Role: Area Designer
Team Size: 100+ People
Time: 4 Years
Engine: Unreal Engine 5 (Initially Unreal Engine 4)
What I Did
My role on Avowed was as an Area Designer, which involved me acting as a combination Quest Designer, Level Designer, and Narrative Technical Designer. Essentially, our role is to champion and implement the entire experience of a sidequest or overlands adventure. My work was dedicated to creating interesting stories for the player to participate in, engaging level layouts, and setup combat and reward pacing for those experiences. I was also dedicating additional time to generate new basic gameplay proposals such as our Treasure Map system, and designing unique weapons for the player to find. The easiest comparison I can make is to working as a Dungeon Master with a very complex digital toolkit. For Avowed I worked on about 8 or 9 quests but championed 2-3 from concept to completion, mostly off of single sentence proposals handed to me by leadership. For brevity, I'll be focusing on 2 quests I worked on in particular: Heart of Valor & Courier, both featured in the Shatterscarp Region of the game. I'll include a version of those single sentence proposals below.
Tools:
- Unreal Engine 4 & 5 (Project converted part way through)
- Unreal Engine Blueprint Scripting
- Internal Narrative Scripting Tools (Similar to Articy Draft)
- Confluence
- Jira (Cloud)
- AirTable
- Perforce/Unreal Game Sync
- Photoshop CC
Process
Avowed was built over a period of four years with content teams facing frequent reshuffles to compensate for needs and shifting priorities. My basic pipeline went as follows:
1. Proposal: Leadership would ask for/hand the team a proposal to develop for a space/quest/POI. I would take that proposal and flesh it out into a short paragraph with the intent of creating a more cohesive story/adventure out of the premise.
2. I would begin writing a document breaking down the intent of the content, it's narrative premise, quest branches (if any) and creating a basic 2D topdown of the locations involved in that content. Reviews and feedback would follow, leading to some major or minor changes.
3. I would then begin the blockout (level design), framework (quest design) and gameplay (traps, dialogue triggers, AI scripting, and combat encounters) for the quest in weekly or bi-weekly rounds. I would also be expected to handle setting up some of if not all of the conversation files and gameplay scripting. Character behavior schedules and banter timings would be hand-scripted by me using a combination of variables and conditional gates to ensure as few reference chains as possible and improve performance. Occasionally I would be asked to move onto something else for a few weeks and act as a consultant to give Environment Art space to flesh out the levels and replace blockout elements with props and shippable assets.
4. As the quest's basic flow was solidified, I would then start handling Quest permutations. What if the player visited the dungeonspace first? What if they only spoke to one of the npcs but not the other? Some of our characters, such as the local sheriff (Tira Nui Hajime) were being used in multiple quests, and required several instances to be simultaneously handled at once in order to be save/load compliant and flexible in the face of edge-cases.
5. Finally, reactivity. Some of our quests had 2-3 stages of reactivity that had to be handled with a combination of calendar bound events in blueprint and consideration for average player pacing.
During each step of the process, I also took time to meet with artists, writers, and gameplay engineers to ensure we had the budget (assets, dialogue lines, and gameplay elements) to produce the content to a shippable quality. We also made significant time for feedback from members on the team and outside the team. These check-ins and tests became especially important as there were periods where Area Design was asked to work by themselves, or prepare for handoff moments to the environment art team. Code changes, and things break, and knowing how and why helped us improve all content. Occasionally, this process would help us identify major gaps in our pipeline and toolkit, such as our unfortunately outdated trap manager system, and creating a more consistent framework for handling reactive events.
Quests
Heart of Valor
A chair-bound local legend asks the Envoy (player character) to retrieve a cherished relic from their past, unintentionally dividing the last remnants of a family, exposing the complexities of legacies, and asking the player what it means to give someone the right to die on their own terms. In a time of crisis, is it more important to champion the truth or let people live with a lie that helps them survive?
Initial Request:
A guy in town wants you to go get him a thing from a dungeon.
Summary:
Heart of Valor is a quest where the player (at the behest of a local legend named Keipo) visits a nearby dungeon and explores it in order to retrieve the petrified heart of a massive Leviathan (Whale Monster) but discovers that the truth behind its hunt is more complicated than the story that inspires the local community. Players are asked to consider whether the town can survive the truth, as well as whether or not Keipo's only living family member and caretaker, Chiko, could handle the tragedy of losing their uncle.
Valor included comedic trap premises and scripted moments to make the location feel unique even after 40+ hours of the player's adventure.
By leaning on the premise of a retired adventurer with far too much free time, I was able to narratively justify creating traps in a grounded Fantasy IP that always needs to clearly show "Who built this and how?" even with grander scale and magical story as ambience. How does an adventurer in retirement deal with thieves constantly trying to steal from their trophy room? Thankfully, the answer was to speak directly to the player and their instincts.
Before leaving Obsidian, it was clear this quest became a guiding light for future work in it's layout and in how it handled a complex emotional story that gave players validating agency in how to end it.
Even More Traps:
The dungeon also featured even more complicated trap arrangements using the existing toolkit, that inspired the team to build out more elaborate scenarios in the last year or two of development. Some of these include a timed flamethrower hallway, a corridor of pendulum blades that emerged from the ground below a "laser grid" of trip wires, and a setup I like to refer to as a "Reading Check" where a quick scan will encourage the player to pull the wrong lever to open a sealed doorway. I was delighted that the enthusiasm poured into designing and building the space was felt by players vividly. Some of these traps were planned, while others were added as the blockout evolved.
While I no longer have access to the original files, here is an example of how the original 2D topdowns looked. The intent of using lines to connect rooms instead of defined hallways was to ensure art had as much freedom as possible while making them aware of some of the design's needs. This map ended up being combined to create the opening section of the dungeon, with the log trap parkour route sitting above a combat arena that helped make the space feel more alive. The undead and man-eating spiders tend to be pretty grumpy when you turn on loud machinery in their den.
Emotional Exploration was as important as the Gameplay Exploration
This was the more emotional of the two quests I ended up developing from conception through release, which was a challenge as two of the writers on this content ended up leaving the studio before they could see it through.
Heart of Valor is a story about the legacies we leave behind and asks the player to weight the value of those legacies against the value of truth. It's a story about a family that loves one another but have nothing in common, with Chiko's struggle of watching a loved one die something we all deal with eventually. It's a caretaker's dilemma that doesn't demand attention but gives the player ample opportunity to recognize it. It's tragic but something I consider important. As the son of immigrants with a radically different life and culture to grow up in than my parents did, I put a lot of that experience of disconnect with the previous generation into the quest's story. The way that people can love each other even if they struggle to speak a common language, resisting the desire to ask them to change for you, loving them even if it feels impossible at times.
The narrative designer who wrote this quest's first drafts, Lis Moberly, also put their feelings as a young caretaker for an elderly family member into this narrative, and we bonded over trying to make something that was difficult to answer and avoided prescribing a solution on the player.
There are no monsters in this story, only circumstance and the ugly things it does to us to help us protect the people we love. Thankfully, the erratic adventuring legend's enthusiasm for challenging the next generation made sure the dungeon felt fun and engaging, even if the backstory was tragic and observant. I think this balance helped tremendously with engagement.
I'm proud of the amount of shipped dialogue and text I produced for this quest including a line where the player challenges Keipo for obfuscating the truth about the death of his partner on the hunt for the Leviathan. Pedestals and hero worship can be tragic things, and I wanted to ensure that players could connect with that blatantly while respecting their ability to digest the nuance.
"From the moment I stepped off that boat, I stopped being Keipo the man. I became the leviathan slayer."
Player Reaction:
Post-launch one of the more popular trends on the game's subreddit was to post about their experience/reactions to a simple trap setup I made involving a swinging log they'd seen dozens of times at this point, a simple sign they could read "Do not pull this lever under any circumstance", and a mysteriously tempting lever beside it. Even in development it was considered such a charming moment that it ended up earning it's own Achievement:
Post-launch one of the more popular trends on the game's subreddit was to post about their experience/reactions to a simple trap setup I made involving a swinging log they'd seen dozens of times at this point, a simple sign they could read "Do not pull this lever under any circumstance", and a mysteriously tempting lever beside it. Even in development it was considered such a charming moment that it ended up earning it's own Achievement:
"That Sign Can't Stop Me Because I Can't Read."
A quote I forgot to save from one commenter on the game's subreddit was: "It's clear to me whoever built this space had a lot of fun making it". I think those sorts of tangible feelings can make even the simplest game a lifelong memory and turn casual players into lifelong fans.
On the flipside, we noticed a different but wonderful response from roleplayers who engaged with the story.
They found the narrative cathartic, especially handling a topic as difficult as suicide without downplaying it's impact. The rift between Chiko and Keipo was something many players could connect to, and cried when they noticed that, had they not let Keipo die, Chiko would be found dead only a day later.
Click the above image for a short clip of Shroud playing through the quest. It really captures the spirit of what this space was all about and was very much the "movie that played in my head" while building this dungeon space.
A funny trap can go a long way
The level was a huge hit with players
The emotional weight of the quest made some people cry
The Wasteland Courier
A merchant in Thirdborn asks the player to act as a courier and pick up a mysterious package from their supplier just outside of town, following handpainted arrows.
Initial Requests:
- "Call this number for a good time".
- A quest where you do drugs.
Summary:
Surprisingly, this quest was one of the first instances of a "Comedy from the beginning" piece of content and ended up causing comedic revisions through out the rest of the game. Up until that point on the project the game had felt extremely dour tone that was missing a human quality. Working together with an extremely talented writer & narrative designer named Katie Tenney, we were able to flesh this adventure out into something that ended up being a team favorite. It was a real opportunity for the two of us to take our existing rapport and shared sense of humor and bring it to an IP we love.
Right from the get-go the feeling I went for with the level design was of an investigator crawling over obstacles in town to follow a trail that is longer than it needs to be. I figured not every player would need these arrows for direction but they added a lot to the feeling of the quest and went through a couple revisions based on feedback. Once you've found graffiti in town that leads to the actual drop off point, we play with level design in another way that really delighted me as a designer. The player is guided to turn right back outside of town, re-viewing the landscape you've already explored from a new perspective to reveal a series of blatantly obvious arrows that were just out of sight on your initial approach to the town. To me, this was a moment of comedy but also one of practicality. I was not given a large level design budget for this quest, and was asked to find ways to cut back on the art budget whenever possible. The quest's flow had to make do with both the town's existing layout and a mostly solidified overlands experience. The meeting spot in the wasteland (where you pick up the package) was a reused space that one of our worldbuilders developed but never found content for.
One of the rules the narrative designer and I landed on early was "This cannot be a joke about drug trips", specifically it was unclear at the time how culture was shifting around psychedelics and narcotics and we wanted to avoid creating something that could date the game and alienate players from different backgrounds. We also had no budget for a "trippy sequence" that you might see in Oblivion's Shivering Isles DLC or the infamous "chicken" trip in The Witcher 3. Instead we focused on the ways that people would try to adapt to an evolving crisis. There are now mushroom zombies walking around the landscape and muttering in riddles. We figured the logical step was to ask how a normal person would try to make a living in that new reality. While this was certainly a challenge, I managed to rally the team around this low-budget and low-risk version of the quest that ensured we were not succumbing to scope-creep.
While I was not the writer for this quest I was given agency by the narrative designer to input my own words and thoughts into some of the dialogue and we would occasionally meet to "act out" some of the story beats we wanted to happen.
Player Reactions:
In general the reception to the quest was very positive, and many people consider it the funniest quest in the entire game (and I tend to agree).
https://www.inverse.com/gaming/avowed-the-wasteland-courier-quest-guide
