Venture to pripyat
An open world experience
Summary
A survivor inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone, grows tired of the life he’s made in there. He wants to escape, and his desires can be met if he helps his village chief with some dirty work. Explore abandoned labs, wade through radioactive swamp water and manage your inventory to make it out of the zone.
The focus of the project is on big scale world & level design as well as creating a flow and sense of direction in a bigger world.
Noteworthy scripts:
Radiation zones
Quest/dialogue system
Different resources to manage
Project Breakdown
Solo - 4 weeks, halftime
Created in Unreal Engine 5
All scripts are created by me
Primarily using UE5 Landscaping for the world
This project was made during the “Open World” assignment at The Game Assembly
This piece draws inspiration from the “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” universe and the book “Roadside Picnic”
Goals
Making a big level with clear motivations to explore and return to different points of interest.
Creating a world that feels immersive and thought out.
Software used
Unreal Engine 5.6
Miro
lEVEL OVERVIEW
1
I wanted to have the starting village small and feel hidden away with the help of foliage work and landscaping. The idea is to make it feel like a secure hub with a strong community of NPCs as well as no hostiles being able to enter so the player can take their time, or hypothetically walk away from the computer without getting hurt in-game.
Starting village
2
This is the first thing I want the player to see of the world outside the village alone. Through the help of the dialogue system and clever leading lines, I try to guide the player up to this lookout where they get to see the magnificance of Pripyat, with the ferris wheel being a standout in physical shape and use of color.
Pripyat establishing shot
3
After the player has seen Pripyat and gotten their main quest instructions from talking to the village NPCs, they should head out north to gather documents from a lab and give to the village chief to progress the main quest.
I use the word “should”, because this is an open world experience and they can go where they please to go looting or look for a gunfight.
Outside lab (main quest)
4
One of the optional areas, the intention behind this place is to teach the player that they can go explore and find artifacts which will help them traverse the zone.
Artifacts are items which help the players’ stats such as more stamina or radiation resistance, and they usually spawn in unstable areas such as radioactive waters or other anomalous places.
abandoned mine
5
The sunken village lies just next to the starting village and next to a big gas anomaly. Anomalies are areas that are abnormal from the reality we know. Usually we wouldn’t see a big gas cloud in a contained area that also holds these artifacts, but in the zone, not everything is at is seems…
If the player explores the area on their way back from the lab, they’re likely to be subconsciously guided in to this area before funneled back into the starting village.
sunken village & gas anomaly
6
A point of interest (POI) that features an artifact and a collectible that gives you some lore about the zone and how the outside world transports supplies to the zone.
The collectible adds a piece to the narrative on why these supplies are being shipped to such a dangerous area. The artifacts that can be found within the zone are quite valuable to scientists, and so the helicopters come in to pick them up and give the inhabitants of the zone some supplies to keep life going in there.
helicopter crash
7
After the player has progressed the main quest by delivering the documents obtained from the lab (see picture 3), they acquire the radiation suit and can safely enter the swamp. The player can still attempt to enter the swamp without the suit, but would find themselves with radiation poisoning rather quickly.
Once they enter the swamp bunker they’re greeted by an NPC for the next quest, to find an artifact in the swamp that he wants, and in return he will give the player a keycard to pass the Pripyat blockade.
This shot is taken from the radio tower just south of the swamp for a better view.
Swamp lookout (main quest)
8
After the swamp quest is done, the player can head north towards the Pripyat blockade and enter the final area of the game. Enemies here would be well equipped with high-end gear, making it a very risky zone to find yourself in, so NPCs will advise you to be careful and the enemy ranks would gradually go up as you progress towards the end of the game.
Pripyat lookout (main quest)
9
This shot showcases an enemy camp outside the ferris wheel area, where the player must fight their way through a construction site and open field, in order to reach a flare gun and call in the extraction chopper. As they fly away, the game comes to an end and you get a gorgeous view of the Exclusion Zone from inside the helicopter!
ferris wheel (ending)
Level design
Being an open world experience, I put a lot of focus on creating a believable environment in terms of layout, scale and space planning.
That said, I worked a lot with creating compositions and using clever techniques to motivate a player from going to the place they need to in order to progress the main quest, but also give enough breathing room and encourage the curiosity to go off the main path. It’s certainly a balance to be found there and you can’t dictate the player’s every movement either.
Another big thing I focused on in this project was to create incentive and intrinsic motivation to return to previous areas of interest such as the starting village. The solution, or rather the inclusion, was to have certain NPCs be vendors of specific items.
If you needed weaponry you’d head east to the friendly outpost to stock up on ammo, if you needed items to replenish health or cure radiation poisoning you’d go back to the starting village to get it. Since I had already planned the inclusion of said items, it was more of a matter on how to tastefully and logically include them in the space of the world.
Health item vendor
Soft revealing the city of Pripyat, establishing the player’s long term goal.
Soft revealing the tower in the distance, followed by the intrigue of a side path to the right
Lab walkthrough with a neat level loop
Including more focused areas and using more traditional level design in a huge space like this one, was a super interesting task to undertake, and I think I got it to work very well due to how I included these spaces.
It’s mostly a matter of space planning, how far away is it from the rest of the POI’s in the world? How big of a time investment is it to explore these smaller areas and what’s the reward?
Those are some of the questions I asked myself when making the lab as an example and I’m very happy with how it turned out!
Finished level in Unreal Engine 5
Pre production, top down drawing
Combat area inside Pripyat
Game mechanics
Game mechanics are very light in this project, as it was mainly a level design assignment, but I did manage to include some anyway that were relevant to the world that I wanted to include for the sake of immersion!
We had to include a mount for the assignment, and what’s more fitting to the theme than a bear covered in armor?
The functionality of the mount is as follows: The player controller is transferred to the mount actor, then stores the player location & current player stats (health etc.) on top of the mount, and when the player dismounts their location is set next to the mount, and control is transferred back to the player.
Other than the obligatory mount, this project features a radiation zone system, with ramping damage-over-time depending on how much radiation the player has accumulated.
Radiation build up can be countered with the acquirement of the rad suit, as well as anti-rad artifacts found throughout the world (such as the one in the abandonded mine).
Lastly for game mechanics I want to showcase the artifacts.
The artifacts are the biggest hint of inspiration that I’ve used, from Roadside Picnic and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R universe.
They’re set up in a data table, where they get assigned values such as Max Stamina, Radiation Resistance, Health, Move Speed etc. as well as a monetary value if one would rather sell it over using its properties.
Artifacts are the main motivation to explore the spaces between points of interest, due to their helpful properties and/or monetary value. I think their inclusion is an important one to make world exploring fun and feel rewarding, so many games just lack content in the “between spaces” and this counteracts that problem.
Mount Showcase
Radioactive swamp, no radiation resistance
Radioactive swamp, with 3 radiation resistant artifacts
Reflections
This assignment taught me a lot about working on big scale level & world design, space planning and pacing in a game. I had a blast taking inspiration from my favorite book and one of my favorite games of all time, I have a huge fascination for the real life Chernobyl exclusion zone and the media that followed the incident.
If anything I wish I had more time to create more game systems such as a grid based inventory and proper enemies. But the world here is already built so I might revisit this one day and make that wish come true!