The Gauntlet
Overview
​Engine: Fallout 4 Creation Kit
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Team Size: Individual
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Development Time: 8 weeks​
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Platforms: PC
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Playtime: 15-25 minutes
While walking near the Red Rocket gas station outside Sanctuary the player will find a driver for the Hotline Casino who is in search of someone to assist them in a “technical issue.” After agreeing to help, for better or for worse, the player soon becomes embroiled in a plot to dispose of the owner of the casino and must choose to either aid or prevent it.
Design Goals
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A strong gameplay theme.
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A story with a final gray-area choice.
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Level layout contains good flow, use of verticality, and clever reuse of space.
Design Goal 1:
Gameplay Theme
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Without any special or new gameplay implemented, the theme would be entirely based around its enemies and level design. Cover and combat layouts became more important because of this as well, and having to ensure that the casino was able to accommodate the story and maintain a good pace was performed constantly as the narrative and quest evolved over development.
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To that end, most all cover in the level is half cover given the manner of what would be in a casino and most of the combat spaces contain some form of verticality either in favor or against the player.
Design Goal 2:
Grey-area Choice
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The story itself focusses on the owner Rasmus and his relationship with his employees, specifically his head of security, Dick. The choice comes down to:
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Killing Rasmus and his loyalists to grant freedom to the other synth employees, but that ultimately removes the benefits he was providing them with his power (aid, protection, housing, employment). 
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Protecting Rasmus and defeating the rebels, returning the casino to its status quo. That being the casino accepts synths from across the Commonwealth and provide them the bare necessities and aid, but they are then being worked for exceedingly long hours to the point of requiring repairs.
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There were a lot of different elements explored to balance out both choices, but it was tricky to get it to be truly balanced and gray. Given the time limit and scope, I think the final result turned out as best of it could have.
Design Goal 3: Flow, Verticality, & Reuse of Space
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From the moment the player arrives into the small-world they can already start formulating an opinion of what the dynamic is between the casino and what they would learn to be the synth employees. There’s the large and imposing structure of the casino to their right, a small shanty town to their left, and lots of high concrete walls and even higher trees behind them enclosing the space.
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When designing the casino, I wanted a large room interior space that could accommodate multiple project requirements such as verticality and reuse of space. The level uses multiple instances of conveyance lighting, cables, and sightlines/framing to highlight points of interest that the player will need to reach.
Postmortem
​What Went Well
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Locking in the main playable space early made it a lot easier to focus on areas that needed more iteration such as the basement area and exterior. The only major change to the interior being the placement of the stairs and stairwells.
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The final result of the basement combat flow is a lot better than the initial design, with a lot more visibility to areas the player needs to go to as well as sightlines to upcoming future areas they will need to eventually reach.
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Keeping the scope small at the beginning of development meant faster development time and feedback. It also meant when I needed to make a critical change to help update the flow or implement stakeholder feedback/suggestions that it wasn’t a major change to the overall quest design.
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Ultimately, all of the technical design required was able to be implemented into the quest to have it be playable. I also feel that the combat situations are reasonably balanced for the average Fallout 4 player.
​What Went Wrong
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While all of the technical aspects of the quest were able to be implemented to a playable degree, the majority of the development time was spent reaching it. To that affect, the polish and aesthetics in the level are lacking, especially in the small clutter and wall decorations.
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The narrative is lacking in that it’s not the most polished or well conveyed. I think there is enough to have a basic understanding of the choice, but there isn’t enough required dialogue to directly explain it to the player. It also relies on the player to make connections based off of the environment and it just doesn’t come across as easily.
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The final combat of the quest is unbalanced in that siding with the rebels to kill Rasmus is considerably easier than protecting him. All of Rasmus’ backup use melee, and even with the turrets there to assist with combat, the five ranged enemies have laser weapons that give a huge advantage in the combat.
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The side-quest ended up being put off until the last possible second so there was no way to receive feedback on if it was well thought out or implemented before the final submission. As a result, it is a relatively simple fetch quest, but it does handle finding the items before talking to the quest giver.
What I Learned
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I definitely feel I should be less hesitant to learn how to do new things in engines. The choice to wait until absolutely necessary to implement things like cable and light conveyance, which was not very difficult, only hurt me in the long run. Rather instead I had chosen to do things that I already knew how to do, and in some cases ended up being changed anyways and wasted production time.
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A way I want to improve my process would be by going over only dialogue in an out of game medium such as a document. My dialogue went through many passes and changes to help make the story have a good narrative flow and that was the most frustrating part having to spend all that time redoing dialogue instead of other aspects of the quest.
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Given the time, I’d like to revisit the side-quest for improvement as well as update other areas of the quest to make some steps more available to be performed out of order. Getting to do another aesthetics pass on the level would help improve it a good deal as well, adding clutter, etc.
Gallery & Gameplay
