Even though there are still terrible things going on in the world, 2022 also brought us a glimmer of hope. The pandemic has seemingly come to a halt in Europe, which gave me the opportunity to partially return to an office environment and work alongside very talented people in person again. Without lockdowns in place, I was also able to attend concerts again and even fall in love with a lovely young lady who I met at a Foals gig. She introduced me to the wonderful world of boardgame conventions, where I bought some new stuff (see picture) that snowballed my hobby even further out of hand. And speaking of games, we’ve released Horizon Forbidden West this year; the biggest title that I’ve worked on in my career so far. I’m very proud of the puzzles that I designed for the game, which also resulted in my promotion to a senior game designer at Guerrilla. And last but not least, I hosted a small music festival in my back yard and started learning to drive a car this year, a skill that I thought might be useful after ignoring it for 32 years. And it’s going pretty well so far!
Summarizing it all, makes me realize that 2022 was actually a great year for me. And I’m sure that 2023 will be another one! With the recent announcement of the Burning Shores DLC for Horizon Forbidden West, I’m sure you can imagine my excitement for what’s to come. But before looking forward, let’s keep my tradition in place and look back with a couple of top lists for 2022.
All those video calls and less travelling even allowed me to start on a hobby project that has been in my mind for a while: an audio-driven exploration board game! Together with a good friend of mine, who happens to be a housemate who’s doing all the audio work, we spent four months (five hours a week) in this project already and 2021 will be the year were we get to playtest the game and see if we can get people excited about it. And it’s not the only new game with my name on it that will find it’s way to player’s hands, because Guerrilla is releasing the sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn this year, which will be the third console title that I worked on that hits the shelves this year! That, and we’re going to beat this pandemic, I’m sure… Yeah 2021 is going to be very exciting!
I learned a lot about setting up a framework for the Kucheza game in 2017 (I guess I could write a whole blog post about that, maybe I should do so one day) and had the chance to pitch my own design ideas for the upcoming Guerrilla project back in pre-production. I grew as a designer for sure, but I guess I cannot go in too much details yet, since the Guerrilla project is still unannounced at the time of writing this. Also, we’ve been talking to publishers for a new String Theory game (which is still being developed in secret) after the original String Theory webgames have been played over 1M+ times online. I’ve visted beautiful places like Bonaire, made a lot of friends and I met a very sweet girl who is now my girlfriend. Also, I’ve listed to a shitton of music, both live as well as on record.
