I owned all of the map's unique side quests, which included the SAM laser trap, Sleepwalking Zombies, Deer Heads, the DG-2 quest, the Fog Rolling In reference quest, the jumpscare quest, and Donut the friendly Doppelghast. Each one had their own goals and challenges, with some notable highlights:
Overall goals: Keep quest steps grounded in some kind of reality, even if it was a fantastical reality - there should be an observable cause and effect. Make use of the environment and set dressing in interesting ways. Have a varied range of quest difficulties.
Sleepwalking Zombies
A goal: Switch up the gameplay and pacing from regular round based zombies.
Challenge - Immersion: In order to create a true feeling of stealth, I made the zombies wake up from intuitive actions like shooting without a silencer or sprinting nearby for too long, in addition to other actions. None of these behaviors, including sleeping in the first place, are default behaviors of Zombie AI and needed to be created specifically so a player felt like they were creeping through the halls.
Deer Heads
A goal: Create a repeatable activity with some randomization for gameplay variety.
Challenge - Player feedback: The player needed enough feedback during this quest to understand what was expected of them at any time. This included having different colored outlines on the wall for what kind of weapon was expected, specific colored eyes and Field Upgrade icon combinations for the phase 1 requirements, eyes lighting up in sequence to denote encounter progress, and different deer head animations to communicate the different encounter phases switching.
DG-2 quest
A goal: Tie a side quest into a cinematic with Richtofen that introduced the Mansion and live up to the threat of the smoke entity from that cinematic.
Challenge - Difficulty progression: In order to have a challenge that was worthy of the DG-2 reward at the end of it, this side quest was broken into multiple encounters with the smoke entity from the cinematic, each one escalating in difficulty. At the same time, this wasn't supposed to be extremely difficult to complete, so a balance was struck between damage that the entity would do to the player and the required damage the player needed to do to it. Each encounter included tunable values like "number of props to destroy before a damage phase", "number of damage phases", "entity health during a damage phase", "entity move speed", "entity projectile rate", and "entity projectile damage" - which combined meant each encounter could be significantly more difficult than the last in a number of ways.
I was responsible for the majority of the implementation of Directed Mode for the map which gives players a guided step-by-step experience through the map's Main Quest.
The goal: Condense complex and obscure gameplay and puzzle steps into digestible segments that are clear and easy to follow. Allow players of all skill levels the chance to experience all of the map's content.
Challenge - Linearity: The Main Quest for Shattered Veil in the normal Round Based mode is very non-linear - multiple steps could be done at any time or completed in any order. For Directed Mode, since each step of the quest is explicitly communicated to the player, it was necessary for the quest to be presented linearly. On the design side of this, I determined the optimal flow of quest steps for best narrative and mechanical experience. On the technical side, I did not block players from doing steps out of order so needed to adjust a lot of the script logic to account for which steps had already been completed when showing the player what to do next, ensuring that it was always the next logical thing for them to complete.
