Scroll Blazer

Duration:
10 Weeks

Team Size:
9

Role: Level Designer/Technical Designer

Tools Used:
Creation Kit

Overview

Scroll Blazer was a mod for the game Skyrim with a focus on horror and storytelling. Development was rapid, with only a total 10 weeks to bring the mod from concept to complete. The development was full of ups and downs as we had to quickly learn a new and complicated engine from the little information we had. All while integrating decades old source control into our work flow.

The content I owned from start to finish was the second level of our dungeon. A rapid descent into the mystery at the core of our story. We felt that before diving head first into narrative and after the more puzzle focused first level, it would be best to have a traditional dungeon crawl as the player heads deeper and deeper into the dungeon. This level took the form of the strata of compressed civilizations that had been destroyed by the otherworldly being hiding in the shadows. This almost entirely vertical shanty town was affectionately named "Blight Town" by the team.

I brought this level from notes on a white board, to sketches on paper, to block outs, to rough playables, to a polished engaging scene. Throughout collaborating with the rest of the design team on it's place in the dungeon, how it would be tied in narratively and with the combat designer on my strike team.

Level Design for "Blight Town"

My first task when starting the level was to understand what made a dungeon in Skyrim, for lack of a better term, "Skyrimy". What design pillars was the level design built upon, how and where were rewards placed, how did the spaces tell their stories. These were just a few of the questions I asked as I began to study Skyrim's dungeon design. So I did what a lot of people a decade ago did, I played a lot of Skyrim. Taking notes and getting a sense of the spaces the original designers created and where I could stretch those rules and include my own flair.

As a team we also began drafting the full concept for the dungeon and where each level would fit together.

After this step I condensed our ideas at the white board into a rough map of the level After discussing it with our encounter designer I began to roughly block it out with the snap kits from the Creation Kit. The level had three distinct spaces and themes. The top was the remains of the town once above, the middle layer was the empires before, and the bottom was the insect ridden ancient ruins beneath. But each had to feel lower then the other. The experience of descent was key theme we wanted to get across. While having the level move always further down was a solid start I don't think it sold the experience as much as we wanted. To solve this I wove together closed tunnels and drops, with large open environments that showcased clear land marks of where the player had been and where they were going. This helped the player understand where they were in the space and how far down they had gone.

Once the blockout was in a place we liked, I moved on to detailing and environment work. For this I started by sketching rough concept art of the feeling or the moment I wanted a player to have upon entering each space. I then used the experiences I found through sketching to begin building the environmental design. This process started with sorting through the assets provided with me and playing around with them. Just placing them in the scene and figuring out how I could use each asset. In addition I referenced techniques and spaces I found when I was playing Skyrim to find the look I wanted. This step was crucial. The work done by previous devs informed not only what and how I should place objects to make the space feel right, but it helped me make a space that fit into the previous work. Once the space felt right, I went through and did a lighting and effects pass for more subtle parts of the level.

Now that the brunt of the work was done I went in and started implementing any logic or custom events we needed. This mainly was in the last part of the map in the ruins section. I implemented a custom object created by another designer to teach the player about the core mechanic of the next floor, a custom power cube the player could use to activate certain features. And an event of all the machines and lights turning back on once the player uses the cube to make the object feel more special.

Beyond content I worked together with a team of other developers to get Creation Kit's built in source control functioning so that we could work together as a group. This included a new workflow and plenty of debugging and testing. I personally discovered that because all Navmesh data is stored in the base Skyrim.esm data file, for us to push any Navmesh we would have to, and this is not a exaggeration, hex edit every data file to mark them as permanently checked out. This was done just so we could manually navigate to the single Navmesh Map file in the asset list for all of Skyrim and it's DLC, and check it out just to immediately check it back in and re edit the data files so we could actually playtest our work. I still remember where the scroll bar has to be for you to be within a 100 entries of the Navmesh Map file. (It's about 2/5th of the way down)

Further I learned Lua based Papyrus scripting language to implement my own features and also to be able to assist and advise team members on their own work. At the time we were working on the project Bethesda's official documentation site had been taken down for maintenance. So, most of this process involved both trial and error and reading the slightly out of date back up. After figuring out a process my methods were used to assist the team in their own individual work. I learned a lot about the Creation Kit from this. From the basic fact that almost everything is a quest object, from dialogue to spells. I learned that books cannot be use the Papyrus method "use" like any other interactable object but have to use the "read" command since they inherit from a completely different chain of parent objects then objects do. Book are technically all UI objects. Every time I learned something new I felt like I was unlocking a part of the old magick, this deep magick that mortals were not meant to know. It gave me new found respect for everyone who worked on Skyrim and previous Elder Scrolls titles. The Creation Kit is extremely powerful and does exactly what it needs to do, but it is at times legitimately arcane.

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