Aggro Crab studio head Nick Kaman shared design lessons from Peak at GDC Festival of Gaming 2026. Key insights include designing social friction (e.g., requiring friends to retrieve items from backpacks), using a first-person camera to enhance proximity chat and roleplay, and implementing a 'Rule Zero' to encourage cooperative behavior. The game's daily map system originated as a technical constraint—maps must be baked in Unity Editor because runtime generation requires an RTX GPU for occlusion maps—but became a beloved community feature. Kaman also revealed that mountain layouts are essentially random ('we throw rocks at the wall and pray'), and that procedural chaos proved more compelling than hand-crafted level design.
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