Overview

Stranger Things: Lost Contact is a project developed during the Level Design course.

During the project we had to develop a narrative, an overall world and levels structure and a detailed level design (for a level of our choice) for a videogame based on the Stranger Things world and the D&D manual, producing documentations and digital/physical prototypes of the level.

The story revolves around a doppelganger of Eleven being created in the Upside Down during the Season 1 finale. This double retains all the memories of the original Eleven, but ends up in a russian military base trying to come out of the Upside Down and now needs to find a way to go back to Mike and her friends again.

My contributions include:

• Designed two skill charts (in-combat/off-combat) with 10 unique abilities and 29 upgrades across a 45-level progression system;

• Conceived the upside down/normal world switch mechanic.

• Designed sections 2 and 3 of the level (the laboratory and the collapsed laboratory), including world and section diagrams;

• Collaborated with a writer to integrate level and narrative design into a coherent experience;

• Wrote and maintained the Level Design Document and the Data Management Document (linked above);

• Prototyped the level both digitally and physically - collected feedback from colleagues, friends and family to balance difficulty;

• Balanced and tested difficulty curve by managing resources, combat encounters and skill usage.

The World Switch Mechanic

Considering the relatively small world in which the game is set, we needed a way to expand the game world and create greater variety. Fortunately, the Stranger Things universe offers a parallel world (the Upside Down) which Eleven can potentially enter by opening portals, as we saw at the end of Season 1.

By incorporating this mechanic into the game, we’ve added the variety we were looking for and introduced a layer of tactical depth to the player’s movement, including through other unlockable abilities that allow the player to sense or see who is in the parallel world, enabling the player to adopt a more stealthy approach to exploration and progressing through the story.

Level Design Section 2 (The laboratory)

The level we chose to design in detail was the 9th. This level is a nightmare induced by the Upside down and is a very important turning point for her in the story. In the first section of the level, Eleven sees her friends but is unable to reach them, becoming increasingly frustrated at the thing until the spider monster arrives and starts chasing her.

The second section, on the other hand, is set in Hawkins' lab and continues the nightmare that eleven is having, with the upside down using her memories to manipulate her, using Dr. Brenner as a conduit.

In this section, the goal of Elevel is to go out of the laboratory using the locked exit door shown in the very first part of the section and the objective of the player is to find 4 of the 5 keys necessary to open the door and put them in their correct slot on the door. Each key has a letter engraved on it and the correct order is deducted by the number printed on the slot that needs to match the letter's position in the alphabet. As a hint to the player, one of the key is already inserted in the right slot.

The player has to explore the laboratory, both in the normal world and in the upside down to find the keys, while having the voice of Dr. Brenner talking and inviting Eleven to stay with him in the Upside Down, recalling a sort of Hellblade kind of voice in the head or also Micolash talking during his bossfight in Bloodborne.

Level Diagrams

Level Design Section 3 (Broken laboratory)

Once the player reaches the exit, the laboratory crumbles, revealing that Eleven never actually left the astral plane during the nightmare, with some of the rooms that are still floating, connected by some scattered pieces of walls, cealings and floors.

I wanted to give the player a sense of fear and strong danger in the culmination of this nightmare, and I got inspired by the Scarecrow's nightmares in Batman: Arkham Asylum, putting Eleven in a collapsed environment at the center of which there is the Spider Monster, with the player having to move between rooms avoiding the gaze of the Spider Monster to reach some special rooms that will collapse to damage it. Additionally the player needs to rotate the rooms with a mechanism present in them, so that their exits match the paths.

A physical prototype was made to test the room puzzles in this section, and various people including colleagues, friends, and family members served as testers, using their feedback to balance the difficulty.

Level Diagram

Physical Prototype

Links

Full Level Design Document

Data Management Document

First Section Digital Prototype