Guerrilla’s proposal for a Move-based peripheral was sent to SCE Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida and the Sony Product Design group, who circulated it among other studios for input. The proposal met with very enthusiastic reactions. “When we saw the foam-board-and-duct-tape mockup, we were like ‘Cool, let’s make that!’” Sony Product Design Manager Ennin Huang recalls.

It wasn’t long before Guerrilla was contacted by developers from other shooters like SOCOM 4, Time Crisis: Razing Storm and Dead Space: Extraction. Zipper Interactive Game Director Seth Luisi, who’d already been looking into a PlayStation Move-based control scheme for SOCOM 4, took a particular interest in the project. “Seth strongly felt that a gun peripheral could bring an additional level of immersion and realism to the table,” Guerrilla Game Director Mathijs de Jonge says. “Like Killzone 3, SOCOM 4 was still in its early stages, so the timing made sense for him as well.”

With each iteration, the design evolved away from the StA-11.

The Zipper team suggested several highly useful additions to the gun peripheral design. “For instance, they wanted players to be able to reload without taking their hands off the navigation controller,” Mathijs explains. “This could be solved by adding pump-action mechanism to the fore grip. Also, they noted that many tactical shooters, including SOCOM 4, featured weapons with multiple modes of fire, which would require the inclusion of a fire selector switch.”

With basic shape and functionality hammered out, the gun peripheral entered the prototyping phase. “Every six weeks, a new plastic gun peripheral would arrive from China for us and the team at Zipper to comment on,” Guerrilla Lead Concept Designer (and resident weapons expert) Roy Postma says. “And with each iteration, you could see the design come into its own more. The style of the weapon became more neutral, less Killzone-specific.”

Enhancements included a more ergonomic angle for the fore grip, an adjustable and collapsible stock instead of the foldable one, and overall weight reductions to facilitate prolonged play. “Sadly, some features fell by the wayside during this process,” Roy says. “We originally wanted to have an ammo counter display above the stock, but it just proved too costly.”

The color of the weapon changed too, evolving from the gunmetal grays of the original design, to a jet black version, to the more neutral grays of the final product. “From a legal and marketing perspective we had to impose some constraints,” Ennin says. “The black version looked menacing, but would have violated most countries’ gun laws.” Even the first grey prototypes proved difficult to get through customs, as Mathijs found after a demonstration at a conference.

Meanwhile, the teams at Guerrilla and Zipper experimented with Move control systems for their respective games, figuring out sensible settings for dead zone, aim assistance and controller sensitivity. “Initially we wanted to map a lot of in-game actions to player gestures as well,” Mathijs says, “but that turned out to interfere with player aim too much. So we restricted it to short, simple movements like thrusting the gun peripheral to perform a melee.”

The final production prototype in all its glory.

The gun peripheral went into full production in the run-up to Killzone 3’s launch. Early hands-on reports of the device – now dubbed the PlayStation Move sharp shooter – were almost unanimously positive, with many reporters expressing pleasant surprise at how solid and natural the peripheral felt during play.

“In terms of control methods, nothing feels more natural than the sheer simplicity of ‘Point, Aim, Shoot’”, Ennin says. Mathijs concurs: “The peripheral made Killzone 3 immediately accessible to people who had never played a Killzone title before. Some reporters even stated that they preferred to play Killzone 3 with the sharp shooter instead of the DualShock 3, because they felt more immersed. That was a huge compliment for us.”
But it wasn’t until the week before Killzone 3’s release that Mathijs realized his other goal for the sharp shooter had also been achieved. “I was watching the PlayStation commercial for Killzone 3 and the sharp shooter and I suddenly realized, you know what – Kevin Butler looks absolutely badass holding that thing! That’s when I knew we’d fully achieved what we set out to do.”

The sharp shooter is available now as a standalone accessory and as part of the SOCOM 4 Full Deployment Edition.

It all began with a Helghast soldier using a PlayStation Move controller.

“We were at a game convention where the PlayStation Move was being demonstrated,” Guerrilla Games Director Mathijs de Jonge recalls. “We had several Helghast performers walking the show floor, and one of them decided to have a go at the PlayStation Move demo booth.”

For Mathijs, the image of a big, intimidating Helghast soldier waving about an innocuous game peripheral just felt off. “I could scarcely imagine him playing a game like Killzone that way,” Mathijs says. “He looked like he should be holding something resembling a weapon – something with a little oomph to it. A peripheral that not only played well, but looked cool at the same time.”

The event got Mathijs thinking about an add-on for the PlayStation Move. “We’d toyed with the idea of designing a Killzone-themed gun peripheral before,” Mathijs says, “but with the introduction of the PlayStation Move, that idea suddenly seemed a lot more feasible. The timing was right as well, because development on Killzone 3 was still in its early stages.”

Early mockups consisted of kitbashed gun peripherals from other platforms.

Mathijs voiced his idea at a Director’s Panel, where Sony Product Design Manager Ennin Huang was also in attendance. Having worked with the SOCOM team on the first Bluetooth headset for PlayStation 3, Ennin was heavily involved with the development of PlayStation peripherals. “After the panel, Ennin approached us and said he very much liked the idea of a solid, realistic-looking Move add-on,” Mathijs says. “He advised us to put together an official proposal and submit it to the Product Design team.”

For his proposal, Mathijs enlisted the help of Guerrilla Lead Concept Designer (and resident weapons expert) Roy Postma. “Mathijs wanted to design a gun peripheral that could represent the majority of firearms in Killzone 3,” Roy says. “We chose the Helghast StA-11 SMG as our starting point: like most weapons in the game it requires two hands to operate, but at the same time it’s quite compact.”

The first mockup housed the navigation controller in the rear grip.

Using foam board, duct tape and pieces of gun peripherals from several different platforms, Mathijs and Roy then constructed a mockup roughly approximating the StA-11’s size and shape. The mockup housed the navigation controller in the rear grip and the Move controller in the barrel, while a trigger mechanism in the fore grip connected to the Move’s T-button. This setup, however, proved impractical.

“When you play Killzone 3 on a DualShock 3 controller, you move around with your left thumb and fire with your right index finger,” Roy explains. “Our first mockup had it the other way around, making the setup somewhat awkward for right-handed people. So I went back to the drawing board to design a clip/fore grip that could house the navigation controller. I also moved the firing trigger back to the rear grip, where it normally resides on an StA-11.”

Guerrilla CEO Hermen Hulst tries out the revised mockup.

Instead of relying on a complicated (and possibly error-prone) physical pass-through mechanism to bridge the distance to the Move’s T-button, the trigger could simply be wired up to the Move’s extension connector digitally. This solution allowed Roy to add additional buttons to the body of the peripheral, saving players from having to reach for the Move controller in the barrel whenever they wanted to reload or swap weapons.

In the meantime, Mathijs worked on the proposal document, outlining the type of user experience he had in mind for the gun peripheral. “I wanted players to experience a sense of joy as soon as they picked up the peripheral,” Mathijs says. “It not only had to look cool and authentic, I also wanted it to feel like a weapon. It had to enhance the overall experience of playing a shooter on the PlayStation 3.”

Check back next week for the second part of sharp shooter Origins, in which the Guerrilla team gets help from their friends at Zipper Interactive!