Beneath The Lake
A Third Person Mystery-Adventure
Trailer - Highlights
Pitch
“After you – a ranger – find out your father has disappeared, it is up to you to uncover the alien secrets that the local mining company has been hiding.”
Project Details
- Made over 4 weeks, half time (4h/day)
- Unreal Engine 5.6
- Plugins used:
- Jakub IWALS template
- Ultra Dynamic Sky
- Blockout Tools
Summary
A third person mystery-adventure focusing on exploration, setdressing and composition.
The Goal
To remake a previous open-world level into a semi-linear one, with focus on expansion of the worldbuilding and visual language.
Project Goals
Explorability...
In the first half of the level, you are free to explore the area. There are details everywhere that add to the immersion of the setting of a small town in rural Sweden, making it feel more real and tangiable.
...and Linearity
And then, in the second part, you are thrown in a one way trip down, deep below the ground, beneath the lake itself. The environments change drastically not just in it’s level design, but in it’s architecture and all around feeling as well.
Talkativity
Every NPC in this level has something to say. Some are more important than others to listen to, so be on your watch. If they are not explicitly vital to the questline, they are either there to provide further worldbuilding, or just to say something funny.
Environments
A strong focus on this level was on larger-scale set dressing. The different areas are designed to feel cohesive, but separare in the purpose of their contexts.
Topdown
Level Walkthrough
3 Act Breakdown
Act 1
1. Firewatch Tower
2. Church
3. Town Square
World and Story Introduction
This level starts with the main character – a ranger currently living in a firewatch tower – getting a distress call, urging them to come to the church across the way.
In the first few minutes of this level’s playtime, I wanted to give the player both an incentive to explore the given area, as well as give clear and direct motion on how to forward the plot and mystery.
This is done through subtitled voicelines. I find it gives the world a more lived in and alive feeling to it, having NPCs not just be props, but serve a role in the narrative.
Walkable cities
Something I struggled a bit with with the design of the town as a whole was where to draw the line of “explorable” and “decorative”. What I love most about open world games is that there is no real distinction between the two – but with the time and limitations on my hands, I had to make compromises.
I tried my hand at signaling in the environment where to explore and where not to – repetition in shapes and patterns where there is little to explore, and abnormalities where secrets can be found.
Act 2
1. Residential Area
2. Camping Grounds
3. Industrial Area
Open Exploration
After the player has been given the quest of investigating their father’s disappearance, they are relatively free to explore their surroundings, with hints along the road about what to do next.
First, the player is reminded of their parents house. There, they will find a readable note where it is evident their father has been taken away by people from the industrial mining company not too far away.
With this knowledge, they can make their way towards the camping grounds, where something shines strangely, hidden beneath some wooden boards.
After picking it up, the player character remarks that something about the object is pulling them towards the aforementioned mining company, right up the hill.
Modular kits
For Leveldesigners, a good modular kit for building houses and structures are extremely useful. For this piece, I reused one of my previously made kits – the wooden living houses – and one made specifically for this purpose – the industrial area’s buildings.
The freedom of being able to build vastly different set pieces with your own building blocks cannot be understated, and learning more on just how modular kits work is something I want to work more with in the future.
Act 3
1. Research Area
2. The Gridded Forest
3. The Battery Room
Stranger Depths
A pivotal point – as well as the end of the more “open world” of the level – happens when the player has to slide down a slab of rock, down, down deep beneath the lake. There, they find bodies lining the floors of research camps, having been locked in about a day ago.
The mining company has been investigating a cave room, previously showing no signs of human life in many years, if ever. A room inhabited by trees – all of them lined up and the same height and shape – with no explanation why.
When the player enters a room where the walls are filled with identical crystal cubes – just like the one they found in the camping grounds – the details unravel. In a note, player character’s father explains the mining company’s greedy plot, one that would eventually have horrid consequences.
Placing the found cube back into it’s pedestal, the entire room shakes, making the player dive into a wall of water lifting them to the surface. The mining operation goes up in flames in the distance.
Architectural juxtaposition
When the player enters the more “alien” areas – like the gridded forest and the battery room – I wanted to really hammer home the point of these rooms not being man-made, but definitely man-invaded.
I was very inspired in the way Remedy’s Control uses it’s brutalistic architecture style not to show an absence of life, but the enforcement of an supernatural/extraterrestrial one instead. I wanted to emulate that feeling of unnatural life to contrast the rest of the level’s more quaint smalltown feeling.
Process
Pre-Production
This level was almost entirely based on a previous one I made for an Open World assignment at TGA. While the story and general layout of the entire area changed quite a bit, the core still stayed the same: the setting of a small town surrounded by forest with a lake where something extraterrestrial is hiding beneath it.
Plenty of the same assets and locations were reused for this piece. The redesign of the map was one that went from an open and exploratory focus, to a more (somewhat) more linear one.
Inspirations
When starting to visualize the Open World assignment, I had just started watching Netflix’s german sci-fi show Dark. The show, along with replaying Remedy’s Alan Wake 2, gave me a very clear idea of what sort of aesthetics and vibes I wanted to bring to my level.
The gloomy, rainy and atmospheric woodlands from both medias was something I wanted to recreate, but with a slightly more Swedish twist to it. Falu-red houses, worn down camping grounds and rickety bridges leading down into cold lakewater.
The parts to cut out...
From the first topdowns and rough blockouts of the map, there was supposed to be a mysterious building on the other side of the lake that the player would be able to explore in the last act of the level. It was supposed to be an area that would deepen the lore of the power cubes and where they came from.
Though, after about two weeks, I realized that there would be no time to make such a huge explorable building with my time. So in the end, it got cut, and the level ends when the player finds their way out of the lake.
...and the parts to reimagine
The original story of this level was not drastically different, but still noticeably so.
Originally, entire houses and cars had been going missing in the middle of the night, one of these being the house the main character’s parents’. This entire concept was cut and reimagined instead as it not being primordial creatures abducting people, but instead greedy humans who stuck their nose where it didn’t belong.
Scale and it's complications
During the making of this piece, I was thrown off quite a few times by the vast scale of the level I’d created for myself.
It’s one thing creating pretty landscapes that look nice at a distance, and it’s another to make them playable and explorable. Unless you have months or even years on your hands, you can’t make every nook and cranny something interesting.
While it hurt to admit, sometimes leaving areas as they are for the sake of the full picture is necessary.
Closing Thoughts
What could I have done better?
The biggest fallback of this project was planing and priorities. As this project came right after we were done with the Open World assignment, my plan was to ride the wave of inspiration into this remake of it.
In hindsight, this wasn’t the best decision. Towards the last week, I had had to reprioritize a lot of the areas, cut down on content I really wanted to fit in, and was generally wanted to move on to the next project (as I had – if you include the Open World assignment – sat with the same-ish project for 2,5 months).
This did result in me not being completely satisfied with the final product, sadly. Though, I think a lot of that feeling stems from the pain of looking at something for too long, and in the end only seeing it’s flaws.
What did I learn?
Something I am happy I got to explore during the process of both this piece and South Lethe Road was the vast differences between small-scale designing versus large scale.
This is, of course, something we’ve done a lot of work around at TGA as a whole, but there comes something different with it when really focusing and exploring what sets them apart so much.
What did I succeed at?
My favorite thing about this level is how I re-visualized the story, as well as the most important environments.
While this piece was not supposed to be as story-focused as my first piece, I still put a lot of time into making the story make sense to the world. A few times, this meant I had to rebuild entire areas or rewrite the progression, but this is honestly the way of creating stories I am most comfortable is. A good structure is always key, but in my opinion, playfulness and room to explore and reimagine your project as you’re making it is a key point to interesting works in general.