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The Gauntlet

"The Gauntlet" is a Fallout 4 quest mod in which the Sole Survivor enters a survival competition against a variety of enemies in an everchanging dungeon. Stripped of any outside gear, the player is given a choice of loadout and the ability to upgrade their weapons after each cleared room, culminating in a final encounter against a powerful robot.

Overview

 

​Engine: Fallout 4 Creation Kit

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Team Size: Individual

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Development Time: 9 weeks​

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Platforms: PC

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Playtime: 10-20 minutes

Design Goals

  • ​Playstyle Choice

    • ​3 Loadouts, 2 weapons each. Each has a differing playstyle and upgrades.​​

  • Weapon Upgrade System

    • Each weapon has 3 upgrade trees with 3 tiers per upgrade and a special upgrade.

  • Simple Gameplay Loop

    • Small quick combats in small arenas with variety coming from which direction the player enters from.

Design Goals 1: Playstyle Choice

​The player has the choice of a balanced loadout, a medium/long range loadout, and a close range/melee loadout. From the beginning, players can choose what they like (or what they specialize in if they're playing a higher leveled character) and proceed forward with that. Combined with the ability to choose to go all in on one weapon or spread out their upgrades between both weapon or bonus caps, the player has a lot of choice of how they want to approach The Gauntlet's challenges.​

In Order: Hunting Rifle, Laser Rifle, Sledgehammer, Combat Shotgun, 10mm Pistol, Double Barrel Shotgun​

​Additionally, there are a couple of quality of life things to help players make the most informed decision. Terminals display the upcoming enemy after you pick your reward. You can also view the layout of the room relative to your starting position by walking up the stairs in the transition area.​

Design Goals 2:
Weapon Upgrade System

​The final result was players having the ability to upgrade as they see fit, with some very mild randomization into what appears for the base upgrades. The upgrades use keywords that "Multiply + Add" the base value of the weapon on a percentage scale. â€‹

​For this project I wanted to lean into something Systems Design related. The rouge-lite genre relies heavily on complex systems and being a fan of them, I wanted to see about created a simple version of it in Fallout 4. The weapon mods already present in Fallout 4 could be used like an incremental upgrade similar to the progression system seen in many rouge-lite games.​

Design Goals 3:
Simple Gameplay Loop

​Each combat room was built as simple as possible with only two height differences and with layouts focused on maximizing the effectiveness of the combat from both the enemies and the player. Each room has many small loops in it to encourage movement and using cover which ties in to the short and quick combats. â€‹The random nature of which room is decided next also helps keep the combat feeling fresher than it would be with a static entrance to each scenario. 

Postmortem

​What Went Well​

 

  • Early Prototyping​

    • Having decided early that a rogue-lite experience was what I wanted to dive into meant I was able to develop the scripts and backbone of the level earlier.

  • Consistent Vision​

    • The level design of the main combat spaces changed very little from how they appeared in the level design document. This meant less time required on adjusting base geometry and more time spent on technical things like how I would handle respawning enemies or how upgrades worked.​

  • Familiarity with the Engine Scripting​

    • Confidence in using Creation Kit, fragments, and the text editor made it easy for me to do more ambitious scripts and interactions like handling the various checks and global variables present in the quest.​

​What Went Wrong​

 

  • Redoing/Adjusting Scripts

    • During middle of development, the enemy AI would break when using a revive script that restores their health and limbs. What I would have to end up doing instead was create spawn points the spawn new enemies from each time the player loaded into an area which meant changing many other systems as well.​

  • Balancing​

    • Balancing took a back seat up until the last possible second. In general the quest feels easy, especially after receiving all the upgrades. Some builds also perform better than others, the short range build in particular can be challenging against the boss of the quest.​

  • Replayability​

    • While the quest is technically replayable, there is no innate way to complete/fail the quest and restart it from the beginning. This came down to a time constraint and the feature note being as priority over others.​

​What I Learned​

 

  • Design Potential

    • Admittedly, I underestimated the amount of work needed to make something that's deep. While the level is impressive, playable, and fun, it pales in comparison to a stellar rogue-like/rogue-lite like Hades II or Deadlink. If I approached something similar to this again or came back to it, I'd scope down what I want to explore rather than a high concept like rouge-lite.​

  • Creating Systems is Fun​

    • Or at least I think it's fun. Testers and I agree that the gameplay is fun given the time and scope of the project and I enjoyed working with the numbers and small parts that add up to create the experience. ​

Gallery

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