INTRODUCTION
The Long Dark: Wintermute is a story-driven survival adventure game revolving around two main characters, Will and Astrid. With the player switching off between playing as the two characters, Will and Astrid attempt to reunite after crashing on the semi-abandoned Great Bear Island when a strange aurora called the First Flare causes all electronics to stop working in “the quiet apocalypse.”
After the First Flare, wildlife behavior changes, disrupting bears’ hibernation and causing other animals to behave erratically.
An abandoned railroad runs across most of the length of Great Bear Island, which ends at a collapsed tunnel, presumably continuing further beyond the tunnel. In this level, the player is able to cross through this tunnel and find the end of the railroad on the other side.
NARRATIVE
After taking shelter in a maintenance shack on the other side of the rail tunnel, Will wakes up to find that his rifle and some of his food is missing. Tracks in the snow lead down the tracks toward an abandoned rail station, where he finds two teenagers attempting to break into the storage building on the other side of the station. The teenagers tell him that they had supplies hidden in the train station, and that they will give the rifle back, along with information about Will’s missing ex-wife, Astrid, in exchange for him going in and getting back their supplies.
When Will enters the station, he finds that a bear has already taken up residence there, and has to sneak through the station to the clock tower at the top to ring the bell and scare the bear away for good.
Objectives
- Get your rifle back after it’s stolen by a group of teens by scaring a bear away from the train station.
- Find additional supplies in the train station.
- Figure out what happened to cause the rail line to be abandoned.
- Learn more about the disappearance of Astrid.
SETTING
The level takes place in the Coastal Highway region, on the other side of a snowed-in train tunnel (the end of the accessible portion of the train tracks within the existing game).
Within this level, it is assumed that the player was able to traverse this tunnel and reach the other side, where they find an abandoned train station and small loading dock on the coast at the true end of the rail line. The loading dock connects to the train station, a small, frozen-over bay, and a service road leading to the main highway.
The station was previously used as a hub for both the train line and the local logging company, since the trains were primarily used for shipping to and from the harbor. Inside are offices for both the logging company (upper floor) and train line (lower floor). The clock tower is a pendulum clock which stopped working years ago.
Two teenagers from the small town along the highway nearby have been living in the train station since the auroras began; however, since the winter has begun, a bear has moved into the station, using the abandoned building as its den. When you arrive at the station, the teenagers have returned and have stolen your gun to try to get back in.
MAP
I wanted to create a level focused primarily on exploration, meaning that the train station didn’t end up having a true critical path. Reading notes and posters left around the station offer clues as to where to go and what to search for next. Three keys are required to open each lockbox and unlock the next section of the station, so players are offered freedom to explore each area of the station while being led along the larger arc of the level.
DESIGN PROCESS
After creating the initial level design document for this level, I created a metrics gym. Initially, I planned to use a horror-themed asset pack for the main mechanics; after experimenting with several different packs, though, I settled on a point-and-click story game pack.
Getting the pack to work the way I needed it to ended up taking much more work in Unreal Blueprints than I expected. It was frustrating at times, but I was very pleased with the end results, and by the end of the project I felt much more comfortable working with Blueprints.
Two of the larger Blueprints I created were the AI for the bear, which chases the player around the level, and the lockboxes scattered throughout the level.
For visuals, I started by establishing the general environment with a simple pine tree and railroad, both modeled in Maya. I painted the tree across the landscape with the foliage tool, and I used a spline Blueprint to duplicate the tracks across the environment.
Once the surrounding environment had been created, I added invisible walls, far enough from the play area that a player wouldn’t run into them unless they deliberately ran away from the main area of the level, and then began to block in the buildings.
There are three buildings in the level: a small maintenance shed where the player spawns presumably after sleeping there overnight, an inaccessible storage building for the local lumber company, and the train station itself. Once the outlines of the buildings were created, I moved through the buildings and began adding decor and interactable objects.
The main flow of the level revolves around finding keys and unlocking different areas of the train station. In my initial plans for the level, only one hidden key was required to unlock each new area of the station, but I found that the keys were too easy to miss. During playtesting, players would elect to pass by locked areas instead of searching for the keys, then become confused and frustrated further down the line when they found that they were missing context or supplies.
To solve this problem, I created a lockbox Blueprint, which would only open once the player found three other keys hidden throughout the level. The lockbox gave players a more obvious goal, and adding more keys in more obvious locations gave players motivation to explore the station more carefully.
Another issue I found during playtesting was that the clues and journal entries I had hidden throughout the level were difficult to find. Since not everything readable in the level is directly related to the player’s goals, the things that were most important were sometimes lost or missed. To solve this, I added more interactables with duplicate messages (i.e. multiple objects telling the player to go into the clock tower) and changed some objects requiring direct interaction into area hitboxes.
The climax of the level takes place in the clock tower, where the player is able to swing a pendulum and reset the tower clocks to ring the bell in the tower and scare away the bear. I used a cinematic camera on a track, which triggers when the player rings the bell, to show the bear running away from the station into the woods.
CONCLUSIONS
This level was much different than others I’ve worked on, and I enjoyed getting to prioritize stealth over combat. I have a background in art and writing, and there were a lot of lessons I’ve learned in traditional storytelling that I had to relearn in the context of game design, especially around environmental storytelling and leaving clues for the player. In writing out my plans for this level, many of the clues I created seemed very obvious to me, but it became clear when I started to test the level that it’s a lot harder to put those clues together when they aren’t being spelled out.
I’m excited to work more on incorporating story into my levels, even if they might not be as narrative-heavy as this one. Even in levels more focused on combat or adventure, I think the lessons I learned about pacing and environments will be very valuable.