Misconbrewed

3D Level Design and Environmental Storytelling

3D Space + Story

Misconbrewed is a 3D project where I worked with environmental storytelling for the first time.

The premise is that you are a traveling herbalist, interested in gathering various plants and selling them. On your travels, you come across a town losing its prosperity and can discover the reasons for it.

About Misconbrewed

Misconbrewed is a solo three-week project of mine, where my main design pillars were discovery and every story has two sides. My goal was to use environmental archetypes in 3D space to pull the player along and provide elements throughout that gave context to what was happening.

In this project, we were encouraged to import some placeholder art assets to better tell the story. For me, these assets included: houses, 2D plants, furniture, and skybox.

Project Specs

Engine: Unity 2021.1.10

Duration: 3 weeks

Tools: Maya, Probuilder, Unity Terrain, Photopea

Solo Student Project

Level Design Start

With my 3D levels, I always start out iterating with a 2D topdown view to get a feel of the flow and how I want things to be encountered. While this takes out the verticality, it helps me visualize the pacing of where I want everything to go.

Level Design Choices

Starting Scene

When you round the path this is the first scene that provides visual interest.

In the distance to the right, you have an enormous tree atop a hill.
These two things provide a point of reference and a future goal, as we move.

This is also your first glimpse at Oxtail Inn, the largest building in town. With Inn's being the 'jewel' of old villages, this is an important frame.

There's a change in elevation from the path to the town, this lowering of the player raises the tree up above the town and places the town at the bottom point of the hills around it.

After I have something to work off of on paper I begin building with primitives. Things don't get replaced with high-fidelity assets until after the space is achieving the feel I want.

Read on to see insight into my leave design choices or click to skip to Environmental Storytelling.

Environmental Storytelling

Calling Attention Right

In the town there's a split in the road, the well-worn path passes the Inn- a story note for later- but I want the player to go to the right.

To make the right more interesting, I've placed more people over here, and the wagon serves as a leading line pointing to the right.

Up until this point, you've been able to hear dialog by approaching a person which makes them points of interest.

The Inn, revealed earlier, also served as a point of reference and has some call power.

Grounding and Reinforcing

There's no dialog, but it does trigger the scene that reveals the dragons for the first time.

I use the motion of the dragons fist to draw attention to the town square, and then have them fly by the giant tree to remind the player of the next goal.

The boards by the inn have some extra lighting and detail to draw the eye, they contain narrative context if the player is interested.

Scenic Shot + Goal

Leaving town we reinforce the hill and giant tree. These are now the player's goals.

You can also see glowing rocks on the side of a cave, another place players could explore.

Leading Line

This fallen tree creates a leading line. When the player faces this direction they'll see the cave enterance.

Cut Sight Line

The cave is a small loop with no retracing, but I want them to experience the left side first. To do this, I placed herbs to gather (right corner of the picture) and the resulting position cuts the sightline of what would be a path to the right.

A perfect Frame

Exiting the cave your pushed slightly to the right by the rock on the left of this shot. This creates a perfect head-on frame with a tree that may or may not have caught your interest before, but now some purple goo is visible, and it has clear height disparity.

This frame is important to the story but delivered through the space design.

A Window

As we make our final climb up there's another frame as the giant tree comes more into view, this one reveals a different shade of purple goo on this tree as well. While visible before, directly following the previous reveal it suddenly holds more imortance.

Revealing "The house on the hill"

Alluded to on a poster in town, as we crest the hill a house is revealed in a small, lush valley. This space is to represent safety and seclusion.

More Framing

The garden and foyer can be explored for narrative elements, but at the end of the foyer is two open doors framing an important key in the narrative: the storage room.

Light Shaft

This light shaft is to keep up with the welcoming homey feel and provide a twist when where the light is coming from is revealed.

Revealing More Story

Approaching the door from any angle gives you a similar reveal, as a designer I'd prefer most players to approach from the left.
To get this behavior, all the previous bookcases had a narrative reward for going to them. This is true for the bookcase at the end of the hallway as well, so most players during testing walked past the door without looking and read the reward, and then proceeded to the reveal as desired.

Spiral to Sight line

This room has tables set up for the player to spiral through and investigate what's on them. When they reach the table with the 'corect potion' they have a sight line of two boards containing the witch's work and her progress, as well as context for what she was after.

Video demonstrating sight line, has some issues with lag.

Leading to the Last Area

The frame standing at the caved-in wall provides a clear path where something large caused some wreckage. You can follow the crater footsteps to the final part, and valve, of the level.

Inside the Valve

There is no return for the player once you hop into the hole (though there is a ladder revealing how the witch get's in and out). The last space is small, with the main point of interest being to the right where the lose ends of the story are tied up before the game fades to black.

Environmental Storytelling

My biggest challenge

This was my first real dive into environmental storytelling. I knew from the start I didn't want to tell a scary story or something with skeletons everywhere. I wanted something light, with curiosity and interest being the main drivers. However, with all my good intentions I ran into various struggles.

Some of the challenges I faced early on included:

My story was incoherent, no player in testing was able to tell me what it was about
Players left with lots of questions such as: what happened to the witch? Why is there even a town? Why are some plants picked but others are not?
The number of elements I had in the game was limited, so if you passed them, you missed a large chunk of the story

This early experience was not only unsatisfying but extremely confusing. It made me realize that my main problem was I was trying to tell a story with just a handful of specific instances- and these could be misinterpreted or missed entirely.

Storytelling

Using Chains

A chain of events involves multiple story threads that allow players to explore avenues and build investment in various different things. These can connect in different ways and paint a much richer story.

I came across the process of chains from the 2010 GDC talk, “What Happened Here? – Environmental Storytelling” by Harvey Smith and Matthias Worch. This process transformed my project.

To get started I broke my level into 15 chunks, and then developed a environment details I could add to develop various chains of events.

This method allowed me to add 44 environmental details to the project. This method of breaking things into smaller chunks and figuring out what part of the story that space should tell allowed me to provide backstory for how the town was feeling, the witch's motivation, and what was wrong with the dragon seen in the beginning.

This also meant that there no longer any areas of the game that had the question: why does this area exist? Each area is intentional and contributes details to the story unfolding.

With the process, I had a fresh set of intentions to place objects. Before, my placement of things mattered to me in the context of how the player would move through the space. With my design now being broader to include more story elements, placing objects also affected the story.

This means things like the placement of the tables in the workroom mattered beyond the player moving in a loop to make use of the space- the tables now carried the context of someone in a rush to find answers.