Burnout
Role: Quest and System Designer
Editor: Fallout 4 Creation Kit
Process: Iterative Agile Spiral with Milestones
Tools: Adobe Illustrator for Maps, Microsoft Word for Level Design Document and ReadMe Documentation.
Design Goals:
Dynamic Inventory Script
Custom Weapon
Meaningful Player Choice
Level Summary:
After being approached by a dweller named Rudy whose vault has been overrun by raiders. The player must make their way through the vault clearing the raiders while destroying supplies to discourage their return, and weaken their retaliatory response.
Project Summary
Design Goals
Dynamic
Inventory Script
Custom
Weapon
Meaningful
Player Choice
Dynamic Inventory Script
The primary design goal of this level was to create a script that controlled the inventory of the enemy characters in a final combat sequence based on what supplies the player destroyed while making their way through the vault.
To do this, I first created a script that utilized an OnHit() event that would destroy the supply boxes after a set amount of time after being shot by the custom weapon. This script detected the type of projectile, source of the damage, and weapon of origin to ensure that it wouldn't trigger the event without the custom weapon. Then I had the script give the box an effect shader that made it look like it was on fire before it disabled itself after a 3 second wait.
Then I created a script that tracked how many supply boxes were destroyed utilizing another OnHit() event that also detected whether the box was hit by the custom weapon before it would track the hit and count the box. It also had notifications to tell the player how many boxes had been burned.
Finally, to ensure that the quest kept proper track of how many enemies were killed to advance the quest stage, I created a script utilizing a while loop timer that would keep track of the global variables for each supply box, and update the kill requirement to advance the stage accordingly.
To create the custom weapon, I made duplicates of the game’s 10mm pistol, the 10mm ammo, the 10mm projectile, and the molotov cocktail explosion. From there, I made the necessary tweaks to make a 10mm incendiary pistol.
The first two tweaks were simple. Make the duplicate pistol and duplicate ammo take only the duplicate ammo and duplicate projectile respectively.
Next, I gave the duplicate projectile a custom explosion. This explosion started as the built-in molotov. However, I quickly realized that was too powerful. So, I had to make a duplicate of that explosion and tweak it to be smaller and less powerful.
Once I had those tweaks implemented, it was just a matter of tweaking the scripts above to detect each of these to confirm that the boxes would be burned by it. Giving it the molotov explosion meant that it would also burn anything in the game that was already burnable by the molotov.
Custom Weapon
If it wasn’t already obvious, I wanted the choices the player made to have consequences. While burning the supply boxes provided some of that, I wanted to ensure that they couldn’t just go into every room, burn all of the boxes, and end up with the easiest fight in all of Fallout 4.
To accomplish this, I made sure that none of the three door options on each floor could be unlocked or opened at the same time. When the player opens one, it locks and closes the other two.
On top of that, I made sure that the door closed and locked behind them once they walked through it. That way they couldn’t simply go back the way they came and choose the other two doors.
This was all controlled via scripts on the terminals that opened and closed the doors in the vault. As well as trigger boxes that closed the doors behind the player upon entry.
Meaningful Player Choice
