Deadhold
The Status of Deadhold - Post Mortem
We've let our community and players down, and this is clearly not what we had in mind when we started Deadhold four years ago. Thank you everyone for the enormous amount of support and trust you gave us these last 4 years, and for the vision we had, I'm sorry we let you down. :(
Why we're ceasing development of Deadhold
Plain and simple, we can't afford to continue development. The cost for ongoing development exceeds revenue (and has for some time). Sales were well below our grimmest projections for a worst case. While I'm proud of the work we did, and the team we built, it still remains that we dropped the ball on the business side badly.
This, in conjunction with scoping too large, with some idealistic thinking sprinkled in, has brought us to the current situation.
Post Mortem
So, what the hell happened? Below is a brief post mortem on the last 3-4 years of development and how we ended up at this point. I hope this will help our community understand the sorts of pitfalls we encountered, where we think we went wrong, and maybe help other developers avoid some of the same mistakes.
Things we did Wrong
1. Marketing
We needed to put as much time and resources towards marketing and community building as we did on development. That's a bit of a catch-22, if you're a tiny team with a shoestring budget. We did put a significant amount of time and money towards marketing, but not nearly enough or in the right places. You need to have someone with connections to media, money to buy ads, or be able to put in enormous amounts of time and effort for grass roots marketing (or ideally, all three).
There's no getting around this, and with the saturation of amazing games on steam, its pretty brutal. (who doesnt have at _least_ 30 games they've bought that they're "going to play sometime")
2. The industry changes RAPIDLY
When we started development in 2014, steam and youtube were pretty different. Gaming on youtube was raining attention on games (at least it seemed so), and it was easy to think a really top quality and unique game could garner a lot of attention. We didn't assume we'd just have attention lavished on us, but we certainly were too optimistic in retrospect.
2. Scope
As seasoned game developers we felt we could punch above our weight. However, just because you can, it doesn't mean you can do so sustainably, or well enough to keep the company lights on.
We rationalized that single player, coop and competitive multiplayer were all requirements for a successful game. In retrospect, I felt coop horde was the core part of the game. So to other developers I say, hunt for the core of your game, and double and triple down on that, rather than expanding to do everything.
All the developers I know, work on games to make cool shit, with cool people. Reconciling the creative ambition with producing a product you can sell to people, and continue doing so ... is the true magic trick this industry constantly struggles with, _especially_ the indie sector.
3. Length of Development
The longer your development continues, the higher the chance some catastrophic project killing event will happen. While I'm listing moving to Unity was something we did right, in hindsight it was the right reason, but what we should have done is taken that opportunity to simultaneously scope it down agressively. (instead we did the opposite)
We continued through 3-4 years of development before launch, and were extremely lucky not to have life events impact us existentially before the launch date, but its a bit of a lottery. If your project is scoped correctly, you minimize that risk.
4. Over-Planning for Scale
This is a bit harder to list as a wrong, but specifically I wanted to point out that we opted for dedicated servers. The reasoning for this was to reduce latency, avoid disconnects killing whole games, and remove cheating as an issue for competitive games and tourneys. I personally feel (at least in retrospect) there's something to be said for starting using p2p and then building out a dedicated network given the resources.
We did some really neat things like writing bots using aws instances to stress test the login server and game server instances, but we never got to the point where that robustness was tested.
Things we did Right
1. Focusing on quality.
This is a double edged sword, but you really can't NOT focus on quality. High ratings are one of the best ways to ensure when people see your game, that they'll play it, and enjoy it. Why even bother making a game if you can't be proud of it?
2. Spending the time to solve hard problems
We took the time to really nail the formation system and pathfinding. The resurrection system was nearly a revelation when we first got it in. Don't be afraid to really drill down and tackle hard problems if they're core to your game.
2. Discord and having a hang out with testers
We dabbled with slack, and irc for a bit, but discord hit all the right notes. With discord we were able to grab crash logs, upload screenshots, have discussion channels etc. Simply put Discord was critical to building a support group around us to motivate us and inspire us.
3. Unity
The switch to Unity set us back, the game was completely rewritten, but the game was infinitely better for it.
4. Team
Last but not least, we had a really great team. We got lucky with our dev members being extremely talented, but we also had an amazing group of friends around us who helped us play, test, offer advice, and suggest crazy ideas that helped shape Deadhold into what it was. If you're making a game, I reccommend building a tight knit group of players and friends around you, its essential.
Last Words
There's no detailed map for charting indie development waters (and they shift all the time). When making decisions its rarely clear what choices are correct, and correct in what context. A lot of the above is going to seem stunningly obvious, but there's a difference between knowing something technically, and identifying situations by experience.
There's some regrets, but life's too short not to try.
We're still here
The next release is gonna be in a couple of weeks I think, we're starting testing soon on the new content with our QA/moderator groups.
Development Stream Oct 6th (Today) 8PM EST
PS. Quick note that there could _potentially_ be spoilers for future content in Deadhold, so be warned.
https://www.twitch.tv/drfisj
https://discord.gg/0Vgtcx5Fx6Nbp1H6
Hope to see you there!
- fisj
Deadhold Friday Night Fights! Every Friday Starting At 8PM EST
https://www.twitch.tv/cowman1211
https://www.twitch.tv/drfisj
https://www.twitch.tv/kelstek
https://www.twitch.tv/jon_god
It Begins
First and foremost we are serious about making Deadhold a great game. Not an average game, a great one. We aren’t working with a publisher and we aren’t finance guys pouring over spreadsheets. Over the last several years all of us put in our time at day jobs and came home and worked on Deadhold. We want to connect with people who share our passion and want to help us make a great game.
So without further ado here are the highlights for the next release, which we are tentatively planning to have ready in late September or early October:
- The second campaign mission “Hermit On The Hill”.
- Offline single player campaign.
- Crucible Horde 100 (100 wave horde map).
- Lots of misc things and improvements.
We're excited to enter this phase of the game and we have a lot more awesome things planned. If you have questions or feedback jump on over the to the deadhold steam forums. Thanks again for all your support. We'll see you in game!
It's starting to come together!
We’ve done a ton in the last two months. It took me longer than I expected but I finally finished all of the game code needed for the new deity spell system, item inventory (including the persistent framework), item generation, drop tables, progression and leveling. It was a big chunk of work. Shortly after that was completed Fisj was able to finally sit down and implement the deity spell trees and progression (WIP IMAGE):
There are 36 spells across 3 deities that you can play, more will be added as we develop the game during Early Access. As you progress through the story, and difficulty tiers you earn experience towards your chosen deity (you can choose your deity at the start of each map). Earning experience unlocks newer and more powerful spells. Monsters, bosses, and missions all grant experience.
Monsters and bosses also drop items, which is what Fisj is working on building out now on the content side. There are four classes of items that drop from monsters, bosses, or objectives:
- Relics: Powerful magical artifacts that utilize soul “essence” which you collect by killing monsters. Essence can be used to power powerful Relic based spells.
- Runes: Contain affixes that when equipped give you an additional effect, like additional damage, healing, or warriors that swing fiery swords.
- Gems: Increase your stats, granting bonuses to your units. Stamina for extra health, dexterity for better accuracy or a faster attack rate.
- Potions: Potions grant you a rechargeable item you can use during gameplay, like healing, or a temporary speed increase.
Just a few days ago JonGod finished the scripting on the first mission of the game “Unexpected Welcome”. We are starting internal testing on this and all the new systems. Things are starting to finally come together!
We’re going to be starting into a lot of polish features: Fisj will be spending a lot of time working on spell effects, while JonGod starts finalizing the gameplay on the 02 and 03 missions. We’re debating having an open alpha test at some point in the near future.
Teaser Trailer Released
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIv8FiZvJzI
Dev Update / Story Driven Campaign / Dynamic Difficulty
This has been a bit of slippery slope for us trying to balance our resources and knowing what we could do really well. Deadhold is two pieces, there's the multiplayer side where you can hop in and compete with your friends or others in stuff like deathmatch and king of the hill, and then there is the part we've been calling "Adventure Mode" that is about experiencing light story elements of the Deadhold universe in this sort of blend of "drop in multiplayer coop" for lack of a more elegant way to describe it. Basically when fisj and I sit back and talk we always say "I want to be like playing this scenario against enemies and I want to hop into this with my friends if they are around". So Adventure Mode was sort of spun up as that experience, as a way of playing through maps and scenarios in a way that's re-playable with or without friends. In the last few weeks we've taken the next step to just say we're going to tie all of this together into a real story driven experience with prologue and mission objectives.
Thrown into this mix is another aspect of the game that we have really wanted to develop which is replay-ability. During the campaign, as you play you will be rewarded with drops from NPC's and completion of objectives with runes, gems, and XP points. As you gain experience you'll unlock new spell abilities in the whatever deity you are spec'ed into, and you can use runes and gems to customize those abilities further. Runes and gems will have various quality levels, so playing campaign missions on something like "epic" difficulty will give you higher quality drops.
Part of the ability replay missions is dynamic difficulty and difficulty tiers, where the missions system will increase the difficulty to match your level as you play. Missions you played on lower tiers will be harder as you progress through the difficulty tiers and loot quality increases.
All of this will be combined with secondary mission objectives which may be really difficulty to do without help, and we are having some conversations about having special events with certain Boss's that drop special loot only being around during certain windows of time, fun stuff like that.
Recap of 2016 / Adventure Mode Progress
Towards the end of 2015 fisj and I slowly came to grips with the reality of where we were at with the Unreal 4 version of the game. UE4 does some things really well but one thing it is not is highly malleable. The UObject framework, networking, and large components of the engine are complex, and interdependent. And UE4 is changing constantly. This made merging time consuming as we had to pull forward custom changes through several versions. For example, fog of war in the UE4 version involved low level networking changes and the IsNetRelevant stuff to stop sending packets for units outside of a clients visible area. At one point in a conversation with Epic they had plans to altogether remove some of the dormancy framework we had modified (they didn't think anyone was using it). There we also a lot of bugs with stuck units with Unreals out-of-the-box pathing, lack of vector field pathing etc.
So we hit the delete button and started over and here we are now: We have excellent pathing, robust networking, and a full implementation of our competitive multiplayer. In every area we are further along now than we were at the beginning of 2016.
We started Open Alpha testing this month and the feedback has been great and it's shown that so far our backend server system is working without any major issues, so we will start piling more people on once Adventure Mode comes together next month.
Adventure Mode is the other half of Deadhold and one of the biggest things that the team and I are excited about. It's geared towards single player or coop play with your friends. It's similar to a raid where you quest through an area fighting encounters with coordinated packs of units, and mini-bosses. You are rewarded with runes and experience. Runes can be slotted into deity's to activate additional effects, and experience is invested into a deity which you choose. You progress through levels in a Deity unlocking new spells which you can use in combat.
Cosmetic items can also drop which you can use to customize the look of your individual units (more of this system in another post).
So yeah 2016 was a good year! Looking forward to what 2017 brings!