Hello everyone, my name is Adam and I'm the producer and community manager at Deadhead studios. We are a student team at the Breda University of applied sciences, a dutch university with a study specifically about game creation.
We have been working on the game in a team of fluctuating size, throughout development we've gone from 14 to 16 to 23, then back to 19. The team is about half artists, quarter designers and quarter programmers.
The whole study is project-based, meaning we have very few lectures and mostly learn by doing, and this is our largest project yet. The school year that we are spending on this game is divided into four, 2 month long blocks, with each of them roughly corresponding to one of the stages of video game production (concepting -> pre-production -> production -> post-release). This year-long project has been a big challenge, but one that pushed us forward a lot.
Throughout the whole development we have been plagued by both real life diseases (ironic considering our game's theme) and a lack of clear vision. With the guidance of our lecturers, we were able to climb at least somewhat out of this rut and we think that the final game we'll present to you towards the end of May/start of June will be a fun one. The development had some turbulence, but game devs are a resilient people.
The game itself is, as you probably saw on the store page, a Venice based horde shooter with online co-op. You play as members of a secret organization trying to rid Venice of the filthy undead. We are hoping to create an experience upwards of 15 minutes in duration.
Unsurprisingly, multiplayer has turned out to be a huge time sink. Even with the help of GAS and the unreal engine replication framework, getting the game to work properly, let alone testing it so that it feels nice difficulty-wise was very difficult, since for any proper playtest, we needed 3 people. The trade-off, of course, is that multiplayer is fun! Running around with friends and shooting at stuff (or each other) is a gaming staple, and being able to overcome this mountain of technical difficulty has been hugely satisfying.
To sum this all up, we are a small student team that went through a semi-troubled development of a co-op shooter, which we are gonna be releasing in late May/early June.
We sincerely hope that when you play the game, you will feel the hard work we have put in.