Agenda

'Baby Steps' is a 3D hiking game with a vast open world created by a very small team. While the world is completely fixed, exploring and curating undesigned random levels was an integral part of the creative process. This talk will explore in depth the ways that randomness not only created the bedrock of the world itself but also came to define the aesthetic approach to the route-finding and climbing challenges that make it up.

Takeaway

Learn how the large open world level of Baby Steps was created by two people, from the Everest-scale mountain down to the individual rocks and footholds that support the core gameplay.
See how Baby Steps subverts the concepts of 'safe hands' and 'guiding the player' by harnessing 'canonical randomness'.

Intended Audience

Level designers, indie developers, and anyone who is interested in the game design challenges of physics-based traversal games or the development of open-world games with tiny teams.