It's been two months since the release of the demo. We got tons of feedback from both players and experienced gamedev colleagues. Getting positive feedback is sure nice, but negative or even neutral feedback were the things we tried to focus on since this particular kind of feedback is what makes you understand the weaknesses of your game.
Everyone agreed that Dead Weight was visually stunning. A lot of players said that the game's art style was the reason they decided to give it a try.
When it came to gameplay, opinions were polarized.
We showcased some of the core game mechanics in the demo: turn-based combat with only ONE action per character and fuel management of the global map. By creating these, we wanted to show that Dead Weight is a hardcore type of game.
On the one hand, it did work; some of the players really appreciated these mechanics. On the other hand, a lot of players have found them too hardcore and borderline unfun. Gamedev professionals said that having only one turn on such small battlefields was too punishing for the players. The fuel management system was also found to be unforgiving and tiresome.
How to shoot your own leg
It became clear that the game mechanics needed some kind of rework. At the same time, we decided that it was finally time to turn Dead Weight into what it was always supposed to be: a roguelike game.
Right when we started working on it, we encountered a huge obstacle. Two months ago, a junior dev who volunteered to work on the game suggested reworking the code part of the game UI. It took us a month to finish. Can you imagine our faces when we realized that these changes made reworking game mechanics almost impossible?
It took us one more month to revert all the changes. To be honest, sometimes echos of it can still be seen in the code, and our devs sometimes still wake up in cold sweat with only one word in their heads: "Winhud"...
The importance of proper documentation
As soon as the changes were reverted, we began the long and difficult process of doing reworks. First of all, we wanted to understand what direction we should move in and what changes we wanted to make.
How it feels to work without a design document
Since the early development stages, we have thought of Dead Wegith as roguelike. That's when we also came up with its unique mechanics. Our first question was: how do we put those inside the boundries of a roguelike genre? We really hoped that an understanding of this would come to us later. It didn't happen. The situation became even worse when it turned out that the core mechanics needed a rework.
All these problems appeared because of one mistake we made. Since we weren't particularly experienced at the beginning of the development, we haven't made a proper design document. We always postponed this important part of the production. That's why we couldn't picture what the final version of our game should look like.
Obviously, we had to make it right. We gathered all the strength that had left after the UI changes and started working on a proper design document. An experienced game designer agreed to help us with it. He has been helping us for two months, and soon the Dead Weight design document will be finished.
Unclassified documents
We've already mentioned that Dead Weight was originally supposed to be a roguelike game. So we reflected this in our design document.
As in any other roguelike game, the core gameplay of Dead Weight will consist of multiple runs on different maps, akin to the one we had in the demo. Of course, the silimalarity will be mostly visual. In terms of gameplay, things will be different.
A pirate turned rogue
Each run will happen on a unique map with the main city in the center of it. From this city, the "brunches" of islands will grow. The further an island is from the center, the harder it is to beat it. During a run, the player will have access to 80% of upgrades; the remaining 20% will be available in the hub between runs. Each one of them can be finished either through death or by completing a series of actions that move the story forward.
The player will still be able to move between the islands on their ship, and the fuel management system will still be an important part of gameplay. Although you won't die the moment your ship is out of fuel since the ship also has sails. After the fuel tanks become empty, the player's ship will start to drift. After some time, the player will find themselves near some random (or not) location. This will not only make fuel management less frustrating but also create a completely new gameplay mechanic.
POV: your ship started drifting, and you woke up in Skyrim
The most challenging part was the combat system. We had to rework it while keeping it rather unique. We decided to take multiple approaches. During the last two months, we tested four new systems.
Our first idea was to split the action resources into movement points and attack points. It made the game way faster, but also made it harder since the enemies were also using these new rules.
The second idea was simple: keep the combat as it is and just add more characters for the player to control.
The third idea was a mix between our old system and the first one we talked about. In this new system, you could hoard action points and get them by upgrading your character. We really like this variant and most likely will use it. It deepens the gameplay and makes character classes more unique. We also decided to keep the teammates in this variant.
The last idea was inspired by Into the Breach. We tried to let all player characters move at the same time. It highlights the tactical aspect of Dead Weight, but it also makes the game less unique.
Visual updates
While working on balancing and game mechanics, we didn't forget about the visual part of Dead Weight.
We are working on new effects for everything! The battles will look so much cooler now. These effects also made it easier to understand what's going on: it's clear that you got hit with a granade if you see an exlosion, right?
Besides adding these effects, we also made new falling animations for everyone! No more invisible black holes sucking goblins in. Now everyone will fall into The Abyss while thinking about all the wrong life choices they've made.
What about marketing?
Everything is amazing!
This March, we broke all records. We got more than 12 000 wishlists and got into Top Wishlisted category. All thanks to our Twitter (X) ads campaign we launched two months ago.
Dead Weight got noticed by GamingBible and Turn-Based Lovers. Angory Tom made a whole video about our game with tons of amazing jokes about OSHA violations.
You've probably heard about Princess Hunter and their amazing comics, so the person responsible for these helped us make our own comics. With his assistance, we created four stories and posted them on our social media. People on Reddit loved them! They fell in love with our silly goblin guy.
The man of your dreams
Our team became bigger! Recently, we hired one more really nice developer. Now six people are working on Dead Weight.
We have even more cool stuff planned. We want to make sure that everyone and their mother know about Dead Weight!
Apparently, now we have fans all over the world, so we are working on a new demo version, and we will make sure to add more supported languages and make it as accessible as possible.
March (and February) in numbers
He-he, LEET
- 6 devs shocked by the number of wishlists
- 100+ hours spent on reverting the UI changes
- 1
almostfinished design document - 420 cups of tea were drunk by devs
- 4 variants of the combat system were done
- gained more than 1 300 position in Top wishlisted
- got more than 12 000 wishlists
- 5 articles about Dead Weight were released in the media
- 1 new version of the demo is in the works