Metatext is in-world text that pops up as the player draws near. It is used in tutorialisation, to encourage exploration, and to add flavour and texture to the world and characters of Impossible Rescue. The presence of MetaText in-game is rationalised through the presence of Danielle's AI companion, Shadow, and it’s made clear early in Level 1 that Shadow is projecting his thoughts and advice directly into the environment.
Not all metatext is immediately available, however. While any text involved in tutorialisation will always appear when the player is close, other text will only appear after the player has found and interacted with that level’s Map Terminal. The Metatext revealed as a result is non-essential but can point the player towards Power Ups and Datapads, and make the finding of Shadow Charge terminals easier.
MetaText encourages and rewards exploration, and has several compulsion loops associated with it:
Exploring the level to find the Map Terminal rewards the player by revealing hidden MetaText.
This newly revealed MetaText encourages further exploration by pointing the player toward areas they might not have explored yet. The player is rewarded with Power Ups and Narrative Datapads.
There are three or four Narrative Datapads in each level that can only be accessed once the Map Terminal has been used. Each Datapad tells part of a story unique to the level being explored. The player is encouraged to explore to find all Datapads and is rewarded with a short story vignette about the level they’re playing. These vignettes often explain something about the level’s design.
MetaText Development
The MetaText feature was not present in our original designs for Impossible Rescue, and actually came about coincidentally. While whiteboxing Level 1, I placed text labels directly into the world to indicate room functions and object locations without needing to place actual assets. These labels stayed in until the First Playable Review (11th Nov 2021), where our tutor, Zuby Ahmed, suggested that using them as MetaText could provide us with the opportunity for a new type of interactive object (Map Terminal) and a possible method of tutorialisation. We agreed that this was a great opportunity and ran with it, adding yellow text around the map in a default Unreal Engine font. At our Beta Review (8th Dec, 2021), representatives from Rockstar Games weren't convinced by the MetaText feature. I asked a few probing questions, and determined it wasn't necessarily the feature itself that was the problem but the current implementation of it. The MetaText didn't look like it fit into the world, and despite Shadow saying it was him projecting ideas, MetaText didn't tie to him visually. Following this feedback, I changed the behaviour of MetaText, making it only appear when the player was close. I changed the text colour and font to better match Shadow's colouring and attitude, and added a scrolling background to help it stand out from level architecture. Features like this have existed in games before - most recently in Deathloop – but I believe our MetaText is innovative in the extent to which it encourages exploration.
Left: Early MetaText styling.
Right: Final MetaText styling
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