SGA Insights: Cairn or how to build a mountain

SGA Insights 26.05.2026.
Time 3 PM - 6 PM
Language English
Location Impact Hub
Price free

SGA Insights: Cairn or how to build a mountain

Have you ever wondered how to create a space that feels so natural you want to explore every part of it? Or how does a team decide what the player can and can't do while still making it feel believable and fun? In this workshop, we'll talk about the process of creating a complex environment, the challenges that arise along the way, and how ideas change and adapt during development. The focus will be on the intersection of design, technical constraints and creative decisions that shape the player experience.

Thanks to the support of the French Institute and the Game Caravan project, we have the opportunity to have as our guest Steven Slater, Lead Level Designer from the studio The Game Bakers in France. This studio works hard to create games that you will remember and that will make you feel alive and full of energy. They say they make games as they cook: with a lot of heart, their secret recipes, and they know that you can feel the passion that went into them. They work on original creations that they publish themselves. They are known for the games Cairn, Furi and Haven.

Steven’s presentation will be related to one of them: Cairn.

One mountain, hundreds of walls, thousands of possible routes. When creating the mountain of Cairn, the team decided early that they wanted to make everything climbable and that they needed to build everything by hand.

In this talk, Steven will show the process and tools used by the team to build a climbable wall, how they adapted to the evolving technical and artistic constraints throughout the project and how they iterated on their design principles in order to make all of it worth climbing.

IMPORTANT: This event is for SGA members only.

 

This edition of SGA Insights was conducted through the Game Caravan project, which is implemented in collaboration with the French Institute.

 

Steven Slater,
Lead Level Designer, The Game Bakers
About the lecturer

Steven’s been working at The Game Bakers for the past 10 years, where he had the chance to work on Furi, Haven and Cairn. On Cairn specifically, he spent most of his time trying to facilitate the work of their level design team, setting up the workflow, guidelines and reviews, which meant a whole lot of time spent looking at rocks. He also spent time with the 3C programming team to test, tweak and fine-tune the climbing gameplay, which did not mean a whole lot of time asking for unreasonable new climbing features, of course.

View all programs