Designing the Settlements in the World of 'Horizon Forbidden West'

[Music] thank you as mentioned my name is rolandz it's very hard to pronounce and I'd like to start this talk with a imagination session let's imagine that we're all underwater that the water has reached top of this building out of the San Francisco Bay [Music] um and what if we left it there for over a thousand years well that's the same question we asked ourselves five years ago at gorilla when we started with the concept team on Horizon forbidden West what would San Francisco look like a thousand years from now it had been if it had been if it had been flooded all that time

to answer that question we started looking at studies that showed how the water would flood parts of San Francisco as the ocean started Rising and what would happen if it would keep Rising San Francisco would turn into a group of islands surrounded by the tops of buildings still poking out of the sea and I'm calling them buildings but over time these concrete floors in these buildings would have collapsed soil would have built up on top allowing plants and trees to get a foothold eventually creating pillars of vertical jungle but close to the water surface where the waves hit buildings will be reduced to their mere skeletons and even further down below the ocean level corals would start creep start building

on top of these ruins building Interiors would start looking like underwater caves with ocean tides slowly eroding the sharp edges into round corners and stalactites starting to form at the ceilings of these lobbies like the ones we like the one we have out here we also exploit what the underwater landscape of San Francisco could look like how the remnants of the city could hold up underwater after all this time like this iconic Landmark the Palace of Fine Arts which would largely be standing due to the use of natural rock and marble which is made out of um whereas the ferry building would have a much harder time only the outer wall is made out of stone all of its metal Interiors would deteriorate

and collapse after a couple of hundred years underwater as for above the water buildings would also collapse the buildings that are that have been built with exterior metal structures like this one would topple over and sand would start to accumulate on the shores of the new Shoreline of San Francisco covering the what once we're busy streets with a thick layer of pearl white sand and although I personally wouldn't mind having a GDC in a setting like this we didn't design it for this reason I wanted to show you this version of San Francisco as an example of what the world of horizon looks like as it sets a stage for the different

cultures that live in the world of horizon which brings me to the topic of this presentation today I'd like to take you on a tour pass two of the key settlements from Horizon forbidden West and share with you the design processes we used when visualizing these settlements how we use the world of horizon itself to shape the design of these locations and its inhabitants but let's we first talk a bit about myself um I started at gorilla way back in 2002 and after graduating as an industrial designer and for the past five years I had the pleasure of working on Horizon forbidden West the sequel to Horizon zero Dawn and just out of curiosity I know the game has only been out for a month how many of you have already played it

well and how many of you have already met the tanaktan utaro wow okay now for those of you who haven't played the game uh let me explain briefly what heisen Horizon is about before we look at these settlements in more detail I'll try to do this as short as possible to avoid any of the spoilers so Horizon zero Dawn is set in a post-apocalyptic world where Nature has reclaimed the land just like in the example of San Francisco it's a world that for centuries was uninhabited by humans and when they returned they returned without the knowledge of their past they were basically thrown back into a hunter-gathering society this life was made intensely Difficult by the presence of these giant robotic machines

these machines came in various shapes and sizes but they had one thing in common they were all extremely aggressive against humans this made settling in this world a big challenge now let's look at one of these settlements in more detail the utero one was our main capital plain Zone one of the key defining elements for the ataro comes from the machines that run the lands around them each filter and Horizon deals with the threat of these large machines in its own way for most settlements these machines are perceived as extremely dangerous wildlife as a result they fortified their settlements or place them Out Of Reach of the Dangerous Ones between your diary we wanted to try something different

we wanted to try a relationship with the machines where instead of hunting them they could grow dependent on them but how would you grow dependent on a large machine like that let me introduce the plow horn this is a machine that's designed to Growing food a large machine that uses his horns to fertilize grounds and is planting crops with the use of the seed pouches you see on the right it's basically a combine on four legs these plow horns can turn deserts into grids of in grid fields and Fields it feels in the grid-like structure filled with edible crops an ideal location for the utero to settle in right in the middle of their own natural

food supply and besides food they would also need resources to build their houses and clothing from one grown one naturally grown resource that they had an abundance of would be bamboo which is a great lightweight construction material that we started exploring as using as a base material for their huts with the bendable qualities of bamboo we started exploring sort of Base shapes um as a basis to layer on top the uh the different layers the external parts of the hut and for this we took inspiration from a variety of weaving techniques from all over the world one technique technique that we found very inspiring was the way that Ikebana baskets are woven in Japan

just like this one these baskets makes use of lacquered bamboo long strips that create beautiful patterns along the outside with long elongated curved lines all the way through and we applied this principle on a larger scale to the entire Hut and we were very happy with the unique unique look that this was giving us long curved lines make the Hut feel like it was grown instead of constructed and with that idea we created a variety of these huts sort of like giant baskets for people to live in are retaining that feel of drone instead of constructed we started to look at different weaving patterns each unique and distinctive in its own way and we felt that we were hitting on a very honorable and distinctive look for the otara

um a downside of these uh this type of weaving is that it's not as protective against the rain but it does give really nice uh allows for light to play at night through the holes in the in the weaves and not just the holes also the bent surfaces play really well with the lights of the other as for the play as of as for where to place these Huts we used the ancient ruins of a satellite array that was built when the landscape was still a desert providing a safe place for the otaro and adding even more to the unique feel of the settlement we started to block out their entire settlement on top of a 3D a representation of these dishes designing a purpose for each and every dish like the one on the right which was made for cooking and storing food

the one in the center closer to the ground was their housing unit housing dish um where we design these support structures to connect the different Huts together um and create paths through the entire settlement again resonating those long flowy lines that we were inspired by by the Ikebana baskets and those those Pathways eventually ended up on Bridges like this one that connected different satellite dishes and just like their houses these Bridges were designed to look like they've been grown rather than constructed to underline the connection of your diary that they have with nature one of the addition dishes even still had a giant tree in that that had grown there before

and Utah hadn't removed it but embraced it and created the Hanging Garden around it where they grow their own plants that they can't find close to their settlement and using these bamboo techniques we expanded on not just creating their houses and their environments but also their probes these decoration items and the two lights on the right that have this nice stress translucent Gene besides these lights we also looked at tools together crops from the fields that are surrounding their settlement and again using bamboo to to both weave robot Parts into handles extending this thought onto even their clothing we experimented with creating heads out of woven patterns and even sandals

which works fine for these sort of stiffer elements that people wear but it's kind of hard when you're doing the actual wardrobe um to create bamboo that create [Music] closing pieces that look comfortable to wear made out of bamboo by combining leaves and machine cables from robots we designed these togas that wrap around in a single piece again creating those longer curves that wrap around the body avoiding Symmetry and straight parallel lines with curved belts and tear shaped and A Tear shape around their neck and at the center of that deer shape a decorated speed pouch seat pouch to show their appreciation of the blower horn

and as a Act of Courage it's not only the plow horns that affected the look of your Tower to show their appreciation for these plow horns they went into the field and acted as an act of Courage put their hands on these plow horns with colored paints so if you walk around the Horizon and you see a plow horn with colored paint on it that's because the guitar will appreciate them so much this takes me to the second settlement I'd like to show you which is the desert tonight's main capital scolding spear for the desert to not their origin story is almost a bowl or opposite they live in a land with hardly any resources and they had a hard time coming by which made them focus on a more combatant lifestyle fighting the surrounding settlements as well as the

robots um split off into three Clans they have their Origins not with the machines but in the ruins that they had discovered the key defining element for the tanak is a rune from the old world a military Memorial that the tanakht had discovered a memorial that was built a thousand years ago before the tanaktet found it to honor a military unit that had battled against automated war machines these great Warriors from the past became a key inspiration for the tanakht for the tanakht the only version of these great warriors that they actually saw was distorted and mangled corrupted data and degradated projection had warped the holographic images over time so we as a concept team started exploring how far we could take this

broken projection idea how could these patterns how could we shape these patterns and initially playing with different just color distortion and pulling at the different angles we still felt that this was too close to the original image of a of a soldier so we took that even a step further and almost like looking through a disoriented piece of glass started warping these Warriors into these extended figures distorting their shapes even more which created the interesting and unique silhouette for these Warriors from that we took a color palette and a pattern style for each and every one of the different tanak tribes

the tanaks are divided into three depending on the region that they live in there's a desert jungle and Mountain to Knox and they all reference a different group of military that they had seen in the museum for the desert it was the forward and aggressive um operations and we translated that into the uh this this outward motion and this aggression in that face that you see there as for the jungle they were more Trappers so their symbology became more inward with pointy fangs pointed inwards whereas the mountains are not um had more of a hide and secure locations high up in the mountains which we associated with this more Inward and concrete shape language

and from this for the desert and act we started exploring how this could look in motion how we could angle up some of these patterns and distort them combining different patterns trying to look for that aggression that we felt was shooting for the for the desert tonight um and these are some of the early sketches that show a sort of an overlay of those patterns onto a character trying to mimic the distorted Holograms that they had seen in the museum where color patterns were painted on and even additional robot plates were added to suggest um those distorted Holograms for us this wasn't going far enough so we created even bigger masks with stranger shapes and and had the the colors of these patterns tattooed all over their bodies

resulting in masks like this built from robot Parts where they had edged off the different sites to create the the angular pattern that you saw in those earlier studies adding all those plays onto these Warriors made them look as intimidating as the one you see here um and again for them we also created the tool set to allow them to make these things this as far as the characters goes what about their housing well they're fierce Warriors they're not architects um so if you can't build yourself why not use an existing ruin we thought that that would be an interesting base for them to start off as they are in the desert there's not a lot of architecture that you can lean

into um so we felt that this solar power plant matched the view of the world that the Tanakh had and it would serve them as a nice Fortress surrounded by these shields that looked like it had it was already protected and a nice central tower that they could see the lands around them good very well so this was the base for their architecture and living but they still had to put huts on top of that and as I said um they're not that great builders and so we started as simple as we could throwing together a bunch of beams like a game of Mikado and tying them together at each interaction intersection and then filling up the spaces in between the beams with floors and balls allowing us to create these erratic

shapes that is that also supported the erratic look that we had in the Holograms as well as these nice over having roof rooftops for some much much appreciated shade in the desert apply going back and applying the color scheme of the desert and act that you've seen earlier we finish them by painting them in their work earlier colors um and arrange them around the central solar tower that you see here by arrange them in this manner they this outward way we started to create a silhouette that almost looked as aggressive as a silhouette and almost like an explosion Frozen in Time which we felt was very appropriate for the for the aggressive desert tonight um as we were arranging this we noticed that some of the concrete

didn't fall in line with the with the to not thinking of decoration so we started chiseling into that seeing if we could bring back some of the patterns also on their outside walls and then again using paint and simple wooden decorations to bring that in line with the Holograms that they'd seen before and at the center of this settlement there's of course a combat ring a combat Arena where the deserts are not trained to become even better Warriors and overlooking this combat Arena is their main is their Commander's Hut where he can oversee the progress where the commander can oversee the progress because it's an act in the village town um we had people come in and question us when they were looking at this saying well that's that's quite a reach Roland

um when you're when you're having this entire culture based off a glitch a misinterpretation of the past isn't isn't that stretching things a bit thin uh funnily enough um this happens in our world as well where we've interpreted old Roman sculptures to be white and this white color has resonated in so many of the uh derivatives that we've created from that time things like even the White House might have had more color if we had found it in earlier stage that most of these Roman sculptures had actually been brightly colored instead of polish white to look better in the museum

I've been talking a bit too fast but this already brings me to the end of my presentation on the two tribes in Horizon forbidden West playing song and scolding spare and I know my jet lag has been killing most of my this presentation but I hope uh you have gotten a bit of an Insight of the way that we work at gorilla um a bit some of the decisions that we've made along the way and how most of our design choices have been made not because we think it looks cool but because we sort of go out into the world of Horizon and discover as much as we can um driving the the visual choices that we make at the concept team thank you very much for for listening to me being very nervous and uh

[Applause] [Applause] that concludes my presentation um are there any questions no I'm sorry there hello there hi there as we've just seen that can get really really detailed how do you know when you've reached a point of like this tribe is detailed enough we have eight other times to look at because it's it's very impressive how far in the detail you've gone uh yes often when we think we've gone far enough um we got replies that we haven't gone far enough yet because once you start molding these things and it's easier when you're doing

things that are based on reality but if you're designing your own things you need that amount of detail to actually show in the models that end up in the game so oftentimes I think wow we've done a really gay job here's the utero package and they come back so wow all this weaving how does that work which materials what so we go back and look at it again so so by the time that that is quiet we know that we have done our jobs gotcha thank you dude I love the game amazing art Direction especially you know shipping on PS4 PS4 Pro and the PS5 must have not been easy in that direction what was the hardest thing that y'all face because like any other generation cross-platform like what was the hardest thing you all did um thank God that wasn't a worry on my discipline

um we we designed things to maximum resolution or maximum amount of detail uh so that we were always able to answer any questions with regards to what material how things look at the at the not a microscopic level but quite a detailed level yes so I think this is not a question for me it's it's um it hasn't made it any harder for our team hi there oh hi there amazing talk um I really loved seeing the amount of concept art throughout the talk and just how creative it all was which I guess was what the talk was about uh I come from Indy and in the world of Indy you have a lot less resources for stuff like having concept art for everything so in my experience we just end up like making stuff on the Fly that might not necessarily have a concept ready for it

so I'm wondering uh in your world how much of this uh does everything get a concept everything that gets made or are the concepts more to guide like maybe one version of something and then the modeler expands from there that's a very good question um although we do a lot of concept art um we don't consult out art the complete World okay uh so we create style guides for each of the different tribes and those usually have a Showcase of a main settlement and what that could look like like I've shown you today but there are many derivatives of that where we hope where we try to include as much information in the style guide sometimes not just technical about how a layout would look so how some of the people who direct how they greet each other and things like that to inform anyone working on this um how to best construct or or build a

derivative settlements so there's kind of a trust moving forward there's definitely trust next levels in the pipeline okay yes yes it's it's too big a worlds to completely sketch out at that level of detail I see thank you one more question I'm going to take it did you also heard that right I really love the designs you've gotten especially the the research that goes into you know San Francisco and building in that water level and I'm just curious how much of the concept and Designs come from a game design standpoint as well with having kind of the flooded sections and how that leads into gameplay how much of that falls back onto you as well um so the question is if how much of the gameplay is involved at an early stage when we're designing these things yes yes um that that happened quite early on

um our initial we had taken lessons from our previous game Horizon zero Dawn where some of these larger cities had less activities um to allow this time to create spaces that were uh game design friendly as well so in conjunction with game design we looked at the different spaces and and where to open up and where certain opportunities for certain types of getting play wouldn't work really well thank you [Applause] sorry one second I don't want to thank all the Applause there's been a lot of concert artists creating this work inside and outside our company so please upload one round for all of those artists thank you [Applause]

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