I remember a moment of Hermen saying we should maybe start something new. We created this really big universe in Killzone, but how many more creative ideas could we find in that universe? Maybe it was time to do something new. We were asking ourselves whether we were getting the most out of our talent and our people.
KILLZONE 1 PSP
We were asking ourselves, I think, “How many more Killzones do we really want to make?” We had the third one, and we had a PSP game, Killzone Liberation. We try not to talk too much about the day to day issues we resolve, and instead focus on the long term vision for the studio. What we do as a management group, we meet every week. Smets: It was around halfway through the development of Killzone 3.
When did that happen, and what was some of the thinking behind it? But at some point, you decided to do something new. You could have stayed in place doing that. GamesBeat: Killzone became a hit and sold millions of units. Image Credit: Sony Computer Entertainment America I think we fostered a culture at Guerrilla where we make something, and then we take the time to sit down and say, “Okay, what are the things that didn’t go so well? What could we have done differently?” Then we try to do better the next time, become better at the process. With every game we shipped, we learned so many things. That’s where I’ve been focused ever since. I remember a conversation with Michiel Werring, the tech director, where I said that if we were going to keep doing this, we really needed to get better at the whole process of making games.
KILLZONE 1 HOW TO
We crunched ridiculous hours because we didn’t know how to do the development process in the proper way.
KILLZONE 1 PS2
We thought, “What could go wrong? Other people are making PS2 games. Picture 20 young people who’d never shipped a console game. Looking back on it, it’s still a miracle that we shipped that game. Killzone was a very challenging project, mainly because we had so little experience. At the time the PS2 was such a powerful machine, and I was already thinking about stuff that I could do with it. When she said “PlayStation 2” I was already sold. We just signed an exclusive deal with Sony for a PlayStation 2 game.” Then, about 16 years ago, a friend of mine who was in technical art at Guerrilla Games – we’d worked at the same company – said, “Angie, you need to come help us. Sometimes you were lucky to do animation at six frames per second. As a designer you were very limited by what the technology could do. Back in the day you had CD-ROM, the CD-I. I started my career as a designer for multimedia productions. I thought I’d become an industrial engineer, because I liked the idea of making products that people would use, and specialized in human-computer interaction, which was a little bit closer to the things that interested me. So I grew up gaming on console platforms. Later on my mother bought me a Philips Videopac G7000. For a long time I thought that was the only game that existed, because it was the only game we had. She’d always get it out of the closet when there was a rainy Sunday afternoon and I’d play with my sister and my mom, play Pong. I started playing games when I was eight, with my mom. Smets: Back in the days when I was going to high school, there was no such thing as a game university, any educational programs where you could become a game designer or a game programmer. GamesBeat: How did you get to where you are? I’m also part of our management team, building and maintaining a good working environment back home in Amsterdam. That basically means I’m responsible for delivering all of our games. Angie Smets: I’m the executive producer at Guerrilla Games.