Some exciting internal news! We’ve been having weekly playtests over the past couple of months, experiencing all the different cogs we’ve been working on coming together in the latest builds.
A handful of our devs attempting a “selfie” to say hi to you before splitting into groups for a session.
Enjoy the awkward jazz hands, dino dance moves and a surprise doggo.
Of course, each department has been running their own playthroughs to test their areas of work, alongside having resident QA testers running through the builds, but we hadn’t played altogether as a Jaw Drop Games family until this summer. It’s been awesome!
The features are starting to come together now and the world is shaping up. The Kill System in particular has given everyone a boost to see working. But like most things in life, not everything goes to plan. Naturally, with all this playtesting, we’ve come across a bug or two. Until we can show you some gameplay, we thought you’d appreciate some dev stories that have come out of our internal sessions.
From jump scares gone wrong
A little studio insight, Ray is usually really chill!
“I was polishing an internal visual test, to which there are quite a few components. So, the majority of my day was spent running around looking for problems. I would spawn in, check a couple of things, take some notes then quit out and fix any problems. Rinse, repeat. It was near the end of the day so I thought I'd update to the latest changes. just in case anyone's work had affected what I had been doing and just generally have a final run-through.
So, I grabbed the latest build, loaded the engine back up, took a quick fly around and then decided to hop into the game to do a final run-through. I checked out a bridge, checked some cargo containers to make sure they were sitting properly, no weird holes, rain working right and then I turned around to walk through the rest of the space. I turned around to....a Raptor. In my face, right in front of me.
I don't think I've ever screamed that loudly before, my partner ran to me to make sure I was okay. It was not cool at all. It's one thing to get spooked, it's another thing when it happens so unexpectedly, I was just trying to work. Damn dinosaurs!!” - Ray, Environment Artist
“I came around the corner between two █████████ while sneaking past Raptors. I had completely forgotten that I'd put the T-Rex spawn there. So, when I came in, suddenly I was face-to-knee with the T-Rex! It leaned forward and roared at me. I immediately ran between its legs to get away. All I could hear was it thundering about behind me, turning around and trying to catch me!” Morgan, Level Designer
To things that are just plain strange
But success strikes too
As many “Oopsie” style moments as we’ve had, there have equally been some perfect playthrough moments too. Can’t beat this feeling when we played last week:
Building the AI for this game is no easy feat but we’re determined to get it right! As challenging as this game is to build, bugs are actually essential for us at this point in development. We’ll happily tackle as many bugs as possible now if it means the overall game experience for you at launch will be of a higher quality!
Until next time...
As the game reaches a new phase of critical development, we're going to be slowing down on community updates to focus our efforts on the game itself. In the meantime, join us and the rest of the community over on Discord to stay connected. (Don’t forget, you can also find and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok.) We're excited to work on a global marketing campaign with our new publisher, and we're really looking forward to talking more about Deathground on a broader scale when this campaign kicks off. The team is hard at work to make sure we deliver the best possible experience to our fans. Thank you for your support and patience, please stay tuned for a lot of exciting stuff in the future!
- Jaw Drop Games -