Dead on Arrival
Project Overview
Engine: Dying Light Developer Tools
Platform: PC
Synopsis: "Dead on Arrival" is a single-player quest in Dying Light. It takes place within a small city slice on the outskirts of Harran, Turkey.
The quest requires the player to traverse the city through myriad pathways to retrieve supplies for survivors trapped in the city from a warehouse held by bandits.
Key Takeaway: Effective pre-planning and reference gathering can cut build time into a fraction of what it would be without.
Design Goals
Realistic City Slice
Freedom of Movement
Detailed Aesthetics
Realistic City Slice
At the outset of my paper mapping of my level I knew I wanted to make a small city. It afforded me the opportunity to play with a lot of the aesthetics in the engine and I could make the kind of gameplay I enjoyed from Dying Light. I wanted to do more than that. In every city there are thousands of stories happening simultaneously every day. I feel like any game city should reflect that reality.
With this design pillar in place, I went about creating little stories throughout my map. I wanted the player to explore the city and feel like people genuinely lived, and died, there. Whether it's the corpse of someone trying to escape the apocalypse or the remnants of a world that once was, it all helps to enhance the realism of the game space.
Freedom of Movement
Early on in the pre-planning of this level, I was deconstructing Dying Light to discover what I personally felt was the most fun so that I could work with that in my design. What I discovered was that the variety of movement options the player gets in their city spaces was a lot of fun to play around with.
To incorporate this into my level, I endeavored to create multiple pathways players could take through the city that I constructed. With these pathways, I also included many different affordances for the player to use to traverse to other pathways if they wished. In this way, I designed the level to give the player the ability to move through the city however the flow took them while still making progress toward the ultimate objective.
The opportunity to shift lanes whenever the player might want to and copious amount of natural affordances helped to create a free flowing movement within the city space. Going from the ground to the rooftop would only take a matter of moments as opposed to feeling like a punishment with Dying Light movement mechanics.
Two examples of scenes set up to tell a story
Detailed Aesthetics
Because of the size of the city, I took great pains to focus in on the details throughout the city. It wouldn't feel right if the player reached a portion of the city and it looked noticeably worse than any other portion. I could have focused in entirely on the critical path. but that would have gone against my other design pillars. I instead detailed each pathway the player can take through the level to the same aesthetic level. This, combined with the other pillars, helped to make the city feel like something that was living and breathing, and not just an empty sandbox devoid of personality.
This level of detail can go a long way to help the player paint a picture of the stories that might have occurred in the setting.
What Went Well
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Gameplay implementation
The gameplay implementation was incredibly simple. I planned for the gameplay in my map to be pretty rudimentary. It took me almost no time at all to fill in the world with gameplay, leaving the majority of my work to be able to be spent on aesthetics and the physical construction of the space.
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Effective reference gathering
Because I knew exactly how I wanted to theme my space I was able to gather copious references from the main game that enabled me to create buildings that were of the same quality as the main game. This saved me a ton of time in construction and I managed to get the entirety of the city constructed within 2 weeks, ready to be iterated on for future milestones.
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Working with the engine
In previous projects I worked against the engine. This time, I took careful time to learn exactly what tools I would be working with predominantly and learned the ins and outs. Because I took this extra time I found a lot of unique meshes and aesthetic tools that allowed my space to really shine.
What Went Wrong
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Ambitious scope
The scope of the project was meant to be rather minimal, but after experimenting with the tools and creating my plan it was clear I committed to creating an entire city space. It was an ambitious choice as it meant I needed to be a lot more careful with the stability of my space, but I knew I could make the city work if I put the work in.
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Gameplay came second
Because the implementation of my gameplay was so simple I wound up spending much more time learning the tools and constructing the city. This resulted in a milestone with gameplay flow that left something to be desired. To fix this, I had to dedicate extra time to reconfigure the critical path flow of my level. If I'd spent some extra time at the outset to plan out other aspects of gameplay, rather than just the ones I enjoyed this could have been avoided.
