Horizon Call of the Mountain

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Genre: Action Adventure

Role: Game Director

Created By: Firesprite and Guerrilla Games

published By: PlayStation

Released on: PS5/PSVR2

Engine utilised: UE4

Accolades:

  • Golden Joysticks 2023- Best VR Game
  • DICE Game awards 2023- Immersive Reality Technical Achievement
  • Develop Awards 2023-  Best Visual Art
  • Develop Awards 2023- Technical Innovation
  • TIGA Awards 2023- Visual Design
  • Road to VR Awards 2023- Best PSVR2 game
  • Nominee The Game Awards 2023- Best VR/AR
  • Nominee BAFTA Game Awards 2024- Technical Acheivement

Responsibilities:

  • Shipped The Award winning Horizon Call of the Mountain as the Game Director, working with an internal team of over 120, as well as team members from Guerrilla, multiple outsource partners and wider Playstation teams.
  • Responsible for the creative vision, pillars, and quality of Horizon Call of the Mountain, ensuring the game remained authentic to the original IP, whilst spearheading gameplay on a new piece of hardware as a launch title.
  • Completed a full creative reshape and rescope of the game, and it’s pillars, following a platform change and continued to regularly present the game vision and pillars back to the full team to help inspire and motivate creativity, whilst also reinforcing the core vision of the game.
  • Worked closely with Horizon franchise directors and production staff to ensure brand guidelines and quality is aligned and communicated out to the team. 
  • Regularly presented to senior figures within the studio and wider corporation, working with, and advocating for, improvements with senior IP holders at partner studios. 
  • Communicated regularly with discipline directors from all departments to create a cohesive best-in-class game experience by balancing the requirements of visual, technical, narrative and game feel. Worked particularly closely with Art Direction to ensure that the standards of the franchise were being delivered.
  • Worked with the Lead Designer to problem solve key issues for the gameplay experience, constructing meta progression systems, gameplay pacing and mission flow. 
  • Worked directly with the gameplay teams to set goals for our features that enhanced the player experience, and developed repeatedly iterated prototypes towards that end. 
  • Worked with the narrative team to develop character arcs that can be reflected throughout the gameplay experience.
  • Worked with the Leads daily to make sure that the team was not being stretched too far, that all raised concerns were addressed honestly and escalated as needed, and to ensure we had a positive work culture day to day, while still striving for excellence.
  • Regularly worked with the production team to scope out and prioritise features across the game. Identified and planned mitigation for any blockers/dependencies to ensure features fit within our scheduled milestone deliverables.
  • Worked directly with the PlayStation hardware engineers to give developer feedback on early prototypes to help with features, ergonomics and feel. 
  • Worked closely with the external user research team, internal design, and production teams to develop pipelines for getting usability testing, comfort testing and appeals testing feedback into the game to improve the overall experience. The studio had previously never used user testing and it was spearheaded on this project.
  • Developed a feature scoring system to guide and give visibility to the team and franchise directors. Used this scoring system to guide regular quality reviews with all discipline teams to ensure that feedback is up to date and that quality benchmarks are being hit.

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