much can we put into the game and still keep it readable?’ There’s no such thing as too many explosions or too many particles. So we didn’t really draw a hard line, we just let the game decide. It was a very conscious decision to embrace ‘bullet hell’, and have that unapologetic video game flavour to the action.”
Returnal was a huge learning process for Housemarque, not least with having to get to grips with Unreal
GOING ROGUE Despite the desire to keep to Housemarque’s signature arcade roots, Returnal was developed during a time of fast-paced experimentation for the Helsinki-based studio, and the final game differs from Krueger’s only other directorial credit, the twin-stick shooter Nex Machina, on a design level in almost every way. This was a conscious choice, as Housemarque did not want to rest on its laurels, preferring to explore new ideas with its expanded budget and team. “There were so many things that we were doing for the first time ever. It was our first time making a third-person game with a new 3D camera. Even just taking one of our previous games and giving it that 3D treatment would have been more than enough to keep us busy for four years. But in addition to that, we wanted to explore procedurally
generated content, so a roguelike formula, for the first time,” explained the director. “We also wanted to tell a story for the first time. All of this was being done in an engine that we were still learning and were largely unfamiliar with, targeting a platform that was just coming out, and targeting a new level of quality. In a 3D third-person game, the quality expectations are much higher than on a top down or a side-scrolling game, where you can kind of get away with cutting a few more corners. All of our previous games were 2D or 2.5D. I guess some of them might have had some minor kind of helper controls to move the camera a little bit. But this was the first time that you were given this agency as a player to control the camera, the aiming and even the traversal in 3D space. The shift to 3D introduced a new dimension of possibilities, but also added complexity to development.” As if the enormous challenges it had presented itself with
weren’t enough, Housemarque also decided to develop Returnal on Unreal Engine 4, a toolset that only a small number of the studio had used once before. Learning to use Unreal would be likely to speed up any work on future in-house projects, and would ultimately make hiring new talent easier and more efficient, but it was still a complex thing to do. It led to a period of adjustment at the studio, and some growing pains. “We used Unreal Engine 4 to ship Returnal. Before that, we had also used Unreal for our previous game, Matterfall. But largely for the size of the team, we were very unfamiliar with the engine. So we were learning as we were running, in many ways. It was a pretty big departure from using our own proprietary tech that we had used for 25 years at Housemarque.” said Krueger, who was himself lead programmer on Housemarque’s Resogun, which released back in 2013.
“I think in general, designers, artists and animators were very happy [with Unreal]. I think programmers were the ones who had the steepest learning curve, as we needed to adapt to just working with this massive engine that was designed by someone else. There was [however] a bit of that intimacy lost with the code base that we had established with our own tech earlier.”
GROWING PAINS
The massive ambition and scale of the plans for Returnal soon led to Housemarque scaling up the studio alongside the increased scope of what it was developing. By the time the game shipped, the team had grown to around three times the size it had been at the start of development. If you were to include the game’s many co-developers, it was at least six times bigger. These were deemed necessary, as the studio quickly realised it had bitten off more than it could chew.
56 | MCV/DEVELOP October/November 2022
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