Housemarque
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Documents about Housemarque
Session: AAA Game Development: A Peek Behind The Curtain - Ari Arnbjörnsson, Epic Games,
This presentation provides an insider’s perspective on the realities of AAA game development, drawing on the speaker’s 18-year career, including roles at Housemarque and Epic Games.
- AAA game development is defined by large team sizes and significant budgets, often resulting in projects held together by 'scaffolding'—vestigial code and features from previous iterations that remain because they are too deeply integrated to remove.
- Imposter syndrome is prevalent in the industry, but it should not prevent professionals from asking questions, as the complexity of AAA development means no single individual can possess all the answers.
- Internationalization is a major technical hurdle, as languages like German or Russian can be 30% to 50% longer than English, requiring UI systems that can handle significant text overflow and complex grammatical rules like gendered nouns and multiple pluralization forms.
Can PlayStation’s Housemarque repeat the FromSoftware story?
Housemarque is currently navigating a strategic evolution as a first-party PlayStation studio, aiming to elevate its historically niche, arcade-inspired design philosophy into the realm of major, top-tier gaming franchises.
- Housemarque is transitioning from a niche arcade developer to a major first-party PlayStation studio by scaling its high-intensity, flow-state gameplay for a broader, mainstream audience.
- The studio currently employs approximately 120 people and is leveraging Sony’s internal resources, user testing, and collaborative infrastructure to support this growth.
- Housemarque aims to replicate the success trajectories of established studios like Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games by treating new intellectual properties as long-term foundations for player engagement.
Can We Do It with Particles?: VFX Learnings from 'Returnal'
Housemarque’s development of the 2021 title Returnal leveraged a proprietary, GPU-based visual effects engine to achieve complex environmental and character effects.
- Housemarque utilized a proprietary, GPU-based VFX engine, originally developed in 2014 and integrated into Unreal Engine, which relies on custom HLSL-based code rather than pre-built nodes to achieve high-performance particle systems.
- The engine employs particle hierarchies, or 'node particles,' allowing child particles to reference parent data to procedurally generate complex structures like tentacles and destructible objects.
- By treating particles as control points for curves, the team implemented efficient tube rendering that manages complex movement and player collisions with minimal performance overhead.
Housemarque on battle royale with cheese
Housemarque’s development of the title Stormdivers represents a strategic pivot from the studio’s traditional arcade-focused heritage toward the competitive battle royale genre.
- Housemarque is pivoting from its arcade-focused heritage to the battle royale genre with the development of Stormdivers, a project initiated in 2015.
- The studio aims to differentiate Stormdivers in a saturated market by replacing static map design with dynamic, randomized environmental events like tornadoes and volcanic eruptions.
- Core gameplay mechanics prioritize high-intensity action, utilizing class-based movement systems such as jetpacks and gliders to emphasize verticality.