Redfall Campaign Design
Arkane Austin
September 2021 - May 2024
Level Designer
Unreal Engine 4
While working on Redfall I was the level designer responsible for two campaign missions which I had inherited. In this section I will describe each mission and my various contributions, as well as provide gameplay videos. I used Blueprint extensively for mission scripting, prototyping and iteration.
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Encounter Design
Layout and Spatial Progression
Documentation
Mission Scripting using Blueprint
Bugfixing and Shipping
Objective Flow and Conveyance
Some Narrative Design
The mission “Dead in the Water” is the opening mission to Redfall, and was one of my earliest assignments. It had been targeted for redesign when I joined, and while some of the core structural layout and objectives had been set in place, core issues remained such as: constrained level flow, limited encounter design, lack of drama and storytelling, lack of variety and lack of explorational rewards. Not to mention it’s technical instability at the time, and that it had to be taken to ship.
Opening missions are difficult to design mainly because you are trying to balance gameplay complexity with UX needs, narrative conveyance and leaving a strong first impression. On a technical level they tend to be tricky as they often break rules that wouldn’t otherwise be broken (disabling player abilities, AI acting differently, teleporting through space differently, etc) and on top of that, introductory missions tend to have many, many major stakeholders: from publishers, to UX designers, to directors and narrative. This careful balancing act taught me a lot about cross-disciplinary collaboration.
On top of the production and design tasks, my day to day consisted of extensive in-editor work— managing and refactoring the level blueprint, creating blockouts and prototypes, hand placing AI and patrols, implementing save game persistence (via Blueprint) as well as scripting mission dialogue with our proprietary dialogue tool.
“Dead in the Water” sees the players washed up on the shores of Redfall, their boat sitting at the bottom of a drained out canal where they witness a supernatural eclipse which allows vampires to roam free in the daytime. After fighting their way back to shore against a squad of cultists, players have their first encounter with an actual vampire, duking it out in a suspenseful, blood soaked basement. Once prevailed, players claim their home-base and the mission ends.
Before I set out for this mission redesign, I highlighted three key pillars which had not yet been achieved:
Clearly delineate between mission beats, with each section having its own ideas and style.
Let groups of friends or individual players fall into their archetypal role by the end of the mission (sniper, assault, support etc).
Strike a compelling balance of open ended exploration with narrative conveyance.
Delineate Between Mission Beats
Early on I broke the mission into 3 segments: The Ferry, The Canal and The Firestation. These sections would be distinct from one another not just in location, but also gameplay focus, tone and encounter design. Working with level art and narrative, we deliberately created blockers to organize each one and ensure that they didn’t bleed into one another. The transitional bottlenecks between segments were also used to convey key narrative beats such as the eclipse.
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This is where players begin. It was designed with narrative and basic onboarding in mind, so there are no enemies. While there is a straight forward path— there is also an optional puzzle to solve to unlock a better starting weapon, and many environmental stories to uncover if players choose to look. Demonstrated in the video is the puzzle in question, which involves finding a key within a blocked off room. A core Arkane value is player agency and rewarding exploration, so even within escaping the ferry, there are about 3 possible routes players could take.
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This is where the level really starts to open up, and players get their first taste of combat and stealth. Here I wanted to emphasize free form exploration— almost mirroring how players would later explore the open world, while also keeping it somewhat structured as to teach combat, and our traversal and mantling systems. A large cargo ship bisects the canal here, letting players pick and choose meaningfully different routes and explore. There are two overheard conversations to observe, and many more stories to discover in the environment. Players can find a hidden sniper rifle, as well as observe the enemy cultists search the Ferry they just escaped from.
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The final section of this level is all about the vampires and introducing the player’s future home-base. We tried to strike a blend of moodiness and exciting combat, while also staying true to Arkane’s core design philosophy of “play your way”. When infiltrating the Firestation players have 4 possible routes, each with different advantages and disadvantages. The mission is deliberately timed so that night falls as they approach the building, and while there was a much larger human presence in this space at first, I deliberately scaled it back to make room for the opening vampire encounter.
Let Players Fall into their Archetypal Role
Redfall is a class-based hero shooter, meaning that players going in might already have some concept of how they want to play. I broke these archetypes into three main roles (trickster, sniper and assault) and supported each with a respective optional weapon to find in the opening minutes (a flaregun, a sniper rifle, and a shotgun). Not only does this reward exploration, but also reinforces player identity and allows them to set forth into the open world with their tool of choice already in hand. For players who are still deciding how they want to play, this had the added benefit of immediately letting them try out different styles and weapons.
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Assault players always want to dive in headfirst, so I decided to give them a shotgun. To unlock this weapon, players must figure out how to unlock the upper Ferry deck. The weapon is given very early on as to reward players for taking the time to explore the opening Ferry.
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Snipers like to get high up and search for vantage points, so the sniper rifle is located in a boat house overlooking the entire canal. Immediately players are given the opportunity to use it, picking off cultists from afar and getting a lay of the land.
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Tricksters tend to find clever solutions to problems rather than face them head on, so the flare gun was chosen to reward such thinking. While this weapon can be used to attack directly, it can also be used to cause distractions (guards become curious about flares) or trigger hazards. It’s found by exploring the Firestation roof, a path deliberately built to support stealth.
Balance Exploration with Narrative Conveyance
While I feel the best demonstration of this pillar is by watching the playthrough, I’ll bullet point some specific devices that were used to achieve this during the mission, with video timestamps as well.
0:20 — Allowing players to explore spaces safely, without fear of attack, in order to absorb as much narrative as they’d like.
1:24 — Entwine gameplay goals with narrative focal points. When players find their first weapon, it also implies the future threat of the vampires. There’s a story behind why she had that weapon, etc.
2:45 — When you want players to freely explore, find other means to deploy narrative. Here a cultist is giving a broadcasted speech to the whole area. This lets players gather context while also able to explore at their own pace. They don’t have to look or get locked into a cutscene.
5:00 — Be adaptive. Depending on the route players take, the conversation playing at this moment can happen at two different locations (unfortunately it’s a bit hard to hear in this video). This approach lets you get the most bang for your buck, without sacrificing spatial agency.
6:09 — Use bottle necks to prime the player for what they’re about to intake. Notice how players can hear this NPC conversation before they see it, and are forced to sneak. This primes them to listen and observe.
9:00 — Space it out. Before the vampire fight, we have a room of empty space, dedicated to environmental storytelling and set up. This lets players take in information at their own pace, whilst retaining agency and control.
The mission “The House of Echoes” involves players exploring a creepy abandoned Victorian mansion in order uncover the weakness of the Hollowman, a Vampire God. I inherited this mission late into development, so while I did not contribute to its core layout or objective flow, I was responsible for all the final encounter design, patrols, objective conveyance and level scripting. Additionally I made some minor spatial adjustments which I will highlight. This mission was used to demo to the press during our pre-launch tour.
My goal with this mission was simple: design a mission that supports a 100% stealth approach, while also making it exciting for players who love to dive in guns blazing. The mission also needed to support recovering from getting caught. Why was this a challenge? Well for three keys reasons:
Redfall is stealth-light: While it does support some stealth options such stealth takedowns and sneaking, it is not the primary focus of Redfall. Players are limited in terms how they can manipulate NPC pathing and avoid them.
Getting caught is of low consequence: In a game such as Dishonored a group of even two guards may pose a threat. In Redfall, such small groups can be easily dispatched. Inversely however, even the presence of two wandering NPCs in an enclosed interior can make stealth incredibly tricky for players. How do we balance these conflicting constraints?
Cascading Firefights: Most guns are quite loud in Redfall, meaning that getting caught is sure to attract attention. In the enclosed mansion, how do we prevent players from alerting all nearby NPCs? How can players return to stealth if they so choose?
Solutions
Solutions came on multiple fronts, and I employed three distinct methods to balance these constraints: tiered encounter design, easy-stealth but hard-combat encounter design as well as careful enemy placement and patrols.
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The Mansion consists of three core tiers: the grounds entrances, the mansion exterior and the mansion interior. Each tier has different enemy types, and are separated from one another so that they do not mix. In the grounds entrances are human enemies, the mansion exterior has powerful vampires and sentries, and the mansion interior has a small, carefully placed number of patrolling vampires. This approach allows players to focus on just the tier they are currently inhabiting, and safely engage with each tier in isolation.
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Using sentry vampires (called “Watchers”) coupled with floating vampires, I was able to create an enemy presence that was both dangerous, but distinctly not difficult to stealth through. Sentry vampires could be dispatched without raising alarms, and floating vampires could remain as an omnipresent threat, only coming down if a fight broke out below. This gave players a reasonable stealth challenge, while also letting longer combat encounters play out in exciting ways.
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Fundamental in any level designer’s toolbelt is deliberate enemy placement and patrols. The process for this was highly iterative to design challenging but fair stealth patterns, as well as space enemies out so that they did not often overlap. Luckily the mansion layout I inherited left plenty of room for clever stealth routes. I tuned the patrols with the understanding that player’s stealth options were limited— and landed on a happy medium where players may be caught once or twice, but are able to return to stealth after completing that small fight.
Other Notable Additions
Aside from stealth encounter design, “The House of Echoes” is also notable due to its atmosphere and puzzle focused objectives. Unlike many other missions in Redfall, it does not revolve around killing, but rather taking in the environment and learning more about the world. This atmosphere had to be reinforced through not just art and audio, but gameplay and scripted scares as well. We also faced challenges in terms of players solving the level’s core puzzle: the Dollhouse, which I will talk about here as well
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The initial implementation of the Dollhouse puzzle was not mine, but I did take it to ship. The core idea was quite simple: find three dolls hidden within the mansion to unlock a psychic rift. The doll’s location in the dollhouse corresponded to it’s location in the real world. When I inherited this mission, we frequently received feedback that the dolls were hard to discover.
While a quick solution to this would’ve involved simply marking them via UI, I felt that this would discourage careful consideration of the environment, was beautiful and moody. I wanted players to really explore and take in the world, so I opted for an alternate solution.
This solution came in two parts: one was to make the dolls more noticeable, we added a psychic aura to them, as well as an ambient sound. The second was to add a note infront of the dollhouse written from a little girl’s perspective. It talked about how the dolls like to “Hide in the attic” / “Play in the garden” to clue players into the fact that the dollhouse was a reflection of the real world mansion.
We quickly noticed during playtests the dollhouse went from a source of frustration to a highlight of the campaign, as players were beginning to pour over details of the environment and passionately engage with the narrative and puzzle elements of the level.
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At various points in this mission are scripted scares or ambushes. Moments like these helped reinforce the themes of the level through gameplay, and many were tied around the collection of the psychic dolls, since they tended to be in predictable, controlled environments (a rarity in open world design). Some examples include: televisions lighting up when players collect a piece of loot, vampires teleporting and entering the greenhouse when players collect the doll there or piano keys crashing as you enter a room.