Jens Andersson, the design director behind last year’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, has a long history of working on first-person games that don’t play anything like a standard FPS.
At Starbreeze, Andersson worked as lead designer on 2004’s The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay and 2007’s The Darkness, both first-person shooters that placed an unusual emphasis on story, environment, and making the player feel like they totally occupied the headspace of the hero character.
With 2024’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which Andersson worked on alongside a number of his former Starbreeze colleagues, among many others at MachineGames, that specific first-person DNA is absolutely still there. This is a game where players inhabit the role of Indiana Jones in a way they’ve never experienced before, from exploring tombs across the world to slapstick brawls and improvising to get out of trouble.
Ahead of a keynote at Develop:Brighton 2025 with MachineGames colleague and audio director, Pete Ward, Andersson speaks to GamesIndustry.biz about the aftermath of making Indy.
Congratulations on the success of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. How does it feel to be able to go around the world and talk about it now that it’s done, upcoming DLC aside?
Thank you! It’s really great. You spend so much of your time being sworn to secrecy, so having the game out for everyone to play is fantastic. This is the sweet spot of time – when people discover the game, play it, and have it fresh in their minds. You’re always eager to hear people’s thoughts of what you’ve poured your heart into for the last few years.
Can you tease anything about the content of your keynote at Develop:Brighton, ‘The Spirit of Adventure – Bringing Indiana Jones Back to Gaming’?
Developing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was such a unique experience. A game released in 2024, based on movies from the 1980s and that takes place in the 1930s. Pete and I will go into how we approached that and made it our own, and some of the challenges we faced along the way.
It’s quite rare for a big game to release in December – how did you find the experience of launching a game in that window?
Yeah. Traditionally, December is not a month a big game would consider launching in, but games going digital has changed this. But as a developer, the date doesn’t matter too much. It was fun to see the reaction of people who had already started to roll out their game-of-the-year lists and then had to scramble because they wanted to include Indy as well. Also, it was very nice to be able to finish the game and then go spend holidays with the family – an opportunity for the whole team to take some well-deserved time off.
The game got a fair amount of scrutiny from people who wanted a third-person experience. The first-person perspective won people over. As a studio, why do you believe so firmly in the first-person perspective? Why has it been so successful for you creatively?
Well, that’s easy. First-person perspective is objectively the best perspective…
Seriously though, we knew that this would be a controversial choice for Indy, but it’s something that we were extremely passionate about, and it was never up for debate.
First person has a few clear benefits, like being naturally immersive. But most importantly, the Indiana Jones game we wanted to create was to make you be Indy, and this is best served as a first-person game. We have so much institutional knowledge at MachineGames on how to work with that perspective, so we were confident that we could pull that off – even if we knew it would be a challenge to convince the world of this.
A lot of the original leads at Starbreeze have worked together for years. What difference does it make to the process of developing games when you have that built-in expertise and way of working together?
Ask any big studio about what their biggest challenge is, and I think ‘communication’ will come out on top. It takes a huge amount of time and effort to align your team with a creative vision and to coordinate the work effectively. When you’ve worked together for as long as some of us have, there is a natural shorthand. You usually already know when your ideas are [perfectly] in sync, or where you need to spend time aligning.
You also know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and will naturally compensate. You have a shared history of things you’ve worked on together, and more often a shared reference library of games/movies/books that you can reference when you need to explain a thought or idea.
Finally, there is the trust that you’ve built that you get after having worked together for years and decades. It’s family.
Was it a challenge to make a game of Indy’s scale with the size of the studio you have at MachineGames?
Making games is always a challenge and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was a very ambitious undertaking for us. But just as challenging as the scale was the type of the game we were building. During development it was really hard to try to present what the game would become, both to the team and to our partners. It deviated too much from other big games to be able to say: “That’s kind of what we are doing but with Indy”.
There weren’t really any fitting modern adventures to point to, so we had to champion our own term: “a MachineGames Adventure”, which encapsulated many of the design pillars of the game.
Have you learned anything from players’ response to the game?
I think the best lesson was that our trust in players was well spent. From a design point of view, we had a lot to prove by making such a story-heavy game as open as we did. I wasn’t sure that our solutions to that inherent conflict would resonate with players as well as it did. There’s of course always stuff that you wish you could’ve improved, but after hearing all the feedback, there is nothing specific I wish we would have done differently.
How long was the process of figuring out what the gameplay mix should be in the game?
Surprisingly we had the gameplay mix laid out from very early on. One of the original pitch-decks for the game had a pie-chart with six slices: Hand-to-Hand, Platforming, Exploration & Puzzles, Infiltration, Set-Pieces, and Shooting. These were the gameplay cornerstones of what we felt was important, and this remains true in the game we shipped.
What was harder to figure out was how they fit together. And how to resolve things like the natural tendencies for players to resort to shooting, just because that’s what they expect from a first-person game.
Puzzles and exploration are slightly different gameplay elements than we’re used to from MachineGames’ past projects – as a studio, how did you make sure these parts of the game were as world-class as the combat?
Yes, these were new things for us. Luckily, we have a few people, myself included, that are huge fans of puzzles, so it was a fun challenge. It took us a while to figure out what types of puzzles fit into the game, and I’m especially happy how we found a nice mix of larger, more epic puzzles that were part of the general progress and complemented that with the optional, sometimes hidden, mysteries that we scattered throughout the game.
As for exploration, that was also trickier, because it requires you to relinquish control over to the player. We wanted to encourage the player to deviate from the story path. There’s a lot of forces on a big development that push you into the other direction – it adds a lot of added work and risk if we allow the player to do what they want. And especially so if the quality bar is very high.
Can you watch the Indiana Jones movies in the same way now, after using them as reference materials for so many years?
Honestly, no. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to watch them as anything [other] than reference material ever again. We’ve lived so close to the franchise for such a long time that you can’t stop yourself from picking apart every environment and scene in case there is something more to learn there. The brain just automatically spins up ideas on how you can turn that segment into a video game. And since the game is now out, I’ll probably take a little rest from the movies, however great they may be.
GamesIndustry.biz is a media partner for Develop:Brighton 2025. Save 10% on tickets with the code EMFQZT. Disclosure: the article author previously worked in a PR capacity for Bethesda, including on Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
