Jayce Rettob talks to us about his role as Technical Designer and how he helps bridge the gap between game teams at Guerrilla.
FOLLOWING HIS KEEN UNDERSTANDING OF BOTH PROGRAMMING AND DESIGN, JAYCE FOUND HIS WAY TO GUERRILLA AS TECHNICAL DESIGNER TO HELP TEAMS IMPLEMENT THEIR VISION.
Jayce shares his knowledge of technical design, the process for helping several game teams, and shares tips for those interested in pursuing this unique discipline!
Hi Jayce! Thanks for taking the time to chat with us today. Before we get into everything technical design, tell us about yourself!
Hello! I was born and raised here in Amsterdam, but have been living in Zaandam since 2016. I studied Gaming Art at Media College Amsterdam and Game Design and Development at Utrecht School of the Arts, where I focused on flash development using Flash, Unity and Unreal Engine 4. Before I came to Guerrilla, I was at Turtleneck Studios and Little Chicken Game Company and Media.Monks.
Outside of schooling and work, I love sim racing, (aggressive) inline skating, bowling, going out for ramen and Korean BBQ, building model kits like gunpla – and I used to dance!
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So technical design requires a lot of foresight, but also the freedom to think through various situations? Is there a part in Horizon Forbidden West particularly where we can see the impact of your work?
You may not be able to see my work visually in-game, but I help with many things behind the scenes. Here are two scenarios in Horizon Forbidden West where I helped:
If the player starts three main quests at the same time and they must complete all three that can be completed in any order before they continue with the next main quest – specifically: The Broken Sky, The Sea of Sands, and Seeds of the Past. At some point in the game, the player talks to GAIA and can choose the route they want to do first to acquire an AI kernel. This wasn’t something Guerrilla had implemented before, so it was quite unique to set up this scenario.
If you start the game for the first time, the player will see an intro cinematic where Aloy travels the world, goes from location to location – and this is all done using real-time rendering! This means that the cinematic was not pre-rendered and re-played as a video, but calculated and executed per frame using our in-engine tech. This was quite a technical challenge to pull off with the hardware. Thanks to the combined collaboration between designers, the cinematics team, game code and game tech teams, we pulled this one off to a fantastic result!