Returnal
If not for the surprise hit Returnal, the debut of the PlayStation 5 may have been a lot less eventful. The dark, cosmic-horror bullet hell game was not necessarily one of the most anticipated for the new console, but audiences have been taken with it nonetheless.
During GDC 2022, Housemarque’s Harry Krueger gave a talk about the game’s development, detailing its successes and failures while providing a roadmap for how the studio transformed itself to rise to its many new challenges. Amid new tech, a bigger team, and several design concepts that they’d never worked with before, the process was marked by both technical and cultural hurdles, from conceptualizing the game and forming its design pillars to prototyping and executing it while making the transition from 2D to 3D along the way. The ensuing discussion is an insightful look at how they brought together all their ideas while managing scope, messaging, and their most essential design values.
The talk began with Krueger explaining what the goals and design values of Housemarque were as they began development on Returnal. "If this [slide] feels a bit like immediate sensory overload, then I think that's the perfect introduction to Housemarque by itself," Krueger jokes, noting that the studio's motto is "gameplay is king." For them, that goal entails satisfying the player's immediacy with razor-sharp controls and a commitment to technical excellence, including "uncompromising" 60 frames-per-second, and "spectacular" VFX and presentation. But it also includes an emphasis on mystery and depth in both the narrative and gameplay, a focus on "bullet ballet" (their spin on the "bullet hell" genre), and addictive replayability, to be "designed in a way that keeps pulling you
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