mirror into the guest bedroom; allowing people in the spy room full view of anyone in the guest bedroom. The last area the player can find is the torture room that has show signs of frequent use such as, blood and bloody torture equipment. Finding all these clues and areas, the player will piece together that Duncan Bayles is the person behind all of the missing women. He secretly invites these women over, wine and dines with them, and then proceeds to torture and kill them.

The player figures out that Duncan Bayles intends to wine and dine this celebrity to drug and torture her. The player can stop this from happening by dealing with Bayles before he can take her to the torture room.

Timeline of NPC mansion routes

When starting the mansion section, the celebrity is in the guest room near the dining room. She is getting ready to meet Duncan Bayles; putting on makeup, trying different outfits, doing voice warmups, etc. Duncan Bayles starts in the kitchen, making sure the chefs drugs the right food for the celebrity to eat and then makes his way to the spy room. He watches the singer while the food and the signer is getting prepared. After a few minutes, Bayles is notified of the food being done and he makes his way down to the dining room. The celebrity is notified shortly afterward. The two meet and eat some of the food. Bayles talks about the missing girls and alludes to him being the culprit. The singer feels the effects of the drugged food and collapses. Bayles drags her to the torture room.

If the player appears in the same guest room as the singer while she prepares, Bayles will spot the player and will cause all guards to be on high alert.

With the assassination route, the player just needs to kill Bayles without getting caught anytime within this scenario.

Focus: Hinting at and guiding players to possible routes

One of the major things that I wanted to learn from this project was to learn how Dishonored 2 guided and hinted to players to possible spaces and routes.

One of the major things that I found was that Dishonored 2 does well was to create safe spaces where the player can take time and plan out how they would approach a route AKA Vantage Points. Whether it is a balcony looking over the street or on top of a lamppost barely avoiding the guard’s field of view, these spaces grant players a bigger field of view of the level they are supposed to overcome.

Another thing that hints and guides players to accessible spaces are the usage of lights, object placement, and affordances in objects. While I did not experiment or add any lighting in this project, I did experiment with object placement and affordances with objects. Affordances, such as broken railings and walls, signal to the player that they can access and climb onto these objects. Object placement can also signal to the player to look in a certain direction.