Hello friends!
Alex here with a brief update on the latest and greatest. We’ve spent the last couple of weeks on administrative & planning tasks as we look to scale up the development of Deadside.
I wanted to talk to everyone here and give some transparency to the things we’re working on/planning around. This isn’t an official roadmap or feature list, this is an overview of the challenges we’ll be going through as we ramp up. Think of this as a behind the curtain look at game development and the discussions happening. And let us know in the comments if you'd want more updates like this.
How to scale a team
Before we can start hiring new members, we’re doing an in-depth evaluation of the code with a co-development team. It’s not always a good idea to start rapidly hiring new people as you need to identify the positions you need. This co-dev team (I won’t name them yet) has previously helped us on several Unreal Engine 4 projects (Deadside’s game engine) and worked on AA-level shooters. The idea here is to have a team come in and help evaluate the amount of work, start helping the original team, and gradually form a structure within Bad Pixel itself. There are engineering challenges which are difficult to scope out, and due to this we don’t know exactly what kind of profiles/positions we need to hire for until we evaluate the amount of work. This is already in progress.
The Netcode Challenge
The biggest challenge will likely be the netcode in general. So far we’ve discovered that the main limitation for the game comes from the server-side code. Things like storage are limited mostly due to this. We do want to give players more boxes in bases. Player count is also currently limited by some fundamental bottlenecks. These challenges are all solvable, they will just need time and resources.
VEHICLES WHEN
Vehicles have been a highly requested feature in Deadside. While I can’t speak for the team on if/when, I can talk you through the backend challenges that arise from implementing such features. First off, if we talk about ground transportation, the biggest issue is that we would want the server to have authority over the vehicle. The server needs to verify movement of the object, and give minimal “trust” to the peer (player). Otherwise cheaters could have a field day - feeding data into the server and you’d see cars flying all over the place. For collisions to work properly, a lot of work needs to be done and tested in live circumstances. In its current implementation, ground vehicles would feel very “rubberbandy”. A stepping stone for this could be vehicles that don’t require collisions - floating or flying ones. So expect a stepping stone before ground vehicles would be considered.
The second challenge with vehicles is building a system that “binds” passengers to the object, so that everyone is moving in sync.
And third is game design. There needs to be lots of thought put into how vehicles would spawn, where they are kept, how/if they decay, and most importantly - where to go using them.
I anticipate both the netcode and vehicle challenges will collide and require some work under the hood, so we will need to balance that with other features that can currently be done without issues (i.e. new locations).
THE SNIPER TTK DEBATE
Like many of you I fell in love with Deadside because of its gunplay. The only real challenge we have there is to figure out how to increase the TTK (time to kill) by snipers. Nerfing the weapons would be an obvious choice, however might not be the most fun. We’re exploring different options here - from sound design to more ways to med -- to more “out there” ideas like tactical shields (tell us in the comments what comes to mind when you imagine that!)
Speaking of sound design - in many games, you hear the gun pop before a bullet lands or wizzes by. In real life, it’s actually the opposite - a bullet flies faster than the speed of sound, especially in sniper rifles. So this is a question of realism vs practicality. If you could hear the pop sooner, it gives you a moment to react to sniper fire. In reality though, you’d hear the pop post-factum.
VARIOUS DISCUSSIONS
- Raiding. We believe it’s the best fun you can have in an online shooter when a raid is happening on the map. We also believe there should be a system that gradually decays bases when owners have left, so that at one point you could offline abandoned bases. This creates both gameplay for non-confrontational players, and eases the servers. This would need to come with more tools to raid.
- Building. We need more things to do in the bases, alongside building more interesting structures.
- Optimization. There’s already a plan in place for an optimization pass for the game. We will find a time to plan that in as we scale the team up.
Outside-of-game housekeeping
We’ve done some housekeeping on the Steam page, and I hope you’ll enjoy some of the community-picked screenshots. The page description has been updated, a couple of pieces of missing artwork were added, and we’re working on a redesigned website that’d also host a press kit for influencers.
SUMMARIZING
This is a nutshell a summary of the latest behind the scenes developments without talking about what the development team is actually working on right now. I hope it gives you an idea of how we think about the future of Deadside, and would love to hear what you think in the comments.
I also hangout on the official discord - https://discord.gg/u4pYuZ9g4F
Thanks for reading
See you in the game
PS some work in progress visuals
