Last year I had the opportunity to give a talk at GDC 2024 about the design philosophy of the Relic Ruin environmental puzzle spaces for Horizon Forbidden West. The talk goes into detail on how we designed the spaces to make them inviting to enter when players are walking around in the open world, but also how we made the puzzles themselves fun and engaging.
It’s interesting to create a talk like this, since it made me reflect on five years of designing various environmental puzzles at Guerrilla. During that design process everything came quite naturally, without thinking too much about structures and reasons why I approach things in a certain way. But when making a talk for other designers, I analyzed those five years of design work and tried to formulate things in ways that are broadly applicable. This led me to define a thing that we’ve been calling “radial design”.
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.