About the Project

"Treasure Chase" is a custom level made for Starfield in Creation Kit. It is a narrative-focused quest that features exploratory elements and dialogue trees.

Made in Bethesda's Creation Kit editor.

Design Deep Dive

I had two design goals for this level: make a quest with exploratory elements and dialogue trees. I wanted to explore the player talking to NPCs in any order and unlocking new dialogue trees as they explore the space, find key items, and bring up new subjects learned from talking with other NPCs. I achieved this through first crafting the narrative and looking at how gameplay elements could be used to support this narrative. Combat encounters were used to show not tell the constant battles the town NPCs face against relentless bounty hunters, and the key items the player finds in each NPC's house provides further narrative context into their life and relationship with the other NPCs. To emphasize the exploration aspect of the level, I placed chests with various supplies throughout the town the level takes place in in addition to the key items in each NPC's house. The level quest features two endings, a choice I made to give the player more agency.

Level Post-Mortem

What Went Well

I was able to design a narrative that was clear yet still had depth. I did a good job of pacing the narrative beats and gameplay elements, and had non-required dialogue trees to reward players who wanted to dig deeper and learn more with more narrative context. I did not bog down the quest with multiple gameplay mechanics, and the gameplay elements that were added enhanced and/or supported the narrative. Ultimately, I view this level as having a successful narrative-focused quest that provided a satisfying story with a good mix of purposeful gameplay interspersed throughout!

What Went Wrong

The level layout feels somewhat plain. The level play-space consists of five main buildings that are all on the same ground level. There is no change in elevation, and the layout of the buildings is not true to a real life town. Granted, the focus of the level is the narrative quest so the layout is not of utmost importance and the layout does fulfill its purpose of clearly defining each NPC's house. Still, given more time, I would have loved to create a space that is more interesting to explore and is more akin to real-life "cowboy" towns as was my aesthetic point of reference.

I did not lock down the narrative before starting development. I developed the level over the course of 8 weeks, which is not a lot of time. I gave myself one week for planning before I moved into building the basic layout in editor. Unfortunately, as I was creating the quest, I was reworking parts of the narrative based on peer and playtest feedback. The changes I made to the narrative made the story stronger, but it meant that I had to go back and change parts of my quest, such as pacing and flow, to better suit it. This ate up development time that I could have spent on aesthetics and polish.

Lessons for Next Time

Moving forward, I will be planning and iterating on the narrative early, and definitely before I get anything built in editor or engine. Only once the narrative is at a good spot will I lock it and proceed with building the level geometry itself. Narrative is the same as design in the way that both need to be solidified before giving other disciplines (such as engineers) the go-ahead. Changing narrative, like changing design decisions, during development is costly.

Narrative-focused levels can still have interesting layouts. Even if a level layout fulfils its basic purpose, that doesn't mean it can't be expanded upon. One solution is to add verticality to add more dimension to a layout. The layout of a building or space can be altered to make it stand out to the player and help them develop a mental map of the play space. This not only helps the player navigate the level better but it adds visual interest.

With this project done, time to take these lessons and apply them to my next project!