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James Nicholson
Level Design
Unreliable Narratives : Gamifying the Truth Through Level Design
In my thesis , I explored how deception in both dialogue and environmental storytelling could be used in quest design and gameplay mechanics . Deception is an integral part of narrative design in games , but environmental deception is not well explored in design literature .
The artifact is a detective mystery quest in Skyrim , which has a flexible dialogue system , deep scripting , and plenty of assets to build an environment around . I gave the player the ability to gather clues by picking up items , reading books and notes , and interacting with custom scripted use trigger volumes around specific areas of interest . Along with certain dialogue options , these clues unlock dialogue options with four different Non-Playable Characters to gather information and advance the quest further , until the player has enough information to come to a conclusion ( correct or not ) about the murderer ’ s identity .
My project took 306 hours to complete overall , including planning , writing , scripting , set-dressing , testing , and iterating . I learned what it takes to handle a quest with dozens of global variables and variations on dialogue , as well as how to execute deception in levels properly . This helped me to develop a set of best practices for execution both in the world and in dialogue , and I received a lot of narrative scripting experience as a result . There will be far fewer narrative projects in the future that will intimidate me after completing this thesis , even in engines that weren ’ t necessarily meant to handle narrative .
This project can serve the industry by showing how narrative gameplay can be packed into a small area , given enough planning and time , along with developing the aforementioned deception best practices , which can be applied to games outside of those with a narrative focus .
58 LEVEL DESIGN