Guerrilla Games are well known for their work on the Killzone series, which is a first person shooter exclusively developed for the PlayStation hardware. Their work with Horizon Zero Dawn involves a brand new genre, which is open world action RPG.
Guerrilla Games’ Senior and Principal Tools Programmer Dan Sumaili and Sander Van der Steen will detail their tools pipeline that they had to create in order to develop Horizon Zero Dawn as an open world RPG at the upcoming Games Developer Conference.
Developing a new IP is a challenging process for a company’s tools pipeline. Developing a new IP while changing to a new genre is even more challenging. At Guerrilla Games, they have done just that. With ‘Horizon: Zero Dawn’, they transitioned from linear tactical first person shooters to a vibrant open world RPG, while completely rebuilding their tools pipeline from scratch. In this session, Dan and Sander will explain how Guerrilla Games defined and implemented a framework that would provide a robust basis of functionality, on which they built an integrated game development environment. They will present a clear picture of how the framework’s capabilities took shape over time, by detailing systems they developed and how those systems interact. Redesigning Guerrilla Games’ tools pipeline while in production was a significant risk, which paid off and greatly benefited the final quality of their game.
If you are interesting in checking out the work that they have done for the game, make sure to attend this presentation.
Horizon Zero Dawn is currently confirmed exclusively for the PS4 and set to release on February 28th, 2017.
