Good day heisters!
Are you ready for a surprise bonus blog? You better be, cuz you’re getting one!
The upcoming update has something we can call a “bonus feature” that one of our coders took it upon himself to create out of nothing more than stubbornness and the kindness of his heart.
What is this bonus feature you ask? Well, OVERKILL weapons will no longer plop down listlessly on a random street in full view of overeager snipers and cloakers. Instead they get delivered right to your feet, like a dog in old movies delivering the morning newspaper. Good drone.
This absolute beast of a dev had to blaze new trails in order to get this feature done, increasing his own skillset while delivering cool features to the hungry PAYDAY audience (things are getting hot in the kitchen with all the things you want us to cook).
So we asked Suat, that’s his name by the way, Suat Kucukgol—nope, we can’t pronounce it either—to help us understand the journey of this cool new feature from conception to release. We hope you find it as interesting as we did writing this!
Interview with Suat
● How come the decision was made that we should change how OVERKILL weapons would be delivered to players?
Since the release of PAYDAY 3, there have been ongoing conversations, both internally and externally, about how OVERKILL weapons are delivered to players.
At some point after discussion #69 (nice), I jokingly kept nagging our AI programmer, saying, ‘You should make a drone that drops the weapon!’ His response was, ‘You do it!’ At the time, there was a heavy workload. Fixing AI bugs and implementing a new AI revival system (see patch notes here) were the priorities. While I was working on those tasks, our Game Director at the time came by and asked me if I could make a prototype of a drone that would deliver the OVK weapon. And with that, we were in business!
● How did the development of the Deliver Drone go? Was it hard to get the AI to understand how it needed to navigate buildings, and get to players?
Yes, it was tough. I think I spent around 3-4 months of side-project time trying to get it to work as it does now. It went through several stages. The first prototype had a limitation. It could only fly to the player if they were in a large, open space. If that wasn’t the case, it would fly to a backup point and leave the weapon there. If it couldn’t find that point, it would just leave the weapon where it spawned.
Overall, the biggest issue I ran into was that all of our original heists weren’t built with drones in mind, because drones weren’t in the game until Syntax Error (having been added with Techies, read more about that here). On these heists, the drone couldn’t reliably fly to the player and would often choose the backup points. I needed to adapt the drone. My goal was to make it function like Techie’s drone. Techie’s drone despawns and respawns to find a new path if the initial path is blocked. However, that didn’t really work.
The next step was to allow the drones to fly to the point closest to the players, hoping to get the weapon as close as possible so one wouldn’t have to run to the backup points, as those wouldn’t have been much different from the helicopter drops. I believe that this is what cemented the drones in this project, as that change made them better than the current helicopter drops. The OVK weapon could now navigate to the players.
Once that work was completed, we added the build into the QA branches for testing. This is where the true fun began, as bugs started to arrive in droves. I was getting reports about the OVK weapons being placed out of reach of players (on roofs, in walls, outside the map itself, etc.). The drone also liked to drop the weapon on the other side of the wall from where the player was when it was unable to get inside the building. All of these bugs made QA question whether the drone was really better than the current helicopter drop, because at least then you could run outside, fight the cops, pick up the gun, and get back inside.
However, I didn’t let this deter me! The next step was the hardest yet: implementing nav links for the drones. For the uninitiated, nav links help guide NPCs through a game world, telling them where they can and can’t go, and how to get around obstacles.
During the whole time I was working on the drone, I had a thought in the back of my mind: ‘Nav links for the drone would have been great!’ Now was the time to finally figure out how to make that work. After all, I didn’t know anything about pathfinding or nav links, so how was I meant to figure this out?
I started to research how pathfinding actually worked and what made a nav link function. After weeks of research and testing (and some banging of my head into a wall), I finally had something that worked! I could get the drone to fly through a nav link and get to places it couldn’t reach before. Great success!
● Did you have to learn anything new to develop this?
Yes, AI! I hadn’t worked much on AI before this, as I’m a Generalist Gameplay Programmer, so my experience on previous features are on things such as Zipline, Breaching equipment, WiFi circles (yeah I know), and such projects. None of these were really applicable to AI, drones and pathfinding, so I had to sit down and learn more about AI in Unreal, and specifically about pathfinding!
● What other departments did you work with to get this working?
I worked with the audio department to get the right sounds for the drone, and with level design to make the pathing for the drone for each heist working!
Then of course we can’t forget about QA! Without their intensive testing and feedback the final push to allow the drones to fly through doors and windows wouldn’t have happened!
● Any fun trivia that you’d like to share from the development?
Early on in development the idea was for the drone to follow the players until it was ready to drop the weapon, but that didn’t even get tested by QA because I already found enough bugs to break it. For example, running around the map, or just hopping in and out a window was enough to confuse and break the poor drone.
Delivery drones were incredibly helpful. They revealed numerous bugs we wouldn’t have otherwise discovered. Many of these bugs were related to air navigation. For example, we found large areas lacking air navigation. In other places, the air navigation was too far from the ground. This all meant that you could trick the Techie’s drones to fly back and forth by going up and down stairs for example!
As a final word on this, I don’t know if it was my nagging that got this to happen, but I want to give credit to a person on Reddit who made a comment (after the release of Syntax Error) saying how cool it would be if the PAYDAY gang and Shade could use the drones as delivery drones, which is what got my brain going on the idea. Your name may be forgotten, but your idea lives on!
If you made it this far then congrats, you get this drone (don’t tell the Techie)! We hope you found this blog interesting, who knows, perhaps we will make more if we have something similar in the future. If not, let us know anyway so we don’t put effort in the wrong places.
The drone delivery system is coming in the next game update. So next time that you find yourself in a tough situation, surrounded by cops, then pull out your phone and call in your new friend! They’re happy to help by dropping your chosen OVERKILL weapon at your location for easy access. Bile on the other hand is getting a pay cut. It seems no one is safe from having their job stolen by a robot, not even in the digital world.