Last year I had the opportunity to give a talk at GDC 2024 about the design philosophy of the Relic Ruin environmental puzzle spaces for Horizon Forbidden West. The talk goes into detail on how we designed the spaces to make them inviting to enter when players are walking around in the open world, but also how we made the puzzles themselves fun and engaging.
It’s interesting to create a talk like this, since it made me reflect on five years of designing various environmental puzzles at Guerrilla. During that design process everything came quite naturally, without thinking too much about structures and reasons why I approach things in a certain way. But when making a talk for other designers, I analyzed those five years of design work and tried to formulate things in ways that are broadly applicable. This led me to define a thing that we’ve been calling “radial design”.
Looking back at the various Relic Ruin spaces, I noticed that most of them are sharing a pattern: they are designed with multiple approaches in mind, they all give the player a puzzle piece upon entry to raise the players curiosity, and they invite the players to find the other puzzle pieces. Once they are all found, the player is enticed to solve the environmental puzzle using those found puzzle pieces.
That’s the core of radial design. And although designed for puzzle content within an open world, it might also be applicable for non-puzzle content. And potentially also for more linear games with open areas in them. But radial design is not always the best option. There are moments where we deliberately stayed away from radial design. Sometimes more linear approach is a better option, when you want to have more control over in which order a player does certain things in a (puzzle) space, like with a tutorial. I explain all of this and more in my talk, along with a bunch of examples from Horizon Forbidden West.
I got a lot of positive reactions after giving my talk at GDC, and later at Devcom 2024 and Dutch Game Day 2024 as well. It’s great to share this knowledge with other game and level designers and I’m now sharing it here, hoping it can inspire more people to make more exciting puzzle content.
So I hope there’s something in here for you, and I honestly cannot wait to see the results of your puzzle game design.
Download the annotated PowerPoint slides from my GDC talk below:
As PPTX file (5.6 GB)
As PDF file (13 MB)
The full 60-minute recording of talk is available on the GDC Vault for premium members.
A shorter 40-minute version of the talk that I did for Dutch Game Day is available to watch below for everyone.