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Griffin DeClaire
Level Design
The World Speaks : Best Practices in Environmental Storytelling
“ Vault 119 ” is a single player level in the game Fallout 4 . It researches best practices for environmental storytelling .
The quest asks the player to explore and gather data from a newly discovered Vault 119 , a vault in which residents were secretly being experimented on and having their ability to communicate with one another taken away . In the level , players explore the vault and use context clues , terminal entries , and other environmental storytelling techniques to slowly piece together what happened .
• Pull Narrative Design : Not forcing the player to read or listen to the narrative ; rather , allowing the player to draw conclusions based on the surrounding environment and circumstances .
• Staging Scenes : A moment frozen in time that the player is able to see and ingest from one frame . It is typically a fully encapsulated story that has all of the pieces in view for the player to put together .
The goal of this thesis was to research and explore best practices for environmental storytelling , including :
• White Space Storytelling : Making your narrative open-ended , avoiding giving players all of the pieces . If a complete narrative were pictured as a complete circle , you would only provide 70 % of it .
36 LEVEL DESIGN