Hello dear reader, and welcome to the last weekly developer article. I wanted to spend this update writing about the ways that you can make your life easier in Dead End Job, and some of the fun trinkets you can find lying around the locations you bust ghosts.
Just like in real life, the main way that you can make things easier for yourself is by getting promoted, and in Dead End Job this happens whenever you catch enough ghosts. Along with your new job title a promotion also brings the opportunity to pick one of three randomly chosen perks. We didn’t want to show players a big skill tree and allow them to have total choice over how their character build progresses, for two reasons. First, in that situation people will usually figure out an optimal configuration and a whole lot of options will get ignored from that point forward. And secondly, looking through all of the options and making the choices would slow the game down, whereas showing just three choices keeps things nice and snappy.
So this method encourages playing with different power ups, while still allowing you some choice over your build. Some perks also lock out others from being available - for example poison shots & cold shots can’t be chosen on the same build. We found that some combinations, like bouncy shots and multiple shots, were very funny but totally broke the game with how overpowered they were!
Not all perks affect your guns, and some of my favourites affect the game in other ways.
For example, Verbal Warning gets you a free pass from HR, so you get to keep all of your other perks if you happen to get demoted. This is a super useful one!
King of Combo gives an increasing bonus for capturing ghosts within a short space of time, and Occult Catching Dividend gives you a bonus for capturing the ghosts in a room in the order the game tells you to.
Speed Demon (which gives an extra reward for completing jobs as quickly as possible) combined with the Cash Converter (which gives you less frequent promotions, but more money per ghost) is a very good combination for speed runners hoping to complete the month as quickly as possible.
And then there’s Supercharged Vacuum which allows you to use the vacuum to suck up the ectoplasm that ghosts shoot, quickly switching between attack and defence.
Our sense of humour is kind of the core thing running through the whole game, and I think that’s most clear in the selection of weird items that you find lying around. We wanted one hundred of them (because arbitrary large numbers make me feel like I’m earning my wages), and we had a crazy amount of fun thinking of stupid things, and what they might do.
Items are spread across different rarity bands from “Common” at the bottom, all the way up to “It Belongs In A Museum” and this affects how likely you are to stumble across an item on any particular job, and how well guarded they might be (rarer items tend to be further from the entrance room, and are sometimes even coated in a slime shell - so you’ll have to clear the room to collect them).
Common items can often be discovered by smashing up furniture as well - Though remember that Hector only has two pockets, so don’t be stingy about using anything you find!
Obviously as the game’s developed in Scotland, we had to put in some bagpipes that blast out a jaunty jig that hurts the ears of every ghost nearby. (Tony note: did we actually have to include them? Should probably check with legal on this. They really do sound bloody awful.)
You can make Hector radioactive, or shrink him down tiny, or make his head huge, or how about just turning him in to a magical unicorn, leaving a trail of rainbows?
There are a selection of weapon items, and these are all useful because as well as firing in a different way to your usual plasma blaster, they also don’t cause any heat buildup. The railgun is particularly powerful, but tricky to master as it has a short charge-up time before blasting energy straight through enemies and scenery alike.
And so, the last(?) “Makin' A Dead End Job” article comes to an end. I really hope you’ve enjoyed reading these weekly looks behind the scenes at the team and how the game came together. I’ve really enjoyed writing them, even though there’s still so much I could still write about - more items, weird enemies, silly jokes and daft scenes, not to mention the Twitch and Mixer interactivity! And if you’ve still got a thirst for even more concept art, there’s a gallery within the game with thirty unlockable pieces.
Dead End Job launches on Friday 13th December (wooOOoo spooky), hope you enjoy it!
Thanks again,
Tony xxx
PS: Here is an artist’s impression of me getting a phone call from Valve about how many copies we’ve sold – please help make it come true!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/827610