The Invisible Hand
A Fallout 4 Mod
Details
The Invisible Hand is a Fallout 4 mod taking place early in the game's main story, right after journeying through Kellogg's memories in Goodneighbor. The player meets a ghoul working for the Crimson Caravan merchant house who asks them to investigate the origins of a new source of Nuka-Cola that seems to be coming from some subway tunnels beneath Goodneighbor. The player explores the tunnels, possibly acquiring a piece of jet pack power armor along the way, and finds a hidden Nuka Cola factory run by the Institute, which the player can choose to either help or clear out.
Mod Statistics:
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Game: Fallout 4
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Engine: Creation Kit
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Platform: Windows
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Team Size: 1
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Development Time: 8 weeks (180 hours)
Mod Zip File
Level Design Overview
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Designed, authored, and maintained Level Design Document (LDD).
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Blocked out, built, populated, and decorated 3 interior cells with base Fallout 4 modular kit and integrated them into the Fallout 4 world and lore.
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Created and recorded voice for over 200 lines of dialogue and accommodated 5 narrative branches the player can choose from.
Environmental Design
Duties
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Created two interior spaces of subway maintenance tunnels
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Designed space to feel abandoned and run-down, but with signs of life in the form of mushrooms, ghouls, explorer corpses, and synths (both living and corpses).
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Green and Blue Lines approximate real world and in-game crossing location of the two subway lines.
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Created interior factory space that used to be the loading depot for the subway maintenance system.
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Signs of Institute technology mixed with salvage litter the area.
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Designed interiors to accommodate jet pack use, with hidden treasures and alternate paths the player can take if they take the time to unlock the power armor.
Problem Solving
Metro Blues
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The choice to use the subway systems underneath Boston as primary setting of the mod was in some senses a natural one.
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Subways were somewhat underused in the main game, there were other stations and lines in real life that weren't included, and subways can lend themselves very well to an enclosed, "dungeony" feel.
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However, that choice also led to production problems.
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The mod kit was extremely rigid, with very few ways to transition to other areas, create new space shapes, or generate a sense of visual variety, and those difficulties made it hard to create contrast in the space on the merits of the mod kit alone.
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Subway Solutions
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However, these challenges weren't ultimately insurmountable.
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Maintenance tunnel pieces served as a good way to connect subway chambers and other rooms together in the desired configuration, while teleport doors allowed transition to spaces those maintenance tunnels couldn't reach.
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As for visual variety, I took lessons from my previous Fallout 4 mod, "The Ones Who Fear The Gods", and focused on lighting, using different colors of maintenance lights and mushroom glow to draw the player's eye onward and differentiate spaces.
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Regular placement of Blue and Green Line signs helped tell the player directly which space they were in and where the next one might be.
Narrative Design
Duties
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Integrated quest into Fallout lore by referencing The Institute and the Crimson Caravan merchant house from Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 1.
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Created narrative structure that accounted for many different player styles and personalities, including mercenary, amoral, libertarian, Keynesian, and conservative, and let players choose outcomes based on their mindset in several branching paths.
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Populated the world with additional environmental storytelling, from terminal entries and corpses to thematically appropriate clutter, doorways, and decals to make the spaces support the narrative.
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Wrote, recorded, and edited dialogue for three main characters and fully integrated it into Fallout 4's editor. Included lines of questioning that rounded out the characters and gave them additional depth.
Problem Solving
Quest Overview
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Like my previous Fallout 4 mod, I wanted to make a quest that felt like it would fit well into Fallout lore.
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This time though, I went for a more wacky tone, exploring a what-if scenario in which a secret Nuka-Cola plant threatens the economy of the Wastelands by flooding the market with new Nuka-Cola and thus new bottle caps, the primary unit of currency in this world.
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I chose a wealthy merchant as the primary quest-giver to get players interested with the promise of a hefty reward and present the worldview of trying to keep the economy stable.
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Then, when players discover the secret Nuka-Cola plant, they find out the Institute has been helping a Nuka-Cola enthusiast make more Nuka-Cola in order to tag the drinks with radioactive isotopes that would allow them to track the citizens of the Commonwealth.
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The player can then choose to help the enthusiast stop the Institute, kill the enthusiast now that she had outlived her usefulness to the Institute, or clear out both factions and get the reward from the merchant (which you can also get in the previous two choices if you lie to him).
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Structural Challenges
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Problem 1: Allowing the player to make three choices could potentially make branching dialogue very complicated, perhaps out of scope for a summer project.
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To solve this issue, I actually nested the choice between the enthusiast and the Institute within the merchant choice.
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If you do choose to help the enthusiast or the Institute, you're effectively making the same choice as far as the merchant is concerned: betraying him. So both of those options branch off to a dialogue tree where you only get a reward from him if you lie successfully.
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However, if the player clears out the factory, this in effect means that they didn't betray the merchant, and they can collect their reward without making a speech check.
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Problem 2: Allowing the player to start shooting up the factory at several quest stages could break the quest flow at many key points, even if that was definitely something a player should by rights be able to do in a Fallout 4 level.
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To solve this, I created a script that would advance the quest to a later stage than the climax between the Institute and the enthusiast if the player triggered combat before that climax, effectively allowing the player to "skip" the interpersonal conflict if they just want to take their money and go.
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This accommodated players with more of a "Killer" personality much better than my previous quest, and it felt like it was approaching decent flexibility like a Fallout level.
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Retrospective
What went well?
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Narrative choices allowed for many different players to be satisfied with the experience.
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Looping design of subway spaces was well-received while not falling into the typical trap of being too obvious from the beginning.
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Players that used the jet pack power armor found a lot of satisfying uses for it.
What went wrong?
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Multiple branching paths made for fairly brittle quest structure, requiring additional passes of bug-fixing to compensate.
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Players often got lost in subway interiors for several milestones until contrasting lighting and more distinctive structures were added to compensate.
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Underestimated the amount of time it would take to record all the dialogue, so extra hours had to be put in to get it in by the appropriate milestone.
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Dialogue audio was sometimes a bit quiet.
Even better if?
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Incorporate spaces more thoroughly into dialogue planning so spaces don't have to be modified too heavily in later development to account for conversations.
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Create "beauty corners" early on to help plan for aesthetics and lighting.
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Add more "pinch points" in quest structure to simplify quest progression and allow more development time for interesting variations with the addition of global variables.