Danver State Hospital Mod
The protagonist gets sent a message about strange happenings going on north of Boston. He then ends up in the area outside of the famous Danvers State Insane Asylum. Which by the looks of things seems abandoned and in ruins. However, the halls are more alive than you’d think and beneath the earth of those haunting cells hides another scar from the Vault-Tec corporation.
The mod project was started for three reasons: I wanted to keep practising my level design with a more open-world focus, I want to pay homage to the hospital itself and its history, and I want to tell a darker and horror-focused story/experience in the Fallout world.
My contribution
So seeing as this is a project with already made 3D assets, mechanics, AI and UI: My focus was around the level design and writing a fitting story to the Fallout universe. I would say that almost all energy so far has been spent on the level design. I learned about how to think about placing down points of interests in an open-world level, balancing the travel distances between them and making sure that there was plenty of environmental storytelling going on to keep the player interested in exploring the area.
The story ties the Danvers State Insane Asylum together with Vault-Tec and it would tell a tale of another one of the horrible experiments that happened there. The experiments that already happened in real life in the asylum was horrible to begin with, so what would a megacorporation like Vault-Tec do if they gained access to an unlimited supply of test subjects? It was interesting to try and balance the pacing of revealing such horrible bits of real history as well as amplifying those elements into the Fallout universe.
What I Learned
- Recreating a real place: The biggest challenge for this mod, in order to give the asylum the homage it deserves, was to recreate the entire building in a realistic way. Seeing as this takes place in an alternative world I had to do a lot of research about the place and see how I could make it fit. I learned that taking the extra time to do research in order to recreate something that already exists pays off. This made it a lot easier for me to come up with level design ideas regarding the open-world design bleeding into the interior designs.
- Open-World level design: This project has taught me so much about a more open-world level design, how to manage scaling, pathing and pacing. The part of the level design I’m most proud of was how I designed shortcuts for players to use in order to travel fast through the complex without entering it. The interior designs that you can walk through in the open-world level makes the complex feel much bigger than it is. Which is one of the core feelings I want to enhance in the architecture: Grand. Working with both a horizontal but also vertical level design made the building feel even more grand as well.
- Environmental storytelling: This project taught me a bunch of tricks regarding how to tell a story just using environmental assets. Fallout has been a wonderful series when it comes to environmental storytelling, so it was easy to find inspiration on how to make the place still feel alive, while still being completely abandoned. I managed to make the asylum feel more alive thanks to focusing on how nature would have naturally taken over and destroyed the place. Not only that, but how much impact humans would have had for the 60 or so years it’s been abandoned. And those are the most important pieces of storytelling in this project.
- Writing a story to fit a set world: This would be the first time I would write a story or element that was already in a set designed world. I had to make sure that whatever story I was writing did actually work regarding the more darker themes I wanted to explore. I really did not want this to feel like it was an external element, designed by someone outside of Bethesda, but rather feel like a natural part of it’s universe. Doing my research regarding Vault-Tec and finding examples of their dark past inspired me to play around with many interesting things. The most important question I want the player to ask themselves while playing the mod is: “What on earth did Vault-Tec have to do with an Insane Asylum hosting over 2000 of patients?”, the answers are quite dark indeed.
- Working with the Creation Engine: I’ve learned how to navigate and use the Creation Engine on a visual level design perspective as well as going into some technical parts on how LOD generation works for their engine. I’ve also made use of simple mechanics like locking and unlocking doors that require keys. The visual parts contain terrain creation, lighting, using 3D assets, interactable objects and some AI placements.
