“When we started, we had this expectation that we’d be able to make this game, which at the time we felt was going to be much smaller, with 25 people. We said, ‘Yeah, well, what could go wrong?’ Luckily, Sony who was funding the project, they did believe in our vision, they saw that we had a unique concept and something with a lot of potential on our hands, and they really helped us just shift to this big, big production. They helped us along the way. We did have to grow the studio quite significantly. I think by the time we shipped Returnal, we had just over 80 people internally, and there were just as many people, if not more, helping us through co-dev. It was a massive jump, considering the previous biggest team that we had ever worked in was like 20 to 25 people.” said Krueger. “Traditionally, we’ve had two projects running at the same time. Sometimes even more. This was the first time that we combined all of our efforts and focused them on a single project for the whole studio. There were so many new challenges we were facing in Returnal, at a new scope that was an order of magnitude larger than anything we’d done before, with higher quality standards for all our content. All this was done with a constantly growing team, working with co-dev for the first time, and constantly adapting to new production processes, with an evolving company culture.”
“Everything was new for us, and it often felt like we needed to take a leap of faith and build our wings while falling. We needed to shift from a garage band mentality to working with a full orchestra, in a way. I feel that one of the biggest challenges we faced was regarding the game’s instability - it’s not an exaggeration to say that Returnal was unplayable for over half of its development time. Many other problems stemmed from this. The game is the boss, and it’s much harder to solve creative problems and have that intimate, calculated iteration over a game when there isn’t a working build to playtest.”
CARVING A PATH
Despite a bumpy development, Krueger believes that if he were to go back in a cosmic time loop of his own and start over with the development of Returnal, he’d be unlikely to change much, if anything at all. “It was a necessary process for us to just try things out, to see what works and what doesn’t. I mean, we could have just relied on trying to do what other games did, but we really felt strongly that we needed to carve our own path.” “You just need to do that through adversity sometimes.
It’s easy to say that if I went back, we would have just designed the camera differently or the character like she looks now and skipped a few iterations, but I think all of that effort that we put into Returnal, all of the twists and turns, ended up creating the game that it was in the end. It couldn’t have turned out any different.” “Define your own rules of cool. Find what you’re good at, and crank it all up to 13. Don’t overthink it. I think it’s very easy to get trapped chasing the promise of innovation. But quality often comes from doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. Be stubborn and chase your
dream relentlessly, but be careful not to become a prisoner of that dream … Ultimately, the game is the boss. Look after it, playtest often, and listen to what it is trying to tell you every step of the way.” Housemarque’s shift in scope to AAA cinematic games has thankfully paid off, as audiences have responded well to the new direction. Returnal has been a huge success both critically and commercially, and while the recently acquired PlayStation first party studio may not return to smaller arcade style experiences in the near-future, Krueger believes that they will continue to hold on to who they are, regardless of how big they may end up. “Seeing the overwhelmingly positive reception and the
numerous awards that Returnal has received has been incredibly humbling, encouraging and validating for all of us here at Housemarque. We feel that with Returnal we managed to establish a fairly unique voice in the third- person action space, and the arcade spirit is clearly an inseparable part of that core identity. So regardless of what form this may take in our next projects, you can expect to see countless more explosions, intense particle effects, tight controls and high-octane action from us in our future creative endeavours as well.”
October/November 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 57
(Don’t Fear) the Reaper, or ominous structures on alien planets
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