Designing A Narrative Scene

Throughout Reach, players visit Atlas’ Workshop four times. On each visit, they participate in an interactive narrative scene that serves to advance the player’s understanding of the plot and provide them with their objective for the next several levels.

As well as blocking out the Workshop itself, I blocked out all four narrative scenes, then worked with animation, audio, tech design, and the voice actors themselves to see the narrative realised in these spaces.

In this article, I’ll dive a little deeper into the design of one of these scenes.

Visit 3 - The Confrontation

The player’s third visit to Atlas’ Workshop happens a little over halfway through Reach’s playtime. For much of the time so far, the player’s objective (and that of the main character, Rosa) has been to help Atlas fix a piece of technology called ‘The Entrapment’. Doing so would ensure that no dangerous Living Statues (Reach’s primary enemies) could ever reach the surface.

However, the game’s antagonist (Lithos) has just revealed that if the Entrapment gets fixed, Rosa will be trapped underground for the rest of her life, hunted relentlessly by Living Statues intent on revenge. Atlas never mentioned this, and in Visit 3, Rosa confronts Atlas about this lie of omission.

https://youtu.be/YkqbQpvlWT4

The goals for the design of Visit 3 included:

• Advance the player’s understanding of the narrative

• Clearly signpost the player’s objective for the next set of levels

• Provide opportunities for immersive, characterful opportunities (NPCs shouldn’t be static when talking)

• Incorporate player movement & traversal

• Tailor an area of Atlas’ workshop to the narrative to be delivered (creating new blockout as necessary)

Designing the Space

Up until now, Rosa has been following Atlas’ lead in narrative scenes, but given that Rosa feels betrayed going into this scene, it made sense to flip things here, putting Atlas on the back foot. This gave me the idea to have Atlas back away from the player when they meet, and evolved into a scene where Atlas is constantly shying away from or backing away from the player.

Likewise, due to the heat of emotion Rosa feels, I wanted to waste little time in getting the confrontation started. I chose to have the player arrive in a familiar location (reducing the impulse to explore) and placed Atlas front and centre as they arrive.

Atlas waiting ahead of the player as they arrive. As the player approaches, Atlas backs away.

Given that Atlas is constantly backing away, he needed somewhere to go. I took an existing hallway already linked to the player’s arrival location and expanded it. What had been a standard hallway became a grand hallway with floating platforms and a dropped floor, creating a space that was linear but didn’t feel like a simple hallway.

Originally this was a narrow hallway used to connect the Transport Hub to the main Workshop. When it became a narrative space, I expanded it into a grander hallway. Players going from the Workshop to the Hub can use the upper route to traverse quickly. Players engaged in the narrative in the opposite direction traverse more slowly across floating platforms.

Creating the narrative

After blocking out the hallway the scene would take place in, I started blocking out the narrative itself, using a T-posed version of Atlas and moving him around using Unreal Engine’s level sequences. Early on, I used text renders to illustrate where each narrative beat should occur, then was supplied with robo-voices by Audio as placeholder for dialogue.

At this point in development, I was also filling the role of scriptwriter on Reach. This scene didn’t exist during the first pass of the script, so I wrote it from scratch, and was able to work on the narrative blockout, level blockout, and dialogue simultaneously to make sure all three worked together. I opted not to have a specific moment of interaction (e.g. pushing buttons, pulling levers) as I felt including one would undercut the tension of the scene. Instead, I added floating platforms that appeared as the player walked, keeping the scene alive with movement but allowing the player to focus on what’s being said.

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Images from an early blockout of the scene and space.

Animation provided blockout animations to give a better impression of the emotion in the scene shortly before dialogue was recorded at SIDE Studios (more about this here). Following delivery of the dialogue, various teams including animation, tech design, environment, audio, and VFX came together to make the scene look and feel amazing.

Designing for Player Agency

An early mandate in the development of Reach was that we should aim never to take away player agency. This was decided partly to aid in immersion, but also because moving the player’s camera in VR is a leading cause of motion sickness. This made for a more engaging scene, but it also meant that the player could walk away from Atlas at any point. I had to build the scene and level in a way that took this agency into account.

For starters, I added ‘gates’ at various points in the corridor. Once the player has followed Atlas through a gate, it closes and limits the distance the player can walk away from Atlas. The use of floating platforms later in the scene means the player can't get too far ahead of Atlas either.

If the player lags behind, Atlas will wait at the edge of this platform for the player to catch up. Once they do, Atlas will float away from the player, and platforms will form a bridge for the player to walk on.

Further to this, I’d written the script with small breaks in mind. These breaks meant that the narrative could be split into multiple sequences and only be progressed when the player is close enough to realistically converse with Atlas.

After talking with our animation programmers and tech designers, it was decided that because this is the only scene in the game we’d want to stop or start based on player position, we wouldn’t create anything bespoke in code to support it. Instead, the stopping and starting would be managed via overlap triggers, gameplay tags, and Blueprint logic.

The result was that at each ‘break’ point, logic would check whether the player is still close to Atlas. If they were deemed close enough, the scene would continue seamlessly, otherwise Atlas would wait in place for the player to approach before continuing. This ensured that players would experience the full narrative whether they stayed close to Atlas or lagged behind.

The Aftermath

Since the player and Atlas leave this scene on bad terms, I opted to give the player an unusually quiet beat immediately afterwards. While the player’s drone companion (Opo) continues to guide them to their next objective, there are none of the usual comments or quips from Atlas, and the player can choose to ignore where Opo wants them to go, instead opting to re-explore a different part of Atlas’ Workshop.

On returning to this area, the player gets new, sombre voice lines. The glowing teal wall panels can also be climbed with a tool the player has recently unlocked. If they do climb up, the player is treated to a hologrphic projection showing the creation of their drone companion.

While revisiting these other parts, Rosa talks to herself rather than to Atlas. Her comments are more sombre in tone, in stark contrast to her mood when she first explored the Workshop.

Once the player has finished re-exploring, they can continue into the next level, where Rosa slowly comes to terms with the fact she has to help Atlas, even if it means becoming trapped underground.