jasonsloandesign

Overview: From the Shadows, a Gears of War single player mission, focuses on stealth combat as the player navigates a Locust infested industrial zone.  The streets provide little opportunity for safe cover against the Locust Drone positions.  To safely navigate the area, the player must shootout streetlights, create distractions, and have steady aim.  The player takes the role of an unnamed special forces captain equipped with a sniper rifle modified with an extended clip and silencer.

Design Goals:

• Stealth Combat
• Guards respond to sounds
• Cinematic Moments

Development Time: 12 weeks (20 hours a week)

Safe from any direct light, the player can observe enemy placement and plan their next plan of attack.

The player starts in a cramped alley with a lamp post illuminating most of the area.  A quick camera scene shows that a drone is hiding in a secure vantage point and can see everything that happens in the alley.  This location teaches the mechanic of shooting out lights to hide from the Drones.  It is critical that the new mechanic, stealth, is enforced at the beginning.  The Gears universe is known for  gunning and cover, not stealth.  Teaching this mechanic needs to feel natural to the player, not some new mechanic that is just slapped on to the level.  A heavy rain and a darkly lit level creates an opportunity for stealth.  The rest is sold by the character commenting on how he should be sneaky and shoot out the light.

This view shows the light layout after exiting the alley.  A heavily fortified position (bottom of the picture) looks onto the area where the player must use the new mechanic of hiding in shadows.

The Gears of War universe has grand buildings with elaborate facades.  The player rarely enters these buildings during the campaign.  In From the Shadows, the player must escape detection by moving through one of these grand buildings.  A design goal was creating an elaborate interior to match the grand exterior of the building.  A library fits the grand theme and provides a great chance to convey the theme of destruction.

Continuing with the theme of destruction, a decorative tower has collapsed into the final courtyard area, creating an opportunity for the player to imagine skirmishes in the past.

A fallen soldier provides a great opportunity add mood to the level.  I enhanced the light map on the van so that his shadow stands out more.  The soldier also serves a second objective, he is dead in the light, a subtle way to enforce the idea that direct light will bring death to the player.

Each light in the level, consists of a static mesh light (that receives the damage), a light volume (to add the illusion of a night time street lamp), a trigger box at the ground level, a point light, and a spot light.

When the street lamp static mesh takes damage, the light volume is toggled to hidden, both lights are toggled off, and the trigger box is disabled, allowing the player to safely continue through the level without raising the alarm.

A sample of spawning 2 Drones.  The section labeled, “Making the drones blind”, fires two console commands changing the sight and hearing range of the drone class to 200 Unreal Units.  Both drones are attached to another section of kismet (the blue area), this section returns the sight and hearing of the drones back to normal when either of the drones in the squad takes damage, giving the appearance that the drones saw where the shot came from and now engage the player.

Sequence of kismet that fires when the player touches a trigger box under a street lamp that is still on.  The console commands returns the sight and hearing range of both drones and wretches to the normal settings.

This section of kismet shows how to script a checkpoint for a non-Marcus character, in this case, Carmine.  When the player returns to a checkpoint by either selecting it from a menu or dying and restarting at the point, they spawn as Marcus.  Before the player notices, I reset the lights they they shot out after passing through the checkpoint initially, reset the sight of all Locust forces to “blind”, re-stream the appropriate levels/encounters, spawn Carmine, posses Carmine, hide Marcus in a small closet area, give the player silenced weapons and check to see if they were playing in god mode.

The last section of kismet changes the rain storm sound as they enter and exit buildings.  Simply put, each building has a trigger volume that upon entering swaps to the appropriate sound.  Leaving the building returns to to the outdoor rain storm sound.