Free Roam

Overview

Free Roam is an open-world experience set after the events of the MindsEye campaign, designed to keep players engaged once the story was complete. It was planned as a platform we could keep building on over a long period, with new updates and new content bringing players back.

It was built purely with Arcadia tools, on top of a city designed for linear missions rather than open-world play, and with multiplayer in mind for the future. In an open world you have to think about what is happening all around the player at all times, and give them the freedom to decide how to solve the challenge in front of them.

Design

At the end of the campaign the robots are taking over, so Free Roam takes place in an almost post-apocalyptic city where robots walk the streets and people live on while they can. We identified the core things a player would want: challenge, an economy with taps and sinks, transport across a big map, agency and progression. Based on this, we built:

• Factions: Split the city into four: the military, the robots, the Back Niners (a gang who want nothing to do with technology) and ordinary civilians. This gave us sets of missions we could apply to every faction, and let the player be comfortable with some factions and more aggressive towards others.
• Fortresses: faction outposts where the player fights their way to the top and earns a reward for clearing out the base.
• Stealing missions: for players who want to play both sides, characters around the city send them to steal a vehicle or military supplies such as ammo and bring them back.
• Ambient environments: factions going about their own business, which the player can interact with and which let us tell some story, such as huge robots harvesting the ground, or prisoners being marched around by robots that the player can disrupt and free.
• A storyline: the player controls a climate preacher, a wild, eccentric character, and a set of story missions ties the world together and helps the player understand what is going on.
• A policing system: if the player starts shooting wildly, the local faction's response unit comes after them.
• Progression: upgrades to weapons, vehicles and other systems in discoverable shops as the player gets to know the city and its economy through exploration.

My Role

• Started with two very talented level designers. I did most of the technical lifting on the logic and taught them how to approach things in a more technical way, while they set-dressed, built the paths the player would take and set up the AI.
• When we moved on to the main storyline, two more level designers joined the team. Together we created a story to show who the climate preacher was and what drove them.
• Gave the level designers as much agency as possible to come up with their own ideas for how to build each mission, within the design we had agreed together.
• Led Free Roam for six months before handing it over to another team, while I focused on the content coming out in the game's updates.

What I Built

• A vehicle recall system, so once the player owns a vehicle they can call it to them at any point.
  • Vehicles only spawn on roads. The system finds the road closest to the player, picks a point around 150 metres along it and places an invisible marker there.
  • If the marker is in the player's camera view, it tries the road in the other direction, and keeps searching until it finds a plausible spot out of sight. The vehicle spawns there and uses the road network to drive as close as it can before heading straight for the player.
  • Built with the outsourced studio responsible for the vehicle AI system and road network. It means the player always has a vehicle close at hand, giving them far more freedom to move around the city without long walks between areas.
• A mission handling system that tracks which missions are active and which are complete, and controls how they instantiate. It needed more information than Arcadia alone could provide, so I designed it, the systems programming and backend teams built the Unreal side with me, and I scripted the Arcadia nodes that we then used in the game.
• A mission activation system that starts and stops a series of airdrop sub missions on a timer, with a notification system that draws the player to the correct location and loads the content accordingly.
• A home upgrade system, with locked doors in the player's home that they unlock through the economy.
• The design of the missions scattered across the map.

Challenges

• Arcadia had no proper level of detail (LOD) system for its assets, so we couldn't have permanently loaded assets scattered all over the map. We built the map from level instantiators, which spawn self-contained "sub" levels only when the player is in range, so different things could be going on all over the map but not simultaneously loaded. At first these sub levels had no way of sharing information with the main logic, so each one had to work fully on its own.
• That broke down for stealing missions, which play out over long distances, so we retrofitted a partnership between the two kinds of level. A sub mission spawns then signals to the main mission to spawn the cargo in its area, such as metal boxes at a pickup point, then tells the main level to spawn the truck that can carry them. The main level in turn gives or withholds permission for certain sub missions to spawn, so the same area can be populated with enemies or left as a normal ambient space.
• The enemy AI was built to never disengage. We made each area's exit trigger larger than its enter trigger, so a player leaving is running away from the centre and facing away from the AI when it despawns. We also sent forceful commands for the AI to return to its area once the player had gone a certain distance from a fortress.

Result

A first version of Free Roam was released to the public in the second MindsEye update. It included many of the sub missions but none of the main storyline missions, and it was appreciated by players and mentioned in reviews of the game as something they were happy to see. Without voice acting and with little localisation available, we were not able to tell much of its story through dialogue.

Lessons

I focus on three pillars that integrate with each other: progression, challenge and economy. These pillars must be entwined and solid as a foundation, and everything else should be built on top of them. During early development there was a lot of back and forth over the currencies, and having too many really destabilised development of the economy, which in turn held back the other two pillars.