If you’ve missed our previous chats with Romain, you can catch up here and here.
Now let’s get into it—
Hashtag: You’ve been quieter than usual lately—what’s the biggest reason? Burnout, polishing, feature creep, or just the curse of working solo?
Romain: It’s been a mix of mental low and over-polishing the foundations of the game, mainly concerning the performance side. Since I’m really demanding when it comes to game optimization, I’ve been taking the time to look for good plugins and learn their documentation to understand how to build my world and its interactions later on properly.
But some changes in my life have also been taking a toll, and I’ve been hesitating for a while to quit my daily job and focus 100% on the game to progress faster. Having to divide the mental energy between work, play, and life has been too hard over the past months. That being said, I’ve made some changes over the past few weeks that I think will really impact the development process. I’m hoping to share more about them in a month or two, after I see how it’s working out.
Hashtag: So, what’s the primary focus of what you’ve brought to share today?
Romain: World building! There’s a lot that can’t be seen in these images: performance and the changes I’ve made to things as I’ve worked on them. Everything revolves around crafting the world of Derelicts.
World Building
Hashtag: A lot of survival players will see vehicle work and immediately think “hell yeah, we’re driving that”—but you have no plans to include driveable vehicles, correct?
Romain: There is no plan to add drivable vehicles so far because the map won’t be big enough to justify them. Also, adding them can be a huge gameplay modification that implies a lot of things to account for (you can avoid most combat while driving), and the terrain must also be thought of for that.
Hashtag: I completely get that! Sons of the Forest gave us golf carts, and frankly, they invalidated a lot of the game in my opinion. Travel was a joke, and I was battering shit to death- AI, animals, whatever.
So, Derelicts- since vehicles aren’t drivable, how are you using them to shape the world?
Romain: So far, vehicles are used to hold loot and to create a sense of environmental storytelling. For example, I’m really looking to add abandoned traffic jams, as I rarely see them in games (some games do it, like The Last of Us, to some extent). I remember watching one of the very first scenes of The Walking Dead and thinking it would be really cool to see such a traffic jam in a post-apocalyptic world in a game!
Hashtag: Do prefabs affect how the game handles destruction, physics, or AI navmesh?
Romain: Prefabs are optimized assemblies of different meshes that can be reused and modified on the fly with pre-configuration (for instance, other foliage locations on cars, different book locations on a shelf…). They are used with two plugins that allow me to optimize all items on the map and instance them to display them quickly in each frame (from the CPU to the GPU). In many games, the CPU is often the bottleneck for performance. They act the same as static meshes, so they do affect physics and navmesh for AI. They can also be spawned at runtime (for example, the building parts). This allows me to optimize anything being built during gameplay.
Hashtag: Looking at all of the images of vehicles and buildings, how much thought goes into balancing visual clutter with performance when dropping big prefab elements into the map?
Romain: The goal to mitigate performance vs clutter ratio is to reuse a maximum of assets on the map, but add variations to the Prefabs so that they don’t look all the same. For example, the castle and cathedral parts shown in the screenshot are modular components that can be used with different foliage, allowing me to add variation and realism to the buildings.
H: So you’re going to do your best to make it look good and not kill our rigs!
R: Try my best!!
Movement & Mobility
Hashtag: I see a bit of an ability to slide over small obstacles—how much does that actually change moment-to-moment navigation? Is it just polish, or does it make things like base interiors and dense forests less of a pathfinding nightmare? Are we talking actual dynamic climbing, or more like context-triggered points a la Sons of the Forest?
Romain: The goal is to create a more dynamic climbing system that lets players easily climb obstacles and makes the game more intuitive and flexible to play. This footage is very raw and in the works, with lots of trial and error. Have to see how it will integrate with the overall gameplay and how it will interact with enemies.
It’s more about polish and running away from enemies more intuitively. The video shows an example that is a bit rough, with no camera shake or visual effects, but the goal is to make the sliding-over mechanic a bit more appealing. As for the climbing, I’m still playtesting to see how it fits overall in the game and in the chases with enemies. However, after playing and testing it, it feels really great to be able to do it!
Hashtag: So, what’s something you’re experimenting with right now that might make it into the game in the next few months? Could be mechanical, visual, or just one of those “I hope I don’t break the build” kind of features. Yanno, so we have something to cling to when you’re radio silent again. 😂
Romain: 😅 Right now, I’m still experimenting with the economy of the game (how many wooden planks are necessary to build this or that) and the chain of building things (gathering minerals, creating ingots from them, then what?). Hopefully, achieving the right economy and balancing looting, gathering, and crafting will make the game more enjoyable and less redundant. But it’s something I’m iterating on to get it right.
H: Translation, you’re probably going to fall back into a giant ass well of silence.
R: Okay, no, haha. I’ll try to share some more videos and images soon. Right now, the work I’m doing is performance-based, so there’s not a lot to show. However, I’d like to show progress in climbing and vaulting as I work on them, as well as in other areas.
H: And the large-ish announcement, assuming things continue going smoothly over the next month or two.
R: 🤐
Looking forward to the next chat about Derelicts!
If you want to catch a few extra questions we didn’t include here, there’s a free follow-up post over on Patreon. And if you’re new around here, Hashtag Survival’s the place to be for curated chaos and survival game news that doesn’t suck, so poke around the website, peep the socials, and hop into Discord. Something you wish we’d asked? The comment box is down below—go wild. Maybe we’ll squeeze it in next time.
