Knocking on Death's Door: Designing a New Bunker for 'Horizon Forbidden West'

Hello and welcome. The title of my talk is knocking on Death's Door, designing a new bunker for Horizon Forbidden West. I'm Blake Rubashow, senior quest designer at Gorilla. I joined Gorilla about 7 years ago during the production of Horizon Zero Dawn. On Zero Dawn, I designed the Grave Hoard and the Zero Dawn project bunker, which is part of the deep secrets of the Earth quest. So, my specialty is in big narratively driven, mostly linear interior spaces. I've been a designer on Horizon Forbidden West through the entire production process. I can honestly say that it's been one of the most amazing and challenging projects I've ever tackled as a designer. So, what is this talk about? This talk is about a quest that I worked on through the entire development of Horizon Forbidden West. Specifically, I'm going to talk about the level and quest design of the bunker in this quest. I designed seven quests during the development of Horizon Forbidden West,

but it's no lie to say that I probably spent more person hours working on this quest than several of the others combined. And indeed, more than any other piece of content I've worked in on in any game. I want to give you all as broad a picture as I can of the development of this large and complex quest, and in doing so, also show you a little bit of our quest and level design process. If you've seen my previous GDC talk, this talk is a little bit of a follow-up, a little bit of a sequel to that talk, but you don't need to watch that talk to appreciate this one at all. In my previous talk, Balancing Action and RPG in Horizon Zero Dawn's quests, I talked about my process and my learnings in the creation of the bunker the Grave Hoard. This is a space where Aloy came face to face with the realities of war in the time of the Old Ones. For Forbidden West, we wanted to build on some of the things that we did well in Zero Dawn's bunkers. For instance, um we wanted to focus on building story-rich environments with unique puzzles, but we also wanted to deemphasize some of the parts of the first game's bunkers that were problematic, in particular, combat

against humanoids and the large cost in terms of art and lighting they represented. As you'll discover, we were sometimes more, sometimes less successful in respect to these goals. Took me 4 years and counting to build this quest. I've broken that timeline down into six phases, and I'm going to talk you through each one, giving you a sense of what the level looked like in each and the challenges we faced. Starting with the beginning of the beginning, we'll talk about production, pre-production, and paper prototyping. In skeleton quest, we'll talk about the block block meshing of the level. In the first playable, we'll talk about getting the quest ready for the first playtests. In iteration and parallel development, I'll talk about adding value through iteration and integrating the work of other teams. In a time of great change, we'll talk about a bit about the pandemic and work from home and rework. And lastly, in finishing touches, we'll talk about polish. So, let's start with the beginning of the beginning. This is equivalent to pre-production of this quest, but also encompasses a bit of the overall project pre-production.

During the pre-production of Horizon Zero Dawn's quest, the entire company gathered into our canteen for a meeting we called story time with the narrative director. In this meeting, we were told the entire main story of Horizon Forbidden West in one go. Sometime after that meeting, I was assigned to create a section or a part of that of that overarching narrative, and that's that became known as the quest Death's Door. As part of that assignment, I received a narrative summary of the quest. This is a document generated by the writer after a quest pitch is agreed to. With a main quest like this, there've already been lead and director level meetings to discuss the major goals, gameplay, and story of the quest. Starting from the narrative summary, I break down the steps of the quest into the early beat sheet or design document. During the process, I may add, change, or tweak the events spelled out in the narrative summary and add gameplay to clarify goals with the approval of leads and direction. Once that early design doc beat sheet is approved, I start paper prototyping.

This is a good time to mention that I'm going to try to keep this talk as spoiler light as I can, um but let me give you a little bit of context. In this quest, Aloy goes to an Old World bunker in search of a backup of Gaia, the AI designed to control the terraforming process of Earth. That's this bunker. As Aloy enters the facility, she enters a central hallway where she finds a blockage caused by water and time. She'll need to get around that blockage to reach an inner gene lock door. Nearby is an old communication center containing a puzzle to unlock a door. Past that locked door are stairs down to a flooded residential area that we swim through. At the end of that swim is an office and a way back up to the to level one. Back on level one, Aloy enters the second gene lock door and there's a into a space that we call the Recluse Chamber, and there's a big cinematic there uh that I'm not going to talk about. Um and uh that's where some bad dudes show up. She finds what she's looking for. The chamber is destroyed and she falls

into a lower level, uh like an old sort of section of the bunker that's like a boiler room. And there, she'll need to swim to escape while being pursued by some new machines called Specters. With that paper design in hand, we're ready to go to the skeleton quest phase, making the initial blockout of the bunker. But what is a skeleton quest? The simplest version of a skeleton quest is one where the player can walk between various locations in the map, and there are simple pop-up text windows that appear and describe what happens. This helps give a sense of pacing and flow for quests that take place primarily in the overworld map. A skeleton quest for a large interior like this is often more complicated. It's more work because you need to create a block mesh of the entire bunker. With a skeleton quest in the overworld, you often have some natural features to work with or around. Without that, it's important to have some look at the at the bunker early on, uh some assistance from a team like concept art. Here's an early piece from concept art

suggesting the layers of construction of the bunker based on my paper designs. Notice the flooded floors in the older levels of the facility. They had this very interesting idea to wrap the facility around the innermost area, the Recluse Chamber. In that chamber, Aloy finds the Recluse processor. This is a machine potentially that holds the copy of Gaia that Aloy is looking for, so it's her ultimate goal in this quest, but it also must serve a variety of other complex needs that I'm going to show you here in a moment. So, here we go. This is the very earliest version of the playable skeleton quest that I had to share with you. I'm going to show this to you in full, um because I think it's going to give you context and more appreciation of how much development and change this quest goes through. So, as this goes, I'm just going to talk over it and explain a little bit about what you're seeing. This is a security checkpoint that Aloy finds at the entrance to the bunker, and then here's the central hallway that I talked about with the blockage that prevents her from going directly to the second gene lock door, which is her goal.

Uh on either side of this chamber, there are some security offices and uh a large room here that is a communication center. In that communication center, there is a puzzle. Uh we wanted to do some kind of new power puzzle, sort of like the multi-locks in Horizon Zero Dawn, but we wanted to do something new and we didn't know exactly what, so we put a placeholder in here, something simple where you activate some consoles. When you do that, a cinematic starts, which you'll see here in a second. This is what cinematics look like first. They look like a a a black placard with some text over it that explains what happens. That's how we we we block it out. Once you watch that cinematic, the door uh is powered and opens and you can proceed into the stairwell. The stairwell goes down into the flooded section, which you'll see in a moment. There's a small little optional space here. If you can't tell, I was playing a lot of God of War 2016 at the time. So, there's a lot of these like little hidden chest areas you can see from one space, but you can't reach till later. This is the flooded uh residential area

or the lab area, you'll also hear me refer to it as. Initially, it was going to be a residential area, but we turned it into labs because that made more sense for the story of the area. So, in Horizon Zero Dawn, we didn't have underwater swimming. You could kind of swim on the surface, and then you could poke your head down beneath the water, but we didn't have true submerged swimming. And this is one of the first places where we wanted to explore how that gameplay would feel, and especially, we wanted to do something with an interior space. As a brief note, you saw her just use sort of a valve stem, a valve wheel, uh that's on a golden marker. Um that was my attempt to do something in this space initially where we had sort of a lock and key mechanic where you would need to find this valve wheel to plug it into a specific place that would open a door. So, I gave you a little tiny example there to see that initially early on in the level. We also have some new elements in here that were new for us, like shootable ladders, and you'll also see some very early versions of pullcaster interactions. So, that chest, for example, that's a pullcaster interaction. These survived all the way to the ship

product, but it was one of the very first things that we had that you could do with the pullcaster. Also, fun note, you see that the the pullcaster early on was also a weapon. So, in the first version of this, it was a bit more puzzly. So, like I said, we saw that golden marker that was next to that closed door, which the intention is to express that the player needs to find this valve wheel, which is the key that will unlock that door. There's a simple uh pull and shoot puzzle here where you need to shoot a droppable ladder from this side of the room and then pull open a crawl space. If you were to just pull open the crawl space and cross the other side, because of the way vents work, you can't shoot from within the vent to to drop that ladder. So, you would need to go backtrack. So, here on this side, you'll find the valve wheel. You'll see some objects in the in the

level that are brightly colored like this golden archway here. There's also a pretty clear stripe on the floor in this next space, this blue stripe that you see. In the early block meshing process, we we try to give things like very bright and vibrant colors to indicate their importance to try to make things very clear. In this early version of the playable level, it's important that just everything is very clear because there's not a lot of the tools we would have later on to express to you that something is important. This was an attempt at doing kind of a tight swimming space, something where you'd have to squeeze and and crawl through a space underwater. That was something we thought we might do and it turned out we didn't end up doing something like that, but you'll see how that space changed over time. Here within the swimscape, there is an office. This is Travis Tate's office, if you know Travis Tate. And the idea is that in this space we would find a story moment, another cinematic or a hologram. And by going through his office, we'd be able to get into that hallway you just saw there, which will allow us to climb back up to level one, to the gene lock

door, to our goal. So you might know the in the final game fire gleam, this is the very first version of fire gleam. We had these sort of placed C4 explosives. You'll see that iterate a few times through this as well. You'll see here that Aloy is self-talking. She says something like comments that she should go up this ladder. That's how we handle self-talk in the beginning of development. They don't want us writing things that seem fictional or seem like actual dialogue because that can get confusing as the state of development we're in. So what we do in these early versions of the quest is we put in self-talk that's important for direction of the player. That's kind of like that. Like Aloy comments that she should look up above her. Aloy comments that she should go down that hallway, stuff like that.

So now we enter the second gene lock door and we go into the recluse chamber. So this room holds the recluse processor I talked about earlier, which is this giant spider looking thingy. And the giant spider looking thingy is an AI testing apparatus. It was used to test old versions of Hades against old versions of Gaia. So that's why Aloy thinks she can find a copy of Gaia here. These are cinematic placeholders right now because we didn't actually know what those were going to be. We didn't really know how to handle something that wasn't a cinematic but not a gameplay interaction. So for the time being, we treated them as cinematics, but we wanted to do these semi-interactive moments where Aloy is messing with holographic UI. This is an early version of the spider where we climbed on it. This is not something we ended up shipping with, but I still think it's a really cool idea. Aloy now gets the copy of Gaia out of this kernel. There's a cinematic there that I'm skipping over cuz it's super spoilery.

And then this bad guy shows up and he's here to choke the life out of you. He's a slow-moving humanoid guy that chases you around the space and the only way Aloy can escape this space is by dropping the spider, getting it to fall down. We do that by shooting weak points on the spider. After a certain amount of weak points, there's a phase transition cinematic and then you shoot some more weak points while trying to get away from this guy and then eventually that opens up an interaction with the recluse processor where it kind of drops down to a lower level and you use a use location underneath it to trigger a cinematic where the spider falls down through the floor and you with it. So that's this right here. So now we fall into the old part of the bunker, kind of this boiler room area where we need to swim to escape. This has one of my favorite early parts of the levels hackery. We had no idea what the specters were going to look like, this new kind of

machine, and indeed it would take years before we got even a mock-up of one. So what I used instead was human enemies from the first game with laser beams attached to their faces. We wanted to build something that was kind of like a stealth arena. We wanted this vibe of like you're sneaking around and there's these really dangerous things that are sort of like turrets that are scanning around for you. And if they spot you, then they shoot you and so you really have to stay out of their line of sight. This would also kind of teach you about stealth and water and how that works, but we actually didn't know how any of that worked. So it took a while to figure out how say for example machines could or couldn't spot you underwater. But these were our early experiments. You can also see we have some like pullable vents in here for underwater that are very early versions. There's also a pullcaster interaction right here that survives even until the final version. Where you get out of the water to to pull open this vent.

And then in this final section, there's something kind of like a gauntlet where you'd swim into a big space where you think you're home free and one of these specters would would blast open the ceiling and rain fire down upon you. So you'd have to swim really quickly through the fire, through the strafing fire. There you go, that's that guy. But he can't actually shoot at you. He has no idea what's going on. He's like, "You're in water? What's water?" And then here at the end of the level, there's another one of these breach charge interactions and blowing this door open allows Aloy to escape. So um just for ease of reference, I want to quickly label some of the areas of the bunker that we just looked at cuz we'll be talking a lot about them. So first we have the central hallway. The communication center.

The swim the swim labs, this this area here. The recluse chamber. And lastly, the swimscape. Okay. So once the skeleton is submitted and approved, we now proceed to turn the skeleton quest into what we call a first playable. That's a bit confusing, right? Because that was clearly playable, right? But there's there are a few key differences between what's a skeleton and what's first playable. So what does constitute first playable? It's about bringing all gameplay to a representative state. Any gameplay in the skeleton that we explain with a text box or that needs further development to actually look something like what we intend, that's what actually we need to transition into proper gameplay. The first playable is the first version of the quest where we'll start playtesting externally. And thinking back on the skeleton quest video I just showed, there are a few areas that we really wanted to spend time developing up to representative quality. Starting with the communication center.

We didn't feel that the space and the puzzle placeholder inside were representative of what we really wanted to do. We knew we wanted to do a new kind of power puzzle, a follow-up to the multi-lock, but we didn't really know what that was yet. We still didn't. And the space itself also had to tell kind of a specific story. And so we relied on concept art to kind of help us get there. This room is the one point of communication in and out of the bunker. Because of the dangerous experiments conducted in this facility, no unsecure data could come in or out. We wanted to tell that story while at the same time forcing the player to engage with a new type of power puzzle. So you see like there's this object marked like power facility up there at the top for instance. So What's this? Some kind of command center? So you can see that I reworked the space to be based on this kind of curved concept with this console with this screen. And we tried out some new puzzle concepts in here, new uses of the pullcaster where we have these pullable boxes that you can yoink around the

space using the pullcaster that will allow you to climb up to higher spaces. There's also this object here that's kind of like a backup generator and we wanted to try some kind of novel interaction here where you'd override it maybe with a mini-game or some kind of thing like this. But for the moment, it's just a hack point. Early on, we thought it'd be really cool to use this screen that you see over here on the wall and show you that when you powered this thing up that there might be like a giant antenna outside in the world that would extend and change the world outside, but it it's something that just sort of fell by the wayside over time. It was something too expensive for us to mock up in any meaningful way. So when you power the room up, now we get the cinematic. The next area we wanted to make some changes to was the lower level flooded residential area and we really wanted to execute on a specific vision. We had an idea early on to try to achieve a unique cave diving feeling for the lab swim area. Bunkers in Horizon Zero Dawn have kind of a cave-like

aesthetic, so cave diving seems to make a lot of sense. We needed to add lighting to get a representative feel of the gameplay, so that's something we did. We did some very early rough lighting in here and we experimented with a the first version of a light on the player, which you'll see as well. We also got some help from concept art here to get a sense of the look. Here are some mood boards and explorations of what this cave diving concept would look like, what it would feel like. This piece was really my north star. I tried really hard to achieve this look during the process of development cuz I thought it was so cool. So here's an iteration where we lit the swimming area very darkly. You can also see that there's a light on Aloy that's on her arm. We also added this like floating debris and all this stuff that you could kind of move around the space cuz we were trying to hit this vibe, right? We were trying to get this feeling. You'll also notice that we cut the puzzle. It just wasn't that important here. It wasn't something we wanted to add more friction to this space. We just wanted to get you used to swimming inside and that seemed virtual enough.

It was also really important to teach you about swimming in interiors because later on during the escape you need to know how to do that already. You'll see that there's a bit of weird stuff here where the light is reflecting on the surface of the water. That's just some early versions of this. So this puzzle that's in the the the other space now, instead of finding a valve wheel, there's a treasure chest basically in the same spot. So we just kept the same space. So pretty much the same room here. The next area we wanted to focus on was the Recluse Chamber boss battle. We wanted to add in the first representative spider model. We felt it was really important to give you the actual real thing because my version was this really weird tinker toy spider. We wanted to add the pullcaster into the boss fight. This boss fight was really more like a puzzle, so we wanted to add

the the new primary puzzle tool into it to see if that would work. We cut the climbing on the spider in favor of adding a sort of tutorial moment because now we needed to teach you that you need to pull these weak points. That's why we needed a tutorial moment. And we moved the weak points to the walls on the spider. In the earliest versions of people playing this, they just constantly looked at the spider the whole time and just ran around it and they never looked at the dude. So we thought let's move the weak points out into the space and so you have to look around the space more so you see the bad guy. We also got this piece of concept art at this point and this was like the one before kind of my North Star. This is the thing I wanted to try to hit cuz I thought this was an awesome vibe. So here's the very first playable version of that animating Recluse spider. You'll also notice that the cage around here is not a sphere and that's because that was extremely hard to mock up. So I used this kind of cage shape in the beginning.

So when you use this console we now kick in this tutorial moment that I was talking about before. We're going to get back to this idea of of of a tutorial moment or a nugget here in a second. But the idea was okay whenever the spider's arms pull on these cables it activates these stabilizers on the walls. And you have to pull open first kind of a an armored shell on them and then you blast them and then that makes the the cable snap. The arm drops, you can activate it. Now we got a new version of our boss. The previous version was just an old version of Helis from the first game who would walk around after you menacingly. This new guy actually has some attacks. He can throw grenades and stuff. These are our new weak points on the walls. As you can see this is slightly problematic. Still the players just kind of running around the whole place yoinking off the covers and then shooting them. So clearly this wasn't very good. We we had problems with this. So we were going to try something new.

So to summarize what did we do during the first playable phase? We brought all the gameplay to a more representative quality with the exception of the swim escape, the part with the laser beam face dudes. More on that later. We have some new puzzles that we added. We've got a new mood for the swim labs. We have the first proper animating Recluse in as well as some boss fight tweaks and we're ready for external playtesting. With the first playable done and approved we move into a period of iteration and parallel development. What happens here? We're getting regular playtest feedback that informs our decision making. We're now at a level of certainty about the content that we're comfortable with other departments being commit resources to to to the level. The art passes start being integrated. Core technical design, a new team at Gorilla starts helping us with the Recluse Chamber and the spider because it's so complicated and I begin to work on some other quests in parallel. This is my first quest but only one of seven quests that I made. So I start to work on some other things. So one of the other quests that I work on was a quest called Seeds of the Past

which is related to the AI Demeter. Early playtesting told us that the puzzles in Death Stranding were too simple. We knew that. We're still trying to figure out this new power puzzle mechanic. In response to that we played around with a new power puzzle concept called the charge spear that I want to show you. So I was telling you about that tutorial moment earlier. This is something that a new designer from Eidos Montreal coming in taught me about that they have there which is the idea of a nugget puzzle. So in an open world game it's really tough to teach puzzles and to get players to remember puzzles because we don't know how long it's been since you've seen the puzzle. We were playing around with using this in the tall neck as well. So I didn't know if you had done that before. I didn't know if you had learned about this puzzle concept. So I needed a really small little instance of it to either teach it to you or to get you to remember it. And that's what this is here. It's called a nugget. Basically you come into this room, you see a charging station, you charge up your spear with it, you go over to this receptacle, you plug it in. The energy

goes into it and it unlocks the door. Same concept in here. There's a receptacle on that opposite wall. You need to charge up your spear using that battery in the other room. You need to cross over this space and you need to plug in your spear to power up this room. Now the twist is the the the aspect of this that you'll notice that's new is there's a thin layer of water on the floor. The idea of the charge spear was you can carry around this charge in your spear so long as you don't touch water. If you touch water the charge it dissipates and then you have to go back and get a new charge. There's also still this aspect of yoinking stuff around the room using the pullcaster to make a bridge for yourself to be able to cross across the space. So the player's going to go back over here to the battery, going to plug in her spear, get a charge in it and then come back to the room. But just as an example you'll see here what happens when you jump in the water. The charge dissipates. Our design director, he didn't love that

version of it. He wanted a version where we had deeper water which is what this is. He felt like the thin layer of water just felt too much like a child like a children's game, you know, like don't touch the lava on the floor. It doesn't feel heroic to have to avoid like a half inch of water on the floor. So we tried this version with deeper water. Also this is the first version of the hologram you can see that goes in here when you power up the room. I thought it was super cool that the hologram people were all talking to each other underwater. So. The art passes start coming in here. What happens during the art pass? I receive from the artist new art files that I have to hook up into the game. They don't do this because if they did it it would break a bunch of stuff. I compare my blockout to the new art because things always shift around and so I have to move my objects around in the space and I have to delete my blockout my block mesh stuff kind of like one piece at a time to make sure that it's accurately represented. Typically we have two art passes and then a lighting pass. From now on you'll mostly be seeing arted spaces and lit

spaces. So here's the same puzzle space, the same kind of area we've been looking at but with the first art pass for instance. Now there's still design changes happening here. For instance we wanted to pull you here to this obstruction to see the second gene lock door in the distance more closely and so we moved the door, the entrance to that command center around the corner so that you wouldn't be drawn to it before you were drawn to this big obstruction in the middle of the hallway. And here's that same command center space with the deeper water than I just showed you but with an art pass. So the swim labs. For several playtests the feedback on the swimming parts of the level had been pretty negative. But we really believed in this type of experience that we were trying to present. And we felt that it was the swimming system, the idea of swimming underwater that needed some iteration time, that needed some time to be developed. At a certain point the core design team came to us with the revised guidelines and metrics for how swimming spaces should work. And unfortunately this was right in the middle of the art pass so

we had to rush to try to adjust to some new metrics and ideas. So the vision was underwater swimming should be smooth, fluid, fast. It shouldn't focus on slowed movement, oxygen deprivation stress, darkness. Unfortunately this is a lot of what we were doing. So just as an example, they made a whole bunch of videos of like don't do this using parts of my level. Yeah. Avoid bad flows. Avoid using hard edge geometry. Avoid placing tricky doorways and openings. This is that tight space that you swam through earlier that I pointed out. Provide clear player direction. So we took another stab at changing the metrics in the swim labs. The most important change of which was we doubled the depth and doubled the width of everything. And we had to do that in the middle of the art pass. Here is the same space with an art pass, with

a lighting pass. And as you can see everything is much deeper, much wider. Now this wasn't the most popular change. It kind of strained credulity that we had a bunker with ceilings that were like 12 m high, 20 m high. But I think that when you see the space in practice it doesn't really it doesn't strike you as being that odd. But now you can see in here we're getting much closer to the right feeling, the right vibe, right? Holographic lighting, darkness. This is that tight hallway section. I stripped a whole bunch of the obstacles out of it so it was easier to swim through. But players were still dealing with oxygen deprivation stress, right? They didn't feel like they could just swim through this section easily. So, um let's talk about the Recluse Chamber. What do we do there? So, the effect of the art pass on the Recluse Chamber,

um that had some pretty big changes, uh and you'll see that in a second. I'm going to show you a video. We got assistance from core design. Um that was really important cuz we needed help with this giant spider thing cuz it needed to be rigged, it needed to have complex scripting, it needed to have physics, it needed to have all kinds of stuff that we had no experience with. This is probably the most complicated interactive object in the whole game. Um because people really thought of it like a machine, and those things are super complicated. We also tried some new experiments with the boss fight, and I'll talk about that in a second. Um as I showed you before, this was sort of my North Star concept art piece, but we decided to ditch this. This spider looks too much like a machine out in the world, and it needs to look like something in an old in an old world bunker. It needs to look like old world tech. So, we moved in this direction. This was something that we actually kit bashed together with a whole bunch of old bunker pieces. So, let me show you that. So, this is the first like built out of art pieces version of the spider with

actual physics derived chains and stuff like this. You'll you'll see. Now, we still have the tutorial moment here, but you'll see the weak points have changed a bit. We added this new idea, which was a timing element. So, you couldn't just run around the whole room and yank all the covers off, shoot all the things. Now, it was based on the movement of the spider whether those weak points would be exposed to you or not. Boss is still pretty much the same, does pretty much the same stuff, still has some ranged attacks, still tries to get up close to you. But now we have these weak points that are that are that are time dependent, basically. So, we also, like I said, did some experiments with the boss. Um the feedback on this version,

um players still never look at the boss. Um the weak points are too high, you have to push the camera up really high to see these things. Um the weak points are too simple. So, we tried to fix this by doing some things. We tried to move the weak points down. We tried to change them to be either shoot or pull, but not both. We just kind of couldn't make up our mind whether we wanted to do pull or shoot cuz they both seemed to have their merits, so we tried both for a while. Um and we added this new mechanic that I'll show you, the pulsing shield. So, to try to tackle the idea that nobody looks at the boss, I added this idea, we added this idea that when you shoot the boss, it would overload his shield and make this EMP pulse emanate out, and that's what it would expose the weak points. I really liked this idea because it forced engagement with the boss, and it contextualized the the weak points becoming exposed, as you see here. But this had problems, too. It didn't

really jive with the fiction we were trying to tell you, which is this guy was a super invulnerable future guy that you just couldn't hurt at all, whereas we were asking you to shoot him. The swim escape, lastly, we haven't talked about this for a while because it stayed pretty much the same for a long time. We still had no idea what the Specters were going to look like or how big they were going to be, but during this period, concept art came to our aid and gave us some paints to try to give us a sense of how this space would look and how the Specters would fit in it. This was the very first image I got of a Specter. To this point, I had no idea how big they were, what they were going to look like, um and this is like the very early Specter. You can notice it has like weird creepy human hands, which is something we didn't have in the finished version. We also got some paint overs of my mocked up spaces that gave this sense of this kind of boiler room vibe. This this end up in the ship product. This is pretty much how it looks. I wanted to tell the story of an older

part of the facility, and these images really helped us understand how we could deliver on that. So, during this period of iteration and parallel development, we tried out new puzzle concepts. We integrated the first art passes. We reworked the swim labs to new metrics. We changed much of the Recluse Spider Chamber in response to art needs, and we got concept art support to help us move forward with swim escape. Now, does anyone know what's coming? March 2020. The last meeting I remember having in our old office on the canals of Amsterdam was a meeting with my lead and producer. They pulled me into the board room to tell me that Matthias, our game director, wanted me to make a a pitch for a bold reinvention of Death Stranding. Shortly thereafter, the heads of the studio reached out to let us know that we were shifting the entire company to a remote working model in response to a new pandemic. I think you all know how that went. For the foreseeable future, Guerrilla would be working from home, and my task was to come up with a bold new pitch.

So, why did we go about doing a rework? Let me talk for a moment about ACE pillars. So, ACE was a tool that we started using in this time to help us identify shortcomings in the design of the game. A is for astonishing. We felt collectively like the content in the early part of the bunker wasn't astonishing enough. It didn't equal some of the wow moments in bunkers in the first game. Think about the giant Titan room in the Grave hoard, for instance. C is for challenging. The puzzles in the swim section weren't challenging players enough. Frustrating, yes. Challenging, no. E is for engaging. We weren't making full use of the suite of new tools at Aloy's disposal. We wanted to add some of the new Forbidden West mechanics here, like the shield wing and the grappling hook. So, I started off by outlining a new set of goals informed by those conversations and feedback. The goals were provide an astonishing moment shortly after entering the bunker, focus on challenging traversal

gameplay through an epic space using grappling, pulling, and gliding, give the player a clear sense that they're moving towards a goal, that is the second gene lock door, while progressing through the space. I also outlined a set of limitations. Shrink the square footage for the purpose of art and lighting. The Zenith must be able to navigate the space when they follow you in, those are the bad guys. And we need to maintain the communication center and Travis' room, that office at the end of the swim labs, as locations for the player where they have to experience essential storytelling moments. Now, it's important to have goals and limitations because you have to sell both. When you come up with a new pitch, you have to get the people you're pitching to to understand the goals and limitations so they understand how your pitch matches those needs. So, here's the pitch. I grayed out most of it cuz it's not directly relevant. I don't want to read the whole thing. Here's the relevant bits. Just beyond the security checkpoint, the player encounters a vast passage like a tunnel roughly 100 m long and 25 m wide ending with another gene lock door. This passage once featured a long suspended

catwalk. This catwalk is now mostly broken. Luckily, this catwalk branched in a few locations to connect to corridors and rooms along both walls of the passage. By accessing those adjacent offices and structures, Aloy can weave her way along and across the shattered passage using grapple points, pullable IOs, and shield wing glides. While weaving back and forth across the chamber, Aloy must still activate the Dust Palace communication center and pass through Travis' room, potentially with some new kind of puzzle, preserving those essential story beats. Here's my paper level design of what that would look like. I wanted to demonstrate the idea here of a shattered passage, the rooms that we were maintaining, and how Aloy would move back and forth through the space. I also threw together a really rough block mesh to give a sense of what that would look like. The response to this was is this big enough? Is this actually a big enough change? Is it going to give us the wow moment? So, I made it even bigger. I increased the size of the passage by double, essentially.

Can the other departments, especially art and lighting, support this change? Well, concept support concept art again supported us in giving us a look, some references that we could show environment art to tell them what they were going to be building. They didn't know if they could build the new thing if they didn't know what it was going to look like. So, concept art helped us out here. Here are a few renders of the concept art made based on my pitch. This was sort of informed Misha, our art director. There's a level in Portal 2 that has a similar vibe to this that we used as a bit of a touch point. But this gave us a sense and we can show it to environment art and say, "This is what we want to make. Can Can you Can you buy in on that?" This also, unfortunately, means that the swim lab section is cut. Pour one out for the swim labs. I was really hopeful we could make this work, but ultimately, we were working against the goals of swimming in Horizon Forbidden West. There are other areas of the game where we did deliver on a vision of an interior swimming experience with holographic lighting. If

you played the game, you know what I'm talking about, and it works great. It just wasn't the right solution here. With this big change approved, I set out to re-block mesh the space based on the design. So, here you go. This is my first block mesh. This video only shows the kind of central passage area cuz I'm trying to keep it a little bit short, but you'll see that we've focused on interactions here using the pull tool, using the glider. Um there are some spots here along the walls that are these pullable vents. I came up with this idea um that it'd be cool if we had this idea of a pull caster enabled grapple point. And the reason why I came up with this is because I didn't want you to be able to just swim to the other end of the chamber and grapple your way up. And unfortunately, the grapple tool has incredible range, like really long range. But the pull tool doesn't. So, if I make you get close to it first to pull it, and that enables the grapple, then I

know at least that you've gotten this far in the level in the way that I intend. I also started playing around with this concept of Spidermanning around pillars and structures using the grapple tool. This is something I came back to in um Alva's companion quest later in the game in San Francisco. So, this is another one of these pull-enabled grapples. This is before the moment where we force you to use the shield wing by going across the whole chamber. You'll see that this moment in particular was kind of problematic. We'll talk about why later. I'm going to move along here cuz we're

going to see more of this area later with our passes. So, the response to the rework of the main chamber was very positive. This led to further discussions about what other parts of the bunker we could possibly improve in the same way with the same process. What would a proposal like this for the Recluse chamber boss fight look like? So, along the same lines, um using the ace pillars, um we got this feedback. Astonishment, the battle doesn't focus on the coolest asset of the room, the spider. The boss fight isn't challenging enough. Players struggle to figure out what's going on, but they don't feel challenged to do it. Uh engagement, uh this falls flat because over time um the mechanic of overloading the shield doesn't really change uh and Eric doesn't really change. So, the fight feels really consistent throughout. So, again, I set it I went about setting some goals and limitations. The goals were to focus on the Recluse spider first and Eric second. Make the player objectives crystal clear. Destroy the spider, survive Eric. Two phases of

the battle. Spider escalates, Eric escalates. Limitations, minimize changes to the cinematics here. There were these huge 10-minute-long cinematics in the space, and we didn't want to change those at all if we could avoid it. Use the Eric design that was provided by combat, which we finally got with some moves and abilities and stuff that he could do. And consider fallout on the core tech design because the spider is so complicated they had to help us with the rework. So, this was the pitch. Rework the weak points in a way that features the Recluse spider. In phase one, the player shoots these coupling weak points on these strings that hold the arms to the ceiling. Severing the cables cause the Recluse to swing back and forth. That complicates the timing of destroying these coupling weak points. Escalate the intensity of the boss fight over time with two phases. During phase one, Eric uses range projectile attacks to disrupt you. Once you cut all the strings, we have a special phase transition sequence that's returned. In that, the spider drops and that

exposes some weak points on this sort of core cable that holds it to the ceiling, the kind of final string. To shoot that, you have to get to certain spots around the room cuz it's shielded in a way where you couldn't shoot all the sides from one spot. Um and we need to escalate the intensity. Let's Sorry. Um and we need to change what triggers the collapse of the Recluse. So, up until this point, it was what I showed you. You shot all the weak points and then you had to do an interaction on the spider. Um I didn't really love that. Um and so I proposed this. This is what cinematics look like early on, by the way. I'm going to show you some little tastes of uh pre-final version cinematics here, but just small stuff. Um

So, the response to this. Can we afford to add a new cinematic between the two two boss phases? Can we support changing the collapse cinematic, the one you just saw at the end? These problems sort of solve themselves because we shortened one and added a little bit to another? Are we going back to all the same problems we had before with moving the weak points to be back on the spider? Uh are we really going to be able to deliver true physics-driven simulations of the spider's arms and wires? We didn't know. Here's a video of our first stab at rebuilding the Recluse chamber to the new cutting the strings concept. Pretty early on, we realized that these coupling weak points on the strings were kind of problematic. In my mind, these strings were always going to be taut. They were going to be like pulled tight. But in practice, you need some to be loose and some to be tight, and that made these weak points very wiggly. Uh and that wasn't ideal. But Marcin had built these really cool um bracelets on the spider to connect the arms to those wires, and we had the idea of like, "Hey, why don't we just make these these bracelets on the arms

of the spider the weak points?" So, that's what you see here. Also, you see now that Eric has a full suite of abilities. This is the combat design that came in from Charles' combat design team. This is our new phase transition cinematic. This is a storyboard animatic. That's what this These are what cinematics look like before the thing you just saw before with a with a rough out. Just thought it'd be cool to show you this cuz we'll see the finished product in a little bit, too. Also very cool in the cinematic here, we show you exactly what you need to do. We actually use it to point out the gameplay. Now we have these core cable weak points that I was talking about on this on this final connector hold hanging uh connecting the spider to the ceiling.

Yep. And then the cinematic for the collapse. So, what else needed rework? The shadow passage and the Recluse boss reworks were received very positively. Something that had language for a long time was the swim escape uh as we talked about earlier. We finally received the first version of the specters so we could actually place them in the level. They couldn't do anything, but we actually could see how big they were, and they were much bigger than I expected. We also got some uh notes from uh our associate game director, Ray. Uh he wanted to add some new gameplay sections to the swim escape. So, this is hard for you to read compared to the versions we've seen before, but there were some ideas in here like uh an area where you have to swim against the current that we added, and an initial swim-through area that we added that I'm going to show you

in the video here. Next. These are the specters, by the way. We finally got these guys, and this is just to give you a sense of perspective. They're huge. They're like medium-sized machine. I thought they were going to be something more like a small-sized machine, and actually we got something the size of a ravager. So, we reworked the swim escape with these ideas in mind. I'm going to point out these new areas. Um this is the new swim-through tunnel that Ray suggested we add. The reason why we added this is we added this tunnel because it's exactly the length required to force you to use up all your oxygen, and that would force you at the end of this swim section to surface and see the specters. So, here are specters. Just like our guys before, they're like, "Haha, you're in water. I don't know what that is." But as you can see, they don't really fit all that well in this space anymore. So, we had to figure out a way to to change the structure of this upper area to accommodate them as best we could. Also, uh surprise,

in the design, there was this idea that they could walk on walls and ceilings, which we didn't actually have any machines that did this, and we didn't actually have some way to mock this up exactly. And so we had to try to figure out how were we going to rebuild the space to accommodate for these machines that could cling to walls and ceilings. So, this is that this is a new gauntlet section, much like the one before where you have to swim through an area at the end while under fire and distress. You'll see a better version of this later. Yep. Okay. A summary of what changed during the time of great change. We completely reworked the main chamber of the bunker. We cut the swim labs. We reworked the boss fight with new weak points on the spider and proper combat design for the boss. We redesigned the swim escape section with new gameplay segments and in a way to accommodate the larger-than-planned-for size of the specters. On to finishing touches. This is sort of like our polish phase. However,

because of large reworks during the phase before this, we had to do new art integration late in the process. That led to late lighting passes, uh late audio passes, late everything passes, and this was very very difficult. Traversal gameplay iteration in response to gameplay. We had to do a lot of this because traversal problems cause players fits in playtesting. If they can't make one jump, they can't progress in the in the level. And we were trying to do everything on like uh a very fine level of of of perfection. Boss battle tweaks in response to playtesting. A custom server or our scripting to support swim escape, talk more about that later, and finally bug fixing. So, in iterating and doing new art passes on the main chamber, like I said, because we completely reworked everything, we had to work hard to catch up on lost time. This caused our scores to dip in play tests for quite some time because we no longer had the fidelity we had before. A more traversal oriented space suffered

more readability issues. Small snags in players' ability to move through the space caused huge dips in player scores. Just as an example, we had one play test where light where ladders stopped working. And when you can't use the ladders to climb back up, players get massively frustrated. In less than a year, we went from this to this to this. And every version caused players fits in different ways. Let me show you a video. So, this is a video of our play testers experiencing some common problems in trying to traverse to the space. What's going on here is this player doesn't remember how to jump backwards anymore. That's the thing we just don't ask you to do that often. And the way I designed this platform, it was really hard to actually land the jump. So, what I did is we added a reminder. This is an idea we stole from God of War where we pop these things up in the bottom of the screen contextually if we felt like you needed a reminder of how to do something. Here, we had this pullable vent that you had to open up to enter this room. In

the the block mesh, people saw it perfectly, but with lighting, they never saw it. They never saw that vent. So, David McMullen, one of our designers, he had the brilliant idea just to open it. Like if people don't see it, just open it up, man. Then it's in your field of view. Door's locked. So, this section, I was talking a little bit about it earlier. This is the the moment right before the shield glide. We had this problem here where players did not want to jump into range to pull themselves to a grapple point. It scared them. So, players would open this thing up and then they would just hop up and down in one spot hoping that the grapple tool would kick in. So, we had to add some self-talk lines. We had to add some player direction.

Don't think my pullcaster can latch onto that from here. I'm going to have to jump. This is another example where we added a reminder because players forgot that they could drop down off of climbing hold. It also felt very scary to them. What's going on here? How am I supposed to get to that? Am I supposed to Okay, okay. Do you want me to drop down? Jesus Christ. I don't know how I get to that, but So, what I did is I added a reminder and I added a climbing piece to suggest the

direction of movement. It wouldn't get you all the way to the climbable piece, but it would show you you need to go that way. There was this moment right at the end of the level where there is a pull enabled grapple point. And right here at the end, we wanted you to actually we wanted to complicate the climb a little bit, so you needed to go to the right here instead of just going straight up. please. I just want this quest to be over. Why won't What do I need to do? Come on. Okay, right there? Okay, so much for the So, I was like, "Look, fine, okay. I'm just going to put the climbing points right above the grapple point." Player want to go up, we go up. Okay, so much for the flooded maze.

I made it. And last but not least Unrealistic. Why is there an obstacle course to get to someone's office? Unrealistic. Okay, I I don't really care that much, but there's a bit of a Fire gleam. This is the real fire gleam, you see. Uncool. I said to prevent this, which I actually didn't really want to change, but to prevent this, I actually added guardrails behind you, so that if you get hit by this thing, it would catch you. Careful. Careful. So, feedback received on the cutting the strings changes in play testing. The tension between needing to split your attention between the recluse and the boss seemed to work fundamentally. Players needed a lot of help hitting the weak points, so we added a lot of magnets. And Eric needed just the right amount of chill.

If he was too aggressive, it was too hard. If he was too light, it wasn't good. So, we took a long time to balance him. We also added a new step that I want to show you. So, Matthias again, he thought it was weird that the the weak points on the spider arm showed up just at the beginning of the boss battle for no good reason. So, he requested that we add this step where you actually had to walk over or run over to this console at the beginning of the room and activate it, and that would make the weak points show up the first time on the spider. Also, nice little touch. Once you activate this thing, Eric gets mad at you, and he blows it up. So, as you can see, this has an art pass now, right? Like it's actually like this is the this is the finished version, so this is with art, with lighting, the the proper weak points that glow and change, the full boss. And this is that phase transition sequence, the one that you saw as a storyboard, but the finished version.

Reckon that thing ain't going to help, girl. Right. Come on. Come at me. Yeah. So, lastly, the specters. Now, we actually had the specters in the level, but we had to get them to do things. So, we need to figure out wall clinging, precision scanning like the turrets I was talking about, shooting from the walls, and detecting the player. These are actually all new behaviors. We hadn't done this stuff before. There are machines in the first game that appear to cling to walls, but it's a bit of an illusion. They can start that way, but then they have to come right down off the wall. This was the first machine that could actually move from walls to ceilings and then shoot from those positions. These are videos provided by Tommy Kiersten, one of our AI programmers that worked with me on this area. He also built custom behaviors for me where I could indicate areas where they would

fire in strafing patterns cuz we wanted that during this section as well. And lastly, there is a custom scanning behavior, which is what you see here. I could give them an array of points, and they would move their field of view, their view cone from point to point changing the direction of the spotlight to show you where that they were looking. So, let me show you what that looks like in the finished version. Again, full art pass, full lighting pass. Might be a way under this.

So, to summarize What did we do during finishing touches? We integrated new art and lighting passes in a single phase. We did tons of iteration on traversal gameplay based on play testing. We iterated on the boss fight. We implemented a bunch of new custom AI behavior for the specters and the swim escape. And the feedback received in the play tests, I'm happy to say in our final appeals test, this was one of the highest scoring quests in the game. We got up to the a nice high score. Um so, let me try to draw some conclusions for you. How do I summarize 4 years of my life? I started this journey the moment I stepped off the plane for my last GDC. I gave my last talk, I flew home, and I started building this quest. And I fixed bugs on it before I came here. So the whole time. I worked on this quest in parallel with six others during the development. That

was very hard. But I was able to bring work back from those quests to this one. I've never been asked to change a level design so dramatically, but I've taken smaller changes with less grace in the past. I'm glad I'm a better equipped for that now as a designer and as a person. Making this quest was not only challenging, but life too was tremendously challenging during this period for all of us. Takeaways. Have clarity on the story you're telling. Though this quest changed a lot, the story were telling remained relatively consistent after the initial documentation phase. Aim for your early designs to be representative and readable more so than beautiful or elegant or fun. This will save you both time and heartache. When introducing or reintroducing a complex mechanic or concept, start with a small, easy example. Remember the idea of the nugget. Be aware that when the larger design of the game shifts around your level in a way that may require your level to accommodate those changes, you have to

embrace those changes. In the game, we didn't have the shield wing as a thing that you got as part of the main quest for a long time. It was actually an optional piece of equipment you got in a side quest. But once we actually moved it in the main quest, we knew that we had to add it into this quest as a thing that you could use. When tasked to explore big change, make sure you understand the goals and limitations defined by the gatekeeper, and then sell those just as hard as the new idea. If the people you're selling the idea to understand the goals and limitations as well as you, they'll know why your well-crafted idea is the right solution. And lastly, good ideas are like boomerangs. Even when you throw them away, they often come back. Looking at the earliest version of this quest, the skeleton quest, you can see that there are the version of the boss fight there is actually more similar to what we shipped than some of the versions in the middle. The ideas just came back. Think about the swim labs. We cut them, but they came back in another place. Acknowledgements. Uh thank you to

everyone at Guerrilla, all the people that I worked with on building this level. It was a tremendous effort. Here's my contact information if you guys want to email me, if you guys want to DM me, or whatever, you totally can. I'm happy to answer questions if I'm able to. We don't have time for Q&A cuz we are officially out of time here, but I'm going to go immediately to the wrap-up space. You can just follow me. I'm happy to answer questions for as long as you guys have them. Uh I'm not trying to shut you out. I just wanted to show you as much as I possibly could. Thank you very much.