A No-Nonsense Approach to Designing Horizon Zero Dawn's Robot Dinosaurs

[Music] hello everyone welcome first of all thank you very much andrew for inviting me uh this is my first time at art director's boot camp and it's been six years since i talked to gdc so i might be a little bit rusty um thank you all for showing up this is quite an audience i don't remember i've ever seen a room this full when we did killzone so that's full first do full introductions my name is jumbo vanbake i am the studio art director and animation art director at griller games and as you may know griller games is part of sony worldwide studios so that's a group of 14 very very different game developers from naughty dog guerrilla media molecule polyphony that all work together to make the first party portfolio of sony now we ourselves are grillia we're based in amsterdam lovely city

and as you may know uh the last title that we did was horizon zero dawn which was also our first open world action role-playing game so just to get an idea who has played horizon very good who has finished horizon who has platinumed horizon thank you very much glad to see that our lead designer has a platform so before we start let's start with a reminder of what horizon is and here's our e3 trailer from 2016. [Music] we know we weren't the first ones here

our stories speak of the ones that came before [Music] the old ones [Music] the world of the old ones was so different than ours they had built incredible cities [Music] with towers that reached the stars but a darkness came and their cities turned to graves and without them the land started to change their great cities faded away [Music]

and in their place came new life over time one by one the tribes came to these lands some small and humble some powerful as kings they say my tribe was the first the first to hunt the first to raise our bows for this world is never ours we've always shared a dangerous balance between man and machine

[Music] there's the herd it goes on and on and on so today i'm going to talk a little bit about the art direction of horizon but before we go there i want to talk about the idea behind horizon we get this question a lot where does the where's the orange of the idea where does this idea of a young girl hunting robo dinosaurs in a post post-apocalyptic world come from and that all started in 2010 when our studio asked us the development staff to pitch ideas for a new game before the time we had worked on killzone for almost a decade and killzone for those who know is a first-person shooter that is set in a dark and dystopian future and while killzone had been moderately successful it never really was a great hit so after about six of these titles we needed to reconsider is this really the best way to use our developments teams time talent and effort now some of you may have heard of the

term franchise fatigue so unlike movie franchises games tend to get better with their sequels and that is basically because over time and over multiple titles development teams really gets much better they get better at understanding the technology they get better at understanding each other and they get better at understanding what makes their particular game tick so unless your company has a very high turnover and staff it's usually the case the same people the same team work on sequel after sequel sometimes as in our case making more than a decade and then at some time point that team gets tired after overworking it although your knowledge and the team synergy and the skill sets are all at peak performance the results are sort of diminishing uh so and maybe so after all how many different games can you make about a bunch of space nazis with red glowing eyes so let's reboot completely let's start from scratch let's take all of our learnings let's the learnings of my first ip and see maybe

what we can do when we all start from scratch so first let me tell you a little bit about sony in itself uh sony is has quite a unique structure it's fundamentally bottom-up so sony doesn't really tell the studios what kind of games they make they let that that figure out themselves of course there's a little bit of typecasting going on like naughty dog tends to basically make action shooters and gloria used to make first person shooters polyphony makes racing games the goal of war team makes god of war and so becky figuring out biggie what we're going to make make is really up to us and in guerilla's case we apply that structure all the way down to the core of our process so we go to our own development staff and ask them what kinds of games they would like to make but before you try this at home it's probably good to understand that this level of creative freedom often needs a lot of guidance to be successful i'm not sure basically how many of you are familiar with this diagram it's the double diamond design process it gets used a lot in complicated processes like service design

and to be honest peggy we didn't actually know that this was a thing until we had made the game and then we heard about it and also like oh that's kind of what we did so in hindsight we did this instinctively it makes a lot of sense so if you think about it biggie the pitch process that i'm about to describe is this discover phase and you want to go as wide as possible with the ideas that you gather and then as you go forward you go narrow again as you try to define the core of a game and then you go sort of broad again wide again it's sort of this cycle of adding new ideas and then subtracting the bad ideas but even in the discover phase you need to have some sort of direction because you need to go somewhere otherwise you just get this explosion of creativity and then it's really heartbreaking to get sort of define it down again to what the focus is of something so i'm going to describe a little bit back how we focused our creativity we put together this brief that went to everybody in an entire company with a very specific mission

develop an epic and cinematic character-driven game universe with intense action-packed gameplay strong storytelling set in a distinct and rich universe yeah good luck with that it's a really really big statement and it's actually pretty open what it mostly says is don't come up with a mobile puzzle game and because we have all this creative creative autonomy as a studio we felt an enormous responsibility to do this right not just creatively but also strategically and commercially so the the nine-page briefing that we sent out making completed a whole broad range of topics we didn't exclude any genre but there were a couple of considerations that people needed to take first of all beggie you know think about this from sony perspective maybe what is missing in their portfolio and of course maybe one thing that was missing was rpg and action rpg and there were other considerations like okay you know we're good at some things we have really good tech we have good experience making

with combat cap mechanics we're good at making pretty art we have a very good team of concept artists and a very good design team as well but you know what can we do making with all these things that we've learned doing killzone and come up with something baby that uses or that leverages that knowledge without speaking just doing the same thing over and over again and of course we discuss other things as well like you know market saturations certain trends that were appearing a whole bunch of different things that people could take into consideration but mostly we asked them to think really big the ambition for this new concept was to create a world that would be rich enough to explore in not just a series of games but potentially also books and movies and onwards make you really think about franchise building instead of basically just a single game idea in total we received about 30 to 40 pitches and this is just a very small sample of what we could still find um and so what was kind of odd especially that we didn't really specifically ask them to come up with ideas that were as

opposite as possible from killzone but it's more something that sort of naturally came out of the process and many of the pitches that we got they hit on recurring notes there were certain themes that we all gravitated towards uh so very clearly we were done with dystopian worlds full of glass and steel and concrete and bullets and instead we wanted to build very lush and very rich worlds i guess basically sort of like that's what franchise fatigue does you can sort of want to make the other thing but thankfully we weren't really done with robots and max very we love that veggie we love a healthy dose of cool science fiction machines but mostly we wanted to create something big that was very unique something that has a positive positive tone to it something that felt very fresh something that would be eye-catching evocative and mostly something that would stand out in the marketplace and horizon clearly stood out from all the different concepts that were pitched it was by far the favorite pitch among our own staff and also basically

when we showed the couple of concepts to our colleagues at sony everybody said like make this one biggie it's sort of it's weird and you're probably gonna fail but you know it's it's at least something new so what was it about horizon that drew people in now to some degree we're still trying to figure that out but we've got a couple of ideas um first of all it had a lot of very contrasting elements lots of juxtapositions that created intrigue and contention tension so let's take a look at some of verizon's many themes first of all it is a world where the flow of time appears to have been reversed we've got a primitive age that has come after an age of high technology and it's a world where the world of science has become the world of mythology and magic and it's a world that questions the definition of life as we know it where the artificial has become the natural now usually going for high concept science fiction is a very very hard sell

but thankfully we got some help from james cameron in 2009 avatar came out and it showed the whole world that the audience are still interested in in very high concept science fiction but in order to succeed it needs to deliver something new and fresh now avatar although it's a science fiction movie it's actually a back to nature story it's about the space faring civilization that clashes with the tribal inhabitants of a far away world and it's a world where they celebrate this make it celebrate the magic of nature so it's science fiction but it's very relatable and it's also very relevant it has a couple of important questions like whether technology and nature are opposing forces in the years before avatar there was a sort of reassurgence in the appreciations of the natural world you may remember the planet earth series the ones about the oceans a whole bunch of these very lush beautifully made documentaries and ironically it was actually new technologies and film technology that

made these things possible so we saw this this aspect of new technology actually heightening the natural experience instead of fighting it then basically on the other side became sort of aware of the flip side of technological advances the notion that if you push nature too far it might just basically push back and this created a sort of new type of apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenario so there are a couple of apocalyptic scenarios that have existed for very long you've got this the very old one from the 50s and the 60s like the alien invasion or the nuclear war or the zombies and then sometimes maggie new things come into fashion because of new societal fears so now we have movies about global environmental collapse or the rise of the machines or smart monkeys in any case there are many different types of stories that describe the events of apocalypse they all focus on showing the events that are preceding it or during the apocalypse and to some degree most of them are

actually disaster movies and then when we get to the post-apocalypse we suddenly see this enormous loss of conceptual variety what we pretty much end up with is wastelands with lots of bad people they tend to be dark decrepit worlds filled with constant danger and most commonly actually the biggest dangers other people because other people are bad and so it's all about trying to survive in these harsh worlds this this sort of end of the world scenario it has certainly fascinated storytellers and audiences are like for a very long time but these vaults these these these are depicted they've become very overly familiar to our audiences and horizon promised sort of like a different view on that a different view on the apocalypse so it's a common notion that the end of mankind is automatically the end of the world uh and of course by the reality is that that's very far from the truth our planet has survived something like six total near extinctions of all life and life tends to come back every single time it's it's the michael crichton thing life finds a way

and so horizon promised a new sort of escape from the dreariness of the post-apocalypse but basically we started describing it as the post poke apocalypse and maybe there's even a post post post apocalypse um so it's a new type of world it's not a dystopian one it's not a utopian world either but it's one that sort of blossomed on the ashes of our world to call it to say it very prosaic it's a world that isn't really concerned with the past anymore uh that apocalypse in horizon has become the stuff of myths those dark days are over and life has moved on so in some degree horizon open offers like a hopeful view of the end of civilization one that's not about morbid display of death but one that highlights a sort of new and brighter world that comes after all that death and within fiction there aren't many stories that really explore the world that comes after and creatively that helps to some degree as the audience doesn't have a lot of expectations about these worlds

so it allows you to be a little bit bolder and and use surprise and intrigue to you know interest the audience with something new and unfamiliar but the stories that do exist they often add a very fascinating ingredient to the post-apocalyptic mix and that's mystery almost in every one of these vegan there is a detective story going on it's the question of what happened who done it and those setups are usually very intellectually compelling to an audience they get to mentally explore this world they get to mentally explore something that's unknown and mysterious to them and in that regard it's a real proper adventure but it's also harder especially from an artificial point of view to make that believable if it intrigues the audience but it doesn't make sense to them they're not going to keep engaged in your fantasy for very long and that's the ultimate trick of production design that production design has to pull off to create a world with a sense of authenticity and believability

now in our visual design process we generally avoid rushing towards an end visual extent we take a lot of time to really research every element that's part of the sum that makes up the final piece of key art so we don't just throw everything together at the same time but we very slowly layer the elements carefully together a key inspiration in our process was alan weissman's book the world without us who has read this book very few people thankfully that's that's why we got to make horizon so in this book he describes a scenario where suddenly all humans have disappeared from earth and he doesn't really explain why because that's not really that important but one of the things that he does in the book is that he very carefully describes the process of how old traces of mankind all evidence of mankind over the ages will finally disappear and there's this nice little moment at the end of the book where he describes baker the last thing that will remain of humanity who can guess no it's it's the voyager because veggie when our sun finally goes supernova this

thing is literally in another galaxy um so we started to recreate that process uh we took a typical american midwestern town because why not and started to visualize what would happen to that so in horizon's background story the apocalypse dissolved oil biomatter so it's a completely lifeless desert and all the soil has turned to sand so we started studying what would happen to buildings to villages to cities in this type of desert environment and of course you'll see some really typical patterns roofs start to collapse that the walls and then the facades basically collapse but sometimes arches and columns stay around that's why we still see them in some of the ancient ruins and chimneys for some reason chimneys stay up forever thousands of years even the landscapes are littered with them um and so also because there is no fiber in the ground anymore there's no roots anymore where the soil itself starts to move

like a liquid it becomes sand dunes it starts to move around so it starts to flow around buildings cover them as the wind pushes it and these shifting sands affect the ruins of course they push the ruins they fill the ruins they they change everything about the landscape till it's been completely changed and then we started imagining how life would would return veggie it would probably first jump spring up in places where the soil can hold water the moment making that rains come back and then life starts to spread everywhere and then you'll end up with something like this where it's very much buried and overgrown at the same time and this was sort of key of making it look like a thousand years instead of like like 50 years after the apocalypse the whole notion baby that the landscape itself would have vastly changed and then we took it a little bit further hundreds of years further so at some point you've got skyscrapers that start to crumble and they become hills again because of the the fluvial lines around them and rivers

of course change cores and start to cut new canyons foodie structure and the whole landscape becomes unrecognizable but very old feeling at the same time the following movie that i'm about about the show is the first art benchmark that we created so this was back in 2014. shield bareback he was one of the artists working on it one of the two artists working on this so this is about one year into production and about two and a half years before we go to release [Music] [Music] [Music]

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so [Music] [Music] the old nipple logo so if you're interested in how we made that sugar we'll be talking doing a talk on friday so this is my plug for his talk

so the final combined results of all these elements is one of horizon's three conceptual pillars and i'll explain a little bit what we mean with the pillars so at gorilla we use a game design process that we call the pillar mythology the game pillars are a set of key statements about the intended experience and it takes quite a bit of time to craft these pillars as all the wording of it is carefully tuned until all the pillars stay exactly what the creative intent is so there shouldn't be one word too many there's no word to less every single word making that's in there is there for a reason and so horizon's environments with its wilderness and its overgrown ruins is one of these pillars and the other two pillars are about tribal culture and the machines and of course beggie the fourth implicit one biggie that is aloy so remember the double diamond these pillars sit at the midpoint of the double diamond it's the smallest most compact way of describing the core experience of the game the pillar statement that we have of the tribes was the one on screen here and

as you can see it's quite a mouthful but one of the key observations that we from the our directional team back he took out of it is that it's it's talks and plural pluralities sorry about that not by native language so it talks about cultures and stories and characters it's really about volume so our job wasn't just to design one rich tribal culture but actually a whole range of them and the pillar doesn't just have subtext about volume it also implies diversity it applies distinction and believability and especially believability can be very challenging now the process that we use to achieve believability is something that we call intrinsic ideation because we love pretentious terms now some of you may have heard about the rule of cool the rule of cool states that things are always cooler if you just keep adding other cool stuff on top of your cool idea stuff and the problem of course with this is making that it completely destroys the believability of any idea

as you keep adding and adding more mismatched ideas to it now i already see you guys thinking becky aren't you the guys that added robot dinosaurs to a game so i'll talk about that later intrinsic idea does ideation doesn't allow you to just add cool stuff to it everything you design has to be there for a reason and there has to be a reason why it looks the way that it looks so before we started designing the tribal cultures our first question was how does culture develop in the real world so we studied a lot of theories and actually reggae john our narrative director says big that we're probably the group of people with the highest density of reading gun service of steel in the world that he knows don't agree on everything but they do agree on a couple of things and one of the common things that they do agree on is that culture is all about resources so the resources that the environment provides that's what defines a culture so let's take a look at one of the tribal cultures in horizon

the nora tribe so this is a tribe that lives in the rocky mountains and so we can sort of say okay what does the environment tell us about this tripe so for one mountain terrain isn't really suited for agriculture so without farming food will have to come from hunting so most likely we're looking at a hunting gathering lifestyle and without agriculture there's also a limit on how large a tribe can become because there's no real way of creating surplus food and storing it so also making in smaller tribes people tend to do everything maybe there isn't really space for people to specialize in tailors or carpenters or tradesmen or video game developers so maybe it sort of limits making the variety of professions that you see there and maybe what that means for the things and the tools that you see as well and then of course there are high mountain passes and that makes trades much higher so you can expect to see making that these people are tend to be quite self-reliant and also a little bit weird or stranger

actually sort of what you see with a lot of people making it have grown up in the mountains they tend to be a little bit weird now also in our background story uh a couple of important narratives as well as game design decisions were made and for one baker there was a reason there was a clear statement that there weren't any large animals anymore so there weren't any cows there were any any horses there were any bears or mountain lions lions so are our designers started from there what do these limitations mean for for example clothing because that means becky that you only have small heights you only have rabbits and you have foxes all kind of tiny patches so that basically means that all your clothing needs to be compiled out of these smart smaller things you end up with very much patchworks and also we figured they won't have cotton cotton is actually quite hard to grow but they might have wool so maybe you know they would have to do something with wild mountain goats and although weaving might be too complex because that requires very

complex equipment they would still be able to braid and knit things together and so we also figured that if if they were able to do braiding anything they would be able to make rope and so let's figure let's see how important rope can be for them because it's an important thing that you need in hunting you need it for traps and bows and fish snatch and all kinds of hunting gear so i'm going to guess maybe these people are very quite good at using rope and making stuff with rope and then thank you from that it's it's sort of imaginable that they could use rope in all kinds of other key elements in their construction techniques so it would be a way that they would put larger wooden structures together and even baby extend that to architecture of course making architecture itself maybe there's a lot of trees in the mountains or some mountains uh so that again baking informed peggy what they would be building from they wouldn't basically be making things out of muds or stone they would be using the most pliable material they could find around so as you can see baking we're sort of layering these elements on top of each

other in a logical structure everything is there for a reason now as this process of ideation continues you start to get the outline lines of a culture but the problem is in our earliest things make it the thing starts to look very mundane making an image like this this would just as easily fit in the world of lord of rings or in game of thrones but there is of course making one truly unique element in the world of horizon and that is sure to have a very large impact on the development of all cultures and that's the presence of these giant animal-like machines so for example what effect would it have on clothing uh now in some degree baking these metal plates are sort of like bones and bones are actually quite bad for making armor with because they break and they're quite brittle but what would happen becky if you start using these armor plates in their clothing would that make sense so we started experimenting basically with this look baking where the metal parts would be embedded in their clothing and that actually

started to make sense very this this would actually be a feasible idea for them and so we began experimenting with ways to include them in older hunting gears looking at how these elements would mix and how they would connect to the existing elements that are already there and then of course maybe there's tons of variation and their songs of balancing how to go a little bit too far you end up with a science fiction game if it's not there at all maybe it's barely noticeable and doesn't really have any big impact so over time we managed to basically get this sort of final result that we felt basically was both authentic to the culture but also created a distinct look for the world of horizon now so through this technique of intrinsic deterioration we managed to create quite a wide variety of different cultures cultures that were all very distinct from each other and it all fitted with the environments of the tribes and it gave horizon a very unique visual identity so the next thing i'm gonna show is one of our trailers where we show a little bit more of the tribes

your whole life you've been searching and the elders they've been holding you back the girl is a curse she came from nowhere she is no one when they told me to raise you i didn't ask questions why am i an outcast who was my mother always you pushed for answers push yourself to the edge here in the valley we may be outcasts but it's safe out there girl you'll be lost you won't know where to turn for who to trust

you'll be chasing a riddle into a wilderness of mysteries the world of the old ones what secrets lie buried beneath their crumbling ruins why earth is ours no more these questions aloy the tribe has forbidden what if the answers are worse than not knowing you can help or you can get out of my way then be ready for the darkness

and be careful what you bring to light even if you do catch what you're after how do you know it won't right back outcast you came from nothing you will die on nothing i came from somewhere [Music] identity confirmed even if it destroys me i will see this through okay let's get back to the robot dinosaurs so when we started the design of our machines uh our inspiration started with the types of machines that we had designed for killzone military industrial design clearly machines that were designed for war and

destruction something that would be very alien something unnatural sort of like monsters of war and we played around with the idea of making them half broken they're a thousand years old so robot zombie monsters playing with things like strange way of movement or locomotion so sort of like nightmare creatures now um we were still using a version of intrinsic ideation and one of the things that we tried to emulate was how military design firms work when they approach a design challenge like this so we even role played that a little bit that process of making the type of commercials that you typically see with military contractors and what they would produce so usually they tend to be very sort of gung-ho look at their cool system thing so here's making one of the movies big that our teammates make it to sort of sell their initial idea of making what the robots could look like when you invest in a gdls vehicle you

know your investment is a sound one and that investment extends well past the date your vehicle is delivered because you have the assurance that through life support one of the premier product support programs in the industry is behind you a program you won't find anywhere else because keeping you mission ready is what gdls customer support is all about [Music] i think this did this inspire our narrative team a little bit bigger about pharaoh industries but the thing is making that did this this didn't work at all um we made some of these prototypes and what we found baking was that the emotional core experience was just completely off so when we look back at one of the pillars it it told us something really important about the core experience and that it was about hunting and fighting against these sort of robot monster zombies machines it didn't make you feel like a fight like a hunter it made you feel like a warrior like a soldier fighting in the world of

terminator and also it clashed with another pillar that we have the designs failed to come across as something that was a life form in fact they came across as solar solus machines so we decided to scrap everything and start from scratch so we needed a design for the machines that enabled our players to feel like hunted like hunters and at the same time maybe that they needed to feel alive and they needed to feel dominating so maybe it was time to look back at another point in time where there was actually another dominant life form and sure breaking when somebody suggested let's turn all the machines into the dinosaurs a lot of people got very very worried because this is sort of like the rule of cool right this is this is a problem it's it's vikings hunting robot dinosaurs it's completely ridiculous uh but still sort of reductantly making we decided to try it out and just see basically what it would look like and feel like from a concept art point of view and then baking as that happened something started to happen none of

these things made intellectually any sense about the imagery ebay that we created worked emotionally this this whole silly idea of a primitive mankind hunting high-tech megafauna just clicked and everybody got very inspired and it just kept this this treasure trove of ideas it really perfectly encapsulated this feeling of being a hunter of very dangerous prey by using familiar shapes such as the famous t-rex everybody immediately understood their relationship to it if something if something really big and dangerous stands in front of you baby you understand that it's dangerous but you don't need to explain it through complex animations or backstories so it might have created some level of intellectual confusion but the emotional clarity was there it was sort of like an extra inferencing juxtaposition now there was a lot of concern about the ideas of robot animals maybe it was a little bit too strange a little bit too alienating for our audience to accept uh and thankfully real life has some precedence

in this whole notion this idea so these of course make the famous movies from boston dynamics that make these robo-dogs they also always kick them so if you're ever wondering bakey why the robot apocalypse happened it's because of this guy so there's this movement or they're making this philosophy in industrial design which they call biomimetic design and it's an industrial design philosophy that carefully looks at nature to solve certain engineering issues so the notion behind this philosophy is that if you have millions and millions and millions of years of evolution the solutions that cost tend to be come out of that are very highly efficient solutions a famous example of this biometric design is a problem that japanese engineers had when they tried to solve the famous bullet trains

now when they first made these things they would they sort of sent them into tunnels and the moan bay that they hit the tunnel there would be these air pressure events which literally ripped the whole train apart and that's bad for passengers so they they were looking for a solution and they got their inspiration from the the the big shape of the kingfisher because this is a bird bacon that once it hits the water to catch a fish it almost makes no splash so this is a perfect sort of evolution that created the shape making that the most efficient form of hydrodynamics and once they sort of took that shape and put it on top of these trains the trains didn't fall apart and baby people were happy now there's other versions of biomimetic designs as well maybe on your flight in you look took a look out of the window and you saw back at these strange ailerons on the tips of airplane flames well this is sort of where they come from maggie it's something big that birds of prey has as well because it reduces drag because it does something strange with the turbulence so when we were designing with the

tribes we talked to a lot of anthropologists and we figured it might be interesting to talk to engineers uh engineers who were working a robot in robotics so we went to the technical university in delft which is local to us and not only did they confirm maybe that indeed biomimetics is a large large part of modern robotics but they were also using algorithms that mimic this process of evolutionary design itself so they would create a design and then have it cross-breed it with successful versions of itself till it would converge to the most efficient designs and you get some really interesting things out of it because they look very oddly organic so it's not really art imitating life it's art imitating technology that's imitating life so it seems very logical for that our very advanced robots food sort of converts to the shapes that we see in nature as well if you think about it if wheels could have evolved in nature but only if roads would have been a natural occurring feature as well but in a world baking where you

only have mountains and tree stumps lying around it makes a lot more sense for you to have legs we also basically asked them if nature could be improved upon if are there any sort of design mistakes or evolutionary processes baking that didn't go to the most optimal form are there any sub-optimal solutions in nature and they explained that internal skeletons is one if you think about it so all the soft tissue is in the outside and then your hardest part is on the inside it doesn't really make a lot of sense because it's just too fragile and also if you break one arm maybe that's done maybe in nature that's probably not pretty much game over you're dead so why put all this soft vulnerable tissue on the outside and then create this these sort of single points of failure you know is there a better solution for that yes nature has better solutions for that so exoskeletons basically are much more sturdier have the protective aspects on the outside it's just you know if humans would look like this break it would be a lot less attractive to each other i guess and so we started to use these concepts

of biomimetics artificial primatic muscles algorithmically generated reinforcements and exoskeletons and started exploring a look that would make these machines believable but it's not just about the efficiency of the biomechanics that influence the shapes of living things often a creature's niche in an ecosystem is also what drives these evolutionary processes that adopt certain shapes and behaviors and we wanted to show a lot of a large variety of different machines each with clear and distinct shapes and behaviors that were coherent to the function that they would have in our ecosystem and in our game so one of the first ones that we tried to design were the watchers and they would be the guard docks of our ecosystem this was a sort of class of machine that would function as walking alarm bells in terms of the game design and one of the things that we found out is that we could actually change the shape of these features quite a lot and still basically communicate what they want to do they didn't literally needed to be dogs or meerkats

to maybe sort of communicate their function so one of our designers proposed this idea of making a snake on legs so it would be able to run really fast on two legs but then making if it needed to look big it could just make it sort of slide up and still and look above things so yeah a snake that's able to stand on the tip of it still now the key thing to get this to work because it would be not really a known creature would be to get the behavior right because if we got that right we figured that the audience might be able to understand them and see them as something beyond a machine so we see them as something like a living creature now here's a movie that i have maybe that shows a little bit breaking about our first prototype and actually the first animated robot that we had in the game so this is almost six years old six years ago and it shows the first watchers that we had and maybe when we had this maker we knew that we could make any game that of any robot that we is it's not playing

and yes horizon was cove at some point [Music] so this proved to us that this was the way forward uh not only did our robots feel alive but you could even empathize with them he could understand their behavior uh you could sort of by the way that they communicated you could anticipate what they want but what they were for and also it made you feel like a hunter you were studying these things you could understand your study your prayer and understand it so that sort of made the decision for us so we were thankfully able to able to rationalize our intellectual disbeliever way and align it with the emotional clarity that we felt when we first started thinking about robo dinosaurs so our cognitive dissonance was resolved

and the crisis was averted and that was time to codify that into the dna of horizon so at that point became about animalistic machines let's take another look at the movie bakery that shows these things a little bit more from the perspective of the game [Music] watcher better stay out sorry little one i couldn't let you go for help [Music] perfect day for a hunt

this is going to be harder than i thought okay those canisters should be cool by now just a couple more oh come on here we go oh someone's angry gotta get under it yeah

[Music] so stay still

all right time to shut you down [Music] the stories don't tell where the old ones went they don't tell us why the machines rule these lands but they warn us that this balance cannot last the storm is coming [Applause] and i will be ready

so a quick pro tip if you're ever making a three minute long trailer against an unscripted ai creature take your time this took us about 160 takes to get it right so arguably we could now design any machine that we wanted but we still felt it would be better to stay with existing or extinct creatures we felt making that it gives a way to player player to anticipate the machine's behavior a little bit more because if it looks like a giant t-rex it's probably going to act like a giant t-rex so for example we designed our version of a terror bird this is a bird that lived about 10 000 years ago in south america and it hunted horses how cool is that um so we had our visual style defined and it actually is now quite easy to come up with what the look of the machine would be but it's often unclear on how it would move and it would be even harder to imagine making how it would attack so for example how would a terror bird attack you would figure baby like oh it has a giant beak

so it's probably used as a speak now there is this aspect from paleontology where they tend to study sort of contemporary relative of extinct creatures and then theorize their behaviors of it so roosters are sort of like contemporary mini-me versions of terror birds and they do this when they attack they're actually quite nasty so you see how they sort of wait for you for you to turn and then like attacking the butt so this inspired our game designers our animator to try something very familiar and so this is the attack vega that ended up in the game sort of nature inspiring the attack sets in our game and then ultimately this is how it ends up in the game um so ultimately this design process enabled us to create a very large

variety of very interesting and evocative feature designs covering everything from dinosaurs and other extinct creatures to bisons wolves and giant birds so the last thing that i'm going to show today and before we go to the q a is one of our last trailers this one was specific specifically created to communicate the concept of being a hunter and shows off a lot of our machines in action let me tell you what's out there [Music] vast reaches of wilderness untamed a rugged domain majestic but lethal it belongs to them the machines the steel beasts who rule these lands and guard the secrets buried beneath its

crumbling ruins if you hunt these wilds no matter how skilled you are no matter how clever you will become the haunted can you brave that challenge can you pass that test if you want to survive you have to make the kill only then can you bring to light the deep secrets of the earth [Music] um thank you very much [Applause] all right anybody has any questions

i think please step up to the microphone i've got a question actually hi um as you're searching for new ip stuff um it looks like you have tens and tons of ideas up there what was the morale of the team like while you're kind of wandering through the desert sort of away from the safety of this known ip that you guys have done for 10 years uh in general everybody was really excited it's it's you know it's a once in a decade opportunity to you know start at maybe at the birth of a new ip uh so a lot of people back here were very interested in taking part of that and of course making people get disappointed if their idea doesn't get big because that's certainly a thing there but in general it's actually really good for morel hi great presentation so my question is like whenever someone like pitches the ideas let's say you guys had 25 different ideas

uh i know it's a like there's a hierarchy in the studio there's level of like you know um expert like how expert you are in your craft but my question is like whenever someone pitches it how much are they in creative control throughout the like whole process or is this just the pitching idea and then it's the regular team so yeah you know people's that pitch they stay involved as stakeholders within it but of course becky if you have you know a junior programmer making pitching a great idea it doesn't necessarily mean that he has the skill sets to also maybe be the game director on the entire process because that requires different skills so usually when this happens people pitch the idea but then maybe it gets taken over by the entire team and there is more of a clear structure in place okay cool well hello uh it was a very interesting and in-depth presentation so it was really really awesome like to learn how like how kind of like life itself is influencing into the designs into the

futuristic and into this juxtaposition of futuristic plus and emolistic aesthetics so i think that's really awesome and my question was more about like the design pillars that the team uses in gorilla like do these design pillars are always changing or do they stay practically like the like the same in almost all the developments of the of the aesthetic of the game so the theory is very or the idealistic presentation that the pillars never change of course peggy they do slightly get tuned over time to make it fit better but they're sort of big there are design bibles so preferably we don't like to touch them because they're so core who are there okay thank you hi um so i thought what i thought real was really interesting about the entire design process was kind of the logical train of thought of like this affects this and this affects us and it seems like um like it almost

it it almost takes like the suspension of belief uh like like it was it seems to be really difficult to balance the point in which uh you can you should stop the logic kind of aspect and then start uh adding like a ridiculous element to your game so what what point would you say did you start thinking oh it's kind of like um well that's kind of hard to say baby you you might be over rationalizing things in certain cases where where you stick too much to your established design process of philosophies and then you end up with something that's missing something so in a lot of cases it's also got instinct like you you have your sort of professional experience and your gut instincts and your own tastes and preferences bigger that you can fall back on but of course those aren't necessarily shared by the entire team so it you then go into a process that's much more about sort of convincing each other instead of

making sticking to the process it's it's difficult to say when exactly that needs to happen or if there's a point where that needs to happen okay thank you i uh first just this is one of my favorite games oh thank you thank you so much for bringing it to us and thank you for this presentation um my question is uh i'm curious as to once you arrived at the the the function and the design of these these machines how did you work their purpose then their narrative purpose into the story how did that affect their design how did that interact so it's something maybe that we always push speakers so make sure maybe that they have a function in their ecology uh but in some cases it's really hard to balance that bakery with the design the combat design requirements so it's something maybe that we want to do but it doesn't always match so in a couple of cases because they're like well you know it plays really well it doesn't make a lot of sense but it plays really well so let's do it anyway

it's it's you shouldn't make it stick too sort of idealistic to the idea that it all has to make sense thank you hello um thank you again for the talk it was very informative um i was wondering with all the creature designs there's so much love and there's so much thought into all of them and with the rush of triple a production i was wondering if processes like outsourcing helped the core team just focus and really bring out the best in those ideas or how did that help with the core team uh so yeah we we do quite a lot of outsourcing okay most of our cinematics are outsourced almost all of our modeling and texturing is outsourced so it is basically what we tend to do is basically just stick to what we feel is our core business which is sort of designing games and developing games but not necessarily making art assets so there is an aspect there but by outsourcing veggies certain aspects we can stay focused more

wonderful thank you one more question i just noticed is it one more question okay one more question yeah um actually my question was sort of related um i was wondering about the scope of the creatures because obviously this game is also your first attempt at open world so there was quite a lot of problems to figure out there on this side as well um there is so many creatures in the game and they're all kind of different i wanted to know about how did you decide and when with design obviously because they probably required some stuff from you guys as well like how did it work like did they give you a list of types of enemies like how do you guys solve that and then obviously how did you scope that because it's ridiculous like the amount of stuff so very good question uh eric our lead designer maggie will be having a whole talk about that but yeah it's difficult because these things are very expensive they take a lot of time to work to make the thunderjaw itself was an 18

month process basically from concept baker to full delivery at some point beggie you get all the ingredients together and then becomes really easy to make things make you once you've got all your mechanics there once your design structure is there it becomes a lot easier but initially in the initial phases this it's very murderous making to go through those processes yeah it was like that demo that you showed there it was it was very interesting because it's i think very rare to see that in in e3 demos or whatnot that the scope of the demo is much more on the character and the tech and the animation and the systems than the usual environment art like the the actual environment is not that big yeah okay thank you very much thank you so thanks everybody i hope you enjoyed it you