Fallout 4 Quest
The Mass Fusion Hotel
Trailer
Trailer:
The music name is "War of Wills – Artist: Inon Zur”, which is a Fallout 4 Original Game Soundtrack.
Development Information
Game: Fallout 4
Engine: Creation Kit
Genre: First Person RPG Shooter
Development Time: Apx. 80 Hours
Responsibilities
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Concept and Documentation
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Whiteboxing and Scripting
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Dialogue design
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Gameplay Iteration
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Final Implementation
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Aesthetics
Download Mod
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design document
Level Overview
“The Mass fusion hotel” is a single-player level built for Fallout 4. It is a stand-alone quest, giving by Fiona who is a thief, starts in Diamond City.
Fiona makes up a fake story and she asks the sole survivor to fetch the property which been taken a bunch of raiders. According to Fiona, raiders have gone to their base which is located at the mass fusion hotel.
Fiona informs the sole survivor that there are two ways to enter the mass fusion hotel, one is the sole survivor can enter the hotel through the front gate, which is watched by lots of enemy guards. Another way is that the player can sneak into the hotel's truck unloading area which will be much easier.
The quest item is locked in a room inside the mass fusion hotel, the raiders’ leader: William, have the key to open that door. The player could choose to fetch the quest item by killing William and get the key. By bringing back the quest item which reveals the truth of the quest.
Major design goals
Sense of Immersion
My first major goal was to make my creation feel like a natural part of the game as opposed to an add-on crafted by another developer. First of all, this scene needs to fit FO4's game story background, that is, a world after the outbreak of nuclear war. Second, the level has a lot of Settings that use the environment to tell the story, and I wanted the players to find a lot of exciting moments in my scenes.
Engaging Combat
My second major goal was to make my combat feel instance and fit into the original game. Specifically, I want the player to feel the need to move quickly to fight. To this end, I focused on creating unique combat scenarios by providing players with new enemies at specific points. And use the terrain to push players to move from cover to cover.
Player Choice
My final major goal was to ensure that the game remained relatively open-ended, as per the nature of Fallout. To that end, I provided players with four endings, where they could quickly complete the game and receive rewards, and where they could explore every place and discover the stories hidden in my scenes. As players get more information, quests unlock more options and branches. This allows players to have a variety of fun gameplay experiences.
How did I achieve design goals?
Sense of Immersion
What I did was to collect a large number of reference pictures and make all relevant pictures into a contract sheet.This gives me an objective understanding of what my level will eventually look like.
Contract sheet
Final project snapshot
Engaging Combat
moving from cover to cover
My combat design mainly has the following points.
Players need to move between covers to fight. In my level, the enemy's position is probably superior in height, and it's hard to hit the enemy if the player doesn't choose to move to the right cover.
Environmental trap
There are many environmental traps in the scene that the player can interact with. As long as the player carefully observed, will be easy to find that the gas trap on the ground. when the player has the right timing, they can make good use of these traps to fight.
Player Choice
In this quest, the player has multiple endings to choose from. My approach is to use flow charts to determine the general direction of the story. Using the flowchart, I can clearly express the various branches of my level and the possible development.
Flow chart of the quest
How did I solve them?
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I was working on this problem. I first cut the entire map in half.
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The choice turned out to be smart, and the half-size map became very easy to control. As I start adding objects to the scene gradually, I can still expand my scene. This allows me to complete all the planned scenarios first. The rest of the time I can add new cubbyholes to improve my level.
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The problem with my dialogue is that the logic of the dialogue is not smooth enough. I think the best solution is playtesting. So I asked someone in my field to help me with my conversational experience. Through their tests, I was able to understand the problems with my conversational logic.
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The conclusion is very obvious. After many tests, the dialogue logic of my task became clear.
Challenges
What challenges
did I encounter?
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The biggest challenge I faced was to build a hotel with 3 floors plus an underground floor in my limited time. The big problem I faced after I finished the overall framework of the hotel was that my scene was too big.
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I also had a problem with the content of the conversation. My dialogue couldn't support my level, and the conversation between NPCs and players seemed unnatural.
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I had a problem with the lack of naturalness of the scene, specifically, my scene was not good enough in several aspects. The first is that my scenario is not convincing. The second is my scene lighting, which is either too bright or without shadows.
Map Design
Level snapshot
Paper Map & In Engine Snapshot
Unload area
The second floor of The Mass Fusion Hotel
The Main Lobby of The Mass Fusion Hotel
The third floor of The Mass Fusion Hotel
Environmental story telling
The hotels in my level were captured by raiders. So there should be a lot of traces of raider life in the levels. The above image shows the entertainment area on the second floor of the hotel and a billiard table with a billiard match in progress.
There are also many pre-war traces in the scene. On top of the box in the unloading area, a corpse has fluorescent mushrooms growing on it.
This is The outer perimeter of The Mass Fusion Hotel, where players return to The outside after finishing their quests. This outer balcony can be seen to have been badly damaged by the war.
Pipeline
Specifically, my level design process has been modified many times. The biggest Cell in the whole map is my hotel lobby. I always ask myself how this map is distributed. What was this map like before? How this map was affected after the nuclear war. What enemies entered the map and what effect they had on the map. If the map has two levels, how can the player tell which level they are on?
By answering those questions, I have solved these problems one by one. I started trying to build my level.
And the building of the level is a white box, gameplay complete, aesthetic complete. I went through a significant revision because my map was too big. First, I cannot complete such a significant level, and then the map is too large, and my Gameplay is not good enough. I can't perfect such a big map.
My modification is that I have modified the layout of the hall. I wanted the room to have a postwar feel, and the first thing that came to mind was that the scene was changed by the explosion.
Here's what I do. First of all, there are a lot of pieces of metal on the ground, indicating that the floor is severely damaged. Then there is the fact that the map is symmetrical, but the explosion changes the two sides into different patterns. For example, there were two toilets on the map, but the walls of the other toilets collapsed because of the explosion.
My second modification is to make the second layer. For the second level of the level, I wanted to create a feeling closer to the hotel restaurant. So I joined the bar, kitchen, dining table and entertainment area. These changes have greatly increased the level's credibility.
Finally, my levels were treated with a lot of Play tasting, so after gathering information, I proceeded to modify my levels. This makes my level even more fun. That's my pipeline.
Level Walkthrough
What went well?
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I scoped the quest appropriately to complete the gameplay logic in a reasonable time.
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I spent a lot of time giving The Mass Fusion Hotel a unique atmosphere, and the result shows in the final product.
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I can finish the task on time. I established a reasonable schedule, and often discussed ideas with my professor, and deleted things beyond the scope.
What went wrong?
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The wrong estimate of map size：There is a certain difference between the internal size of the hotel I designed and the actual size of the building outside. The main reflection is that the overall building is too small when compared to the interi This caused me to spend a lot of time to modify the size of my hotel interior.
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Narrative design: my levels have multiple endings, which makes it difficult to differentiate between each end. At the end of my level, I was actually happy with only one of the endings, and the others made me feel unable to convince the players.
What did I learn?
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I learned how to use the engine, including programming for level design.
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I learned how to design a level with multiple endings, including the rationality of each ending and how to balance them.
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I learned how to build a reasonable level through scenario design. Let's take my game level as an example. I learned how to construct a post-war hotel by learning the level of Fallout4. As I made the levels, I learned how to think about the pre-war scene, what it was like after the war, who entered the scene. Finally, I finished my level.