THE ENDURANCE
ABOUT
The Endurance Light Scout is a small, tough, multi-role scout used by the Coalition on fringe territories on account of the vessels robust design. Despite it's clumsy electrical system the Endurance's simple design and ample cargo facilities for a ship of it's size has made it a favourite of small, up-and-coming crews.
This is a custom Barotrauma submarine designed to be as readible and accessible as possible to new players while also offering interesting gameplay oppertunities.
KEY SKILLS
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Level Design
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UX Design
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Professional Tools
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Balancing
THE DESIGN
I designed this submarine in many ways as a counter to most of the other custom submarines availible, most of which are huge, overpowering and complicated. The most important thing I wanted my design to be was small. A small submarine makes the layout easy to learn and remember. I also wanted the design to be highly practical and so I looked at many things through the lense an architect would, I took into account the purpose of areas, the people that use them, the flow of traffic through a space and more. This resulted in several design decisions that I believe make this a very practical submarine:
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The medical bay is located centrally in the submarine, meaning it is very quick to access from any area in case of emergencies.
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All of the relevant rooms for certain roles are located together, such as the armoury and gunnery deck for security, the engineering room, ballast tank and fabricator for engineers and the bridge and captains cabin for the captain. This limits unnessecary traffic and means that you get very little crossover, no engineers passing through the gunnery deck to get to a ballast tank for example.
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The cargo deck is located so that it can be accessed without passing through any other area of the sub, meaning that station dockhands don't require special access or escort to bring cargo on and off.
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The non-crucial rooms to survival, like crew quarters, captains cabin ballast and cargo are located in the most likely 'crumple' areas in case of a crash (i.e hitting somthing head on or falling belly down on the ocean floor). Meaning that even in a crash the submarine is in a strong position to recover and repair.
Another goal I set out to achieve with this submarine design was to promote interesting gameplay oppertunities for saboteurs and so there are several decisions I made to try and push this:
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The fabricator room is isolated from the rest of engineering allowing saboteurs to destroy items with the deconstructor more surreptitiously.
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The fabricator room backs onto the armoury allowing a saboteur to cut through to get to the weapons.
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The ballast tank backs onto the cargo bay, allowing a saboteur to flood and potentially damage cargo if they cut though the wall and also cause a rapid descent by almost doubling the ballast size, potentially causing a crash and major damage to the submarine.
Overall, I think I successfully met the goals I set out to achieve with my design and learning the submarine editing tools was a fun challenge. Being able to apply myself and learn development tools is a key skill for a designer so I am glad that I took to it well.