I'm honored to be here today
to present this masterclass to you,
and we'll be talking about
how we at Housemarque created Returnal.
Our most ambitious
and biggest title to date.
Just like all good stories, it's
probably the best place for us to start
would be from the beginning, right?
When first jumping into Returnal,
one of the first things
I wanted to do was just define
the project goals first, right?
I mean, we had a really big budget
were shooting for the stars
and you know what they say, right?
I mean, anyone can handle adversity,
but if you want to test the game
developers' character,
just give them a big budget.
And one of the first things
that we defined was that we really wanted
to bring that established
brand of Housemarque
explosive action and cool tech
to a triple-A third person package.
And back then
I remember saying that triple-A for us
just means awesome arcade action.
And second project goal was
to bring
Roguelike elements
for replayability and depth.
And last
but not least,
we wanted to weave
a mystery driven narrative
that would ultimately haunt the player
long after the credits have rolled.
So sounds pretty simple, right?
And after this,
one of the first things that we did
was put together the “Hellevator” pitch,
as I like to call it.
So this was
essentially
the initial premise for the game.
And it went something like this.
So you crash land on a hostile
alien planet.
You don't remember how or why
you got there.
You quickly succumb
to its cosmic horrors.
But upon your death,
instead of finding peace,
you just reawaken
just moments before the inevitable
crash landing again.
So you're trapped in an endless cycle
where even death, there's no escape.
Each time you awaken, the planet
seems somehow different,
like some cosmic forces
are toying with your sanity.
With each cycle,
you slowly learn more about the planet.
You see remnants of an alien civilization
that met an untimely demise.
But most eerie of all,
you also see some things
that appear deeply personal in nature.
So it's
almost like
this planet knows
you better than you know yourself.
And your only hope
is to keep moving forward
and keep looking for answers.
Your only hope
is to break the cycle
before the cycle breaks you.
And that was the premise
that I had to say this
at least 470 times
throughout development.
For onboarding,
you know, whether it's new recruits or
with coders, studios,
or even just internally just reminding
people what the premise,
what the concept of the game is.
And next up,
we can look at how we actually
solidified the vision for Returnal.
So lots of time spent on Pinterest,
lots of raw materials
collected on pure
ref mood boards, mind
maps, different presentations.
And honestly, through this process,
I just followed the rule of cool.
So it was just,
yeah, if something spoke to me,
if something created a feeling,
even if I didn't understand exactly why,
I just kind of I took a note of it.
I just added it to the mood board.
I'm like, this is cool, you know?
And because you're chasing a dream,
you're chasing a feeling
when you're doing creative work, right?
You're chasing the intangible.
And many times
you are -- you're more guided by
how will this make players feel?
So I really wasn't concerned at all
about internal consistency
and kind of connecting
these things. It's just this--
This is a series of really cool moments
and it's going to be
an amazing experience.
During this distillation process,
we also define Selene’s character.
And one question I often get
asked is what came first?
The story or the character?
And in our case,
it was definitely the story
because much like all of us,
I think
Selene was also a direct product
of her environment, right?
So she had a dream
of becoming an astronaut
and explore the cosmos.
And her road to achieving
this was really wrought with challenges
and some generational trauma.
We also knew that our main character
would be old enough to be a parent,
to have accumulated
some baggage and some regrets in life.
So, you know, she couldn't
just be like a 22 year
old just running around, right?
And we also knew that
we wanted her to be really smart
and analytical,
but also philosophical and carrying,
you know, perhaps some guilt.
You know,
there's
there's that sweet spot
between having a hint of vulnerability
and humanity in our character as well.
But early on, we realised
very early
that we didn't want our character
to be too vulnerable
because,
well, in
a traditional Lovecraftian sense,
you would usually have a character
just descend into madness
and they cower in the corner.
They cannot you know, they cannot cope.
They cannot move on.
But
gameplay comes first, right?
And when you have this
kind of explosive
stylized badassery on screen,
you can't really have a character
that's just crushed
by kind of the fear of these forces.
So the gameplay dictated in many ways
what kind of personality Selene was,
just as much as the backstory was.
And from the gameplay,
we just identified
that Selene
is actually a character
who is determined to a fault,
and this is woven
back into her personal story.
But it's something
that you see on display
and you feel as a player
every time you pick up the controller.
And from this process, Selene was born
and we're really happy
that we found that
the right balance of grit, relatability
and also the power fantasy.
Next up, we're going to be looking at
how we found the fun.
We're going to be looking
at some old prototypes.
And this is where we look
at our humble beginnings.
It's interesting
because this is from the end of 2017,
the first year of development.
And aside from a couple of rough edges,
if you can look very closely,
you can already see
kind of like the game
that we ended up shipping.
I mean, we have the minimap,
the third person camera,
the compartmentalized rooms
that we randomly interconnect,
the health pickups.
I mean, this was essentially it was the
the final game.
Just a really, really bad version of it.
Right?
Um, but yeah,
I'm happy to say
that we did actually nail
a lot of the fundamentals early on,
but there were a lot of challenges
that we faced.
And arguably the biggest one
on a high level
was just going from 2D to 3D because 2D
you have like the in Ex Machina
in which on the left
you have this intuitive
spatial awareness, right?
So you have a 360 view
of what's happening.
You have all the information
needed to make decisions
and in a third person space
you actually have a really narrow
field of view. Right?
You have a view frustum
you can't see
what's happening on the sides
or behind you.
And
yeah, things like bullet hell
and compartmentalization of space
is fairly easy in 2D, right?
You have,
you know, when you when you move to 3D,
this introduced a new dimension
of possibilities for us,
but also a dimension of complexity.
And it's important to note once again
that there was no reference game for us.
There was no third person
run and gun and jump
shooter with bullet hell elements
and this kind of fast paced combat.
So we just had to carve our own path.
One of the
first things we
looked at
were of course, defining the controls,
and we wanted to preserve
that snappy arcade feel in 3D space.
Right.
And I think I'm happy to say
that we actually nailed these early on.
So we did not actually
change the controls
that much
after the first few months
of just tinkering.
And it helped that
we had a really, really simple
and clear philosophy
for this,
that responsiveness and gameplay
always comes first.
And that
that helped to really keep things
simple for us.
And next step, okay,
so we had our controls
and now we needed to give players
something to shoot.
And we had this chaser guy
that ended up being our lab rat for all
all sorts of unholy experiments.
We were trying to find our popcorn
enemy, right.
So the one enemy
that we would just have in
in large numbers, really small time
investment, simple homing behaviour.
Just like Nex Machina.
Like, of course, it's going to
work out of the box, right?
Well, like, okay, yeah.
Here's our our chasers.
And you can see
there's a lot of backpedaling.
There's a lot of just,
you know,
that that really one dimensional
type of gameplay.
And in Nex machina this worked but here
nothing interesting is happening
and then we also had the navigation
to actually consider
and we have this example of shooting
fish in a barrel
because you'd have the enemies
now that had to climb up
and they're used like,
you know, really fancy
animations to do so.
So you could just be sitting on
top like a ledge
and just picking them out one by one.
These were problems
that we never had to deal with before
as designers, right?
And just to ease the cheese.
And in the end,
I think what we ended up doing
was just giving them
a bigger time investment.
So there's not just one bullet.
We ended up giving them a spread shot.
So they just reinforced the bullet hole.
And we realized that for melee attacks,
mainly it works a lot
better for larger enemies where you have
you have the opportunity to build
that kind of dance to tangle with them
a bit more.
Next up, enemy engagements.
So similarly
thinking in 2D thinking
like a really simple we just
we wanted to have a lot of enemies
we thought would keep them simple
and predictable.
And we just create engagement
through numbers. Right.
So again, thinking in
2D, you
can see the naivete on display here
with all of our prototypes.
They're mostly static enemies.
They're shooting the player
you can strafe to avoid them.
Everything.
There's no synergy between the enemies.
I mean,
all of these were designed in isolation
with a fairly 2D thinking
and now they're just two
is to snipe from a distance. Right.
So we thought, okay, maybe
one thing that can help us solve
this was trying medium range combat.
So here
the bullets actually don't fly that far.
It forces you to get up
close to the enemies.
This does create
some near field engagement with them,
but we still didn't fix
the fundamental problem,
which was that
enemies were just really one dimensional
and weren't doing anything interesting.
I mean, this guy here, he's
doing this
really fancy kind of like,
you know, magic gathering attack.
But it's just the turret, right?
Yeah.
It's too easy to divide
and conquer the enemies.
Like, it was just really static.
And long story short, what we ended up
settling on was,
yes, simple is good, simplistic isn't.
So one note enemies weren't viable.
We just added more layers of attacks
and layer
attacks and depth
and more mindful
utilization of that vertical space.
So this spore wizard
or the Michael Morph
enemy, as we called it,
it started as the static turret.
Now we had the teleportation to it
to cover ground,
an AOE attack, a slow down
grenade that slows down the player.
So this led to bigger,
more interesting encounters,
while still keeping things
really simple and readable.
So simple, not simplistic.
Next up, the cutting room floor.
So believe it or not,
we actually considered adding
NPCs to Returnal at some point.
Yes, this was a
really sophisticated prototype.
As you can see,
many minutes of love went into this
and there was actually one that we tested
fairly late in production as well.
As you can see,
Selene
is a bit more recognizable here.
It was just like a small wizard
that just yeah.
Is kind of having a bad day
that asks you for some help
and you can bring an item and all that.
So we dropped it
because we kind of wanted
to support
the solitary journey of Selene more.
And it was just out of scope
to do it properly.
Another thing that we tried was droids
so inspired by classic shoot
‘em ups such as Gradius,
where they have these helper
like droids that follow you
around,
also known as options
usually in those games,
these would follow you around
and add layers of firepower
and supporting actions.
But as you could probably see, it
introduced way too much clutter
and noise in the combat.
So we axed it pretty quickly actually.
And last
but not least,
there was this idea of
like being corrupted
by the forces of the alien planet.
And we thought,
what if Selene
could be transformed into a pitiful
but dignified creature
that's really corrupted by this,
you know, hostile planet of Atropos?
And this was our lead designer's
interpretation of that idea.
So
bless his heart.
So that was a really quick test to see.
Okay,
is it viable to just transform
into something else?
There's about 73 reasons
we didn't end up going with this,
but you can see one of them
but this is also a testament
to the prototyping power
of Unreal Engine 4
and what that power can do
when placed in the right hands.
And just wrapping up
now, last couple of slides,
so just a few key takeaways
chasing the dream, right?
That was the name of the presentation.
And I think that's what we should do
is to chase the dream and champion
our vision. Right.
I think compromising leads to mediocrity.
And I think we should all just
follow our own rule of cool
and not overthink it
and just, you know, do what feels best.
I mean, everything is a product of its time
anyway, right?
So in 20 years from now, I'm
going to look back and say, Yeah,
it kind of made sense
to just make a game like that back
then, you know, so not overthink it
and yeah, build on your strengths.
I think it's important to just remember
like who you are,
you know,
just get the fundamentals right
as they will carry the game
and just really,
really focus on what really makes
your unique brand of games tick.
And this is kind of like a bit of, uh,
you know, a disappointment in a way,
but know that there's no silver bullet,
there is no secret sauce.
I mean, making games
is really, really hard work.
And pursuing greatness
won't ever come free
and your resolve will be tested
just like ours was.
But I think that knowing that it's
going to be tough going
in, knowing that there's no silver bullet
can make the difference
between fight or flight
when those instincts to kick in
or when the uncertainty kicks in.
You know, and speaking of uncertainty,
I think it's something
that we as creative
people just need to learn to embrace.
So, you know, creative
work is always going
to be filled with doubt.
So having uncertainty, having that
that fear is not a sign of failure.
It's a sign that you're doing
what you love.
And, you know,
the perfect plan only exists
in hindsight anyway. So...
And I think it's also important,
like when you're chasing your dream
to not become a prisoner
of that dream either.
So in the end, the game is the boss
and you need to listen to the game,
listen to the team
and just
take care of the game, you know,
keep it in good shape,
keep it playable,
and just listen to
what it’s trying to tell you.
I think Returnal was
it was really a once
in a lifetime opportunity for us
and I feel like together
we managed to create something
that we would be proud of for the rest of
our lives.
So thank you.