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.
Let’s dive in!
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 as I was already making some maps for Half Life and Counter Strike back when I was 17 (I’m now 33), with 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 turned out to be free as well right at that time).
I started by trying Unreal Engine first with some tutorials from forums, Reddit, and YouTube. Also gave a quick chance to Unity but I had my preference for UE4. I started with small projects at first, having fun learning the software, the possibilities, and the 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 line of Mirror Edge but with different mechanics). I learned a lot from these 3 projects but they never saw the light of day as I always felt like they weren’t the right thing I needed 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 those that gave me the most fun and cooperative feeling out 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 finding out and enjoying my game is fueling my work. I’m trying to make the survival game I would like to play. The creative sandbox part of survival games also makes them interesting to approach as a developer.
- Second point: I believe the scope of a survival game is feasible as a solo developer because it really fits the Early Access model. You can have an open world with a sandbox approach and some parts of the story ready to go while still offering the players more content as time passes. I thought this model was much better for taking the time to fit my vision of the game than a more co-op linear game. 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 2 engines naturally came up almost at the top when you were looking for possible engines to use.From my comparison with Unity, Unreal Engine comes with a lot more native features that are really useful and easy to learn. It’s like an all-in-one software that allows you to have 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 have the same version as what 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 that is really visual so I loved the way Blueprints are working when I started.
Hashtag: They say one is the lonliest number- so why fly solo?
Romain: At first, I went solo because it started as a hobby and I don’t have any budget to have a team working with me. As the game gained in visibility, publishers started to contact me and I could have most probably gotten funds to have a team up and ready but this would mean that I would probably spending more time being a manager than a developer, which I do not want at the moment. I like the creative and programming side, and being able to really achieve my vision of the game myself. I also kind of approach it as a challenge, to prove that I’ll be able to ship a co-op survival game on my own. Of course, being solo means that I need the help of other means, like buying 3D assets, SFX and also probably have 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 was just organizing a team. Working solo has its drawbacks as you don’t get the cheering of your teammates and also to share 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 overwhelming sometimes, really draining. You have to develop the game and also market it, communicate about it on all platforms. Having your help will lighten the weight a bit on that part and also help with improving the post quality (English correction, better phrasing and so on). I think that, overall, it will bring only positive things to the progress of the game! As for external perspective, it’s really good to have someone who share the same passion for survival games being able to give you a honest and raw feedback without trying to sugarcoat it too much!
Family and friends often are not players and specifically not survival game players so they often don’t really know what 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 he can bring as well. I have my vision for Derelicts and there are certain things that I won’t derail from, but it’s still really great to have the right feedback on some specific mechanic or on the gameplay loop. I’m sure that it will help a lot with balancing the loot to crafting/building system loop, alongside with the feedback from players.
Survival Life
Hashtag: I know you haven’t expanded on these mechanics a lot, but what are your thoughts on how will you handle typical survival mechanics, things like 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. The goal is not to have something as detailed as SCUM, for example! But the way Green Hell does it is really interesting (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 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 being similar to the one in The Forest, the restriction will come from the maximum number of items of a certain kind you can transport. Similarly to The Forest, there will be storage containers that you can build 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 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 have to pick items directly on 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 is when a game’s interface elements exist in the universe of the game. For example, for Alone in The Dark or even the Dead Space inventory that is so well-known for it’s creativity. I had to make a choice for Derelicts and I chose this path but I often 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 get the feeling that everything around you is a threat, be it the environment, the weather, or the other living beings.
So weather will have an impact on player stats for sure. 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 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 pictured, 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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