Inside Derelicts: Q&A with Romain on Game Dev and Survival Mechanics

Romain, the creator of Derelicts, joined us to answer some questions about the game’s survival aspects, which is right up our alley here at Hashtag! Derelicts is shaping up to be a solid survival experience for those unfamiliar with it, and Romain has been steadily sharing updates. If you missed them, you can catch Part One and Part Two of his earlier Q&A sessions, plus his latest development video from the start of the month.

Hashtag: Let’s talk briefly about your journey into game development. How did it all start?

Romain: My game development journey started as a hobby first. I’m not a developer from education and never studied programming, even though I had some notions from my regular job. 
It started really young: I was already making some maps for Half-Life and Counter-Strike back when I was 17 (I’m now 33), using an editor called Hammer.

 After that, life caught up, and I just never really went back into it until 2019. I don’t really remember why I started to get interested in game dev back then, but I know that it was around that time that I started noticing some games were released and made by solo developers with Unity. 
I was wondering how this was possible and started digging a bit more to see what was possible with both Unity and Unreal Engine 4 (which just happened to be free at that time as well).



I started by trying Unreal Engine using tutorials from forums, Reddit, and YouTube. Also gave Unity a quick shot, but I preferred UE4. I started with small projects at first, having fun learning the software, its possibilities and limitations, and trying to understand more about level design, game design, and optimization.

Some of my first projects were a co-op First-person shooter, a co-op horror game, and, finally, a co-op FPS platformer (in the vein of Mirror’s Edge but with different mechanics). I learned a lot from these 3 projects, but they never saw the light of day because I always felt they weren’t the right thing to do. I knew something was off every time, as my motivation and will to make each one of them were fading around 2 or 3 months after working on them.



One day, while visiting my parents for two weeks, as I often do every year, I decided to go for a genre I really love: survival games. The very first brick of Derelicts was born on the old laptop I was using there.



Hashtag: So, why did you choose to focus on a survival game? This was before survival got SO TRENDY, I think?

Romain: I knew that I was right about choosing to make a survival game after 2 or 3 months because I was not burning out of the project, and my motivation was still up and running. I think the main reasons are the following:


• First point: Survival games are among the ones that gave me the most fun and cooperative feeling of all the other genres. There is just something visceral and organic about playing survival games with friends and cooperating to survive out there. The fact that I can imagine them and other players discovering and enjoying my game is fueling my work. I’m trying to make the survival game I would like to play. The creative sandbox aspect of survival games also makes them interesting to approach as developers.
• Second point: I believe the scope of a survival game is feasible for a solo developer because it aligns well with the Early Access model. You can have an open world with a sandbox approach, with some parts of the story ready to go, while still offering players more content over time. I thought this model fit my vision of the game much better than a more co-op, linear one. The scope still needs to be realistic, because making this independently is not easy. The good thing is that I can still add features later on, both from my list and from player feedback.

Hashtag: What made you pick Unreal over Unity?

Romain: Several reasons! Unreal Engine was one of the only engines that had decent tutorials, documentation, and marketplace, back then. For 3D games, those two engines naturally came up almost at the top when you were looking for possible engines to use.

From my comparison with Unity, Unreal Engine offers many more native features that are really useful and easy to learn. It’s like an all-in-one software that lets you access most of the important features at once. Unity seemed really great as well, but I started with Unreal Engine first, and I felt like Unity was coming in kits, where you need to buy many plugins to get the same features as UE was offering. It was back in 2019, so I’m betting that Unity improved a lot since then, but I just felt that UE was the way to go, especially with Epic Games doubling their efforts on improving the software (Thank you, Fortnite!) with new and innovative technologies. Another point is that Unreal Engine was offering visual scripting with the help of what we call Blueprints (this has been added to Unity since then but it wasn’t a native feature at the time). I’m someone who is really visual, so I loved the way Blueprints were working when I started.

Hashtag: They say one is the loneliest number- so why fly solo?

Romain: At first, I went solo because it started as a hobby, and I didn’t have any budget to have a team working with me. As the game gained visibility, publishers started contacting me, and I could have most likely gotten funding to have a team up and ready, but that would mean spending more time as a manager than a developer, which I do not want at the moment. I like the creative and programming side, and the ability to really realize my vision for the game myself. I also kind of see it as a challenge to prove I can ship a co-op survival game on my own.
 Of course, being solo means I need help from other sources, like buying 3D assets and SFX, and probably having a composer later on to make an original soundtrack. But all of these parameters still allow me to code my own mechanics and really learn and experience a lot more than if I were organizing a team. Working solo has its drawbacks: you don’t get the cheering of your teammates, and you miss the joy of working on something great with other people. But overall, it’s less stressful.

Hashtag: Less stressful! Perfect jump-off point for a follow-up! How does our announced partnership (Romain/Derelicts & Jordan/Hashtag) impact things? (Or make it more stressful, either or.) Is it helpful to have a non-friend/family voice chime in?

Romain: 🤣 Teaming up together will help keep track of the milestones and progress- solo, you sometimes get into some task and lose the sense of priority, especially for someone like me who likes to diverge a lot sometimes from my initial daily objective. Being a solo dev means wearing so many hats that it can be really overwhelming and draining. You have to develop the game, market it, and communicate about it across all platforms. Having your help will lighten the load a bit on that part and also help improve the post quality (English corrections, better phrasing, and so on). I think that, overall, it will only bring positive things to the game’s progress! From an external perspective, it’s really good to have someone who shares your passion for survival games to give you honest, raw feedback without sugarcoating it too much!

Family and friends are often not players, specifically not survival game players, so they often don’t really know which aspect can be improved or redone. Since you know a lot about survival games and their foundations, it’s always great to have the reminders and ideas that you can bring as well. I have my vision for Derelicts, and there are certain things I won’t deviate from, but it’s still really great to get the right feedback on a specific mechanic or the gameplay loop. I’m sure that it will help a lot with balancing the loot to crafting/building system loop, alongside the feedback from players.

Survival Life

Hashtag: I know you haven’t expanded on these mechanics much, but what are your thoughts on how you will handle typical survival mechanics: health (injury system, illness) or food/water?

Romain: I love some depth with survival mechanics, so having an injury system, illness, and mental health stats, for example, would be really great. I feel like having only food and water would be a waste of potential, as it’s something we see in most games now —like MMOs or some survival RPGs. I would love to add some intricate layers and details without “overspilling” too much. The goal is not to have something as detailed as SCUM, for example! But the way Green Hell does it is exciting (with different stats to account for like carbs, fat, proteins…) and I think that’s the closest thing I would like my game to have, without making it into too many “sub-layers.”

Also, some of you know that I want to add a dog companion in the game, and I always thought that it would be cool to have him/her be a good way to increase your mental health stat after fighting mutants for a while!

Hashtag: What kind of inventory restrictions do you want to add/ how would you like to handle the inventory?

Romain: My inventory, similar to the one in The Forest, will be limited by the maximum number of items of a given type you can transport. Similar to The Forest, you can build storage containers in your base or elsewhere. I’m also thinking of implementing a robot mule that would act as an extra inventory, following you everywhere as long as the battery is being charged. Nothing is sure about that yet, though, but I like the idea! Though this mule would only be available at the surface and not in the dungeons (because some places will be too narrow for it to follow you).

Personally, I often prefer immersive inventories, like in Green Hell or The Forest. To me, those inventories add an organic vibe to the gameplay. For example, there is one inventory I loved in a game that, unfortunately, wasn’t really good. The game was Alone In The Dark. When you were opening your inventory, your character was looking at his chest, and you had to pick items directly from your belts and suspenders. Of course, this kind of inventory would be too small for a survival game and a pain to handle craft resources. So the best compromise to me was to use something akin to The Forest, in which I really like the way it was done. Basically, I love what we call diegetic inventories. A diegetic interface occurs when a game’s interface elements exist within the game’s universe. For example, the inventory in Alone in the Dark or even Dead Space is so well-known for its creativity. I had to choose for Derelicts, and I chose this path, but I don’t mind regular inventories in games either. Some of my favorite games, like Stalker or Subnautica, have regular ones.

Hashtag: Will the environment act on the player at all? Cold weather, rain making you wet and sick, rain putting out fires, etc?

Romain: Yes, I really want the weather to impact the players, their base, energy production, and the overall environment. This is one of the most important things I would like to have in the game because I think it’s supposed to be one of the highlights of a survival game. You need to “survive” and feel that everything around you is a threat, be it the environment, the weather, or other living beings.
So the weather will definitely affect player stats. For example, if it’s snowing and you just went into the water, you’ll get cold faster than if you were dry. Players will need to have fires and, later on, heaters in their base to keep it warm during cold phases and blizzards.

 Blizzards will be one of the most aggressive and threatening weather conditions as I’ll make it so it gets you down in a matter of several minutes. However, players will know beforehand when a blizzard is coming, usually, so they’ll have time to get indoors (caves, abandoned buildings) or in their base before the blizzard comes. But to know that, they’ll need to pay attention to how the weather is behaving. My goal is to make it go like this: Little snow falling? It’s ok. More snow all of a sudden? Ok, let’s watch that. More snow + strong winds? Ok, let’s get close to the base or an indoor place to get safe. 


Hashtag: So, what did you think of the featured image? I described us to DALLE: this is what it came up with. I want to point out that I DID tell it that you have a mustache and no beard, and I have no idea where it was going with that hair. Fabio aspirations, maybe.

Romain: My beard sucks compared to the one in the picture, so I am OK with this! Damn, we look good, though!

Hashtag: I love this glimpse into the mechanics and specifics of the game because you haven’t shared much of that to date. However, the videos/pictures you HAVE shared have been great. Looking forward to seeing how these mechanics – and others- build up as development continues.

Romain: Thanks for having me, and I look forward to sharing more with you next time!

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