Arkane Studios’ critically-acclaimed 2017 game Prey quickly climbed into the lists of all-time great immersive sims, and last year Arkane followed it up with a downloadable content pack, Mooncrash, that blends the systems and stories of Prey into an innovative roguelike side story.
It was an exceedingly risky move, and Arkane pulled it off with flying colors. If you want to see how they did it, come out to the Game Developers Conference in March and enjoy a rare behind-the-scenes look at the making of Mooncrash.
Arkane lead level designer Rich Wilson will be there delivering a Design track talk on “‘Mooncrash’: Resetting the Immersive Simulation” that’s all about how what began as a standard DLC follow-up to Prey evolved into a creative experiment that was eye-opening for both fans of the original as well as folks on the design team.
Not only does Mooncrash add roguelike elements and multiple playable characters to the formula, but it abandons a traditional linear narrative structure. In this talk, Wilson dissects the unusual project to extract common themes, like what it takes to motivate a team to break form, what you can learn by dismantling your existing mechanics and how you can integrate other genres into your game to breathe life into it. Don’t miss it!
Further details on this talk and many more are available now on the GDC 2019 Session Scheduler. There you can begin to lay out your GDC 2019, which takes place March 18th through the 22nd at the (newly renovated!) Moscone Center in San Francisco.
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