February Development Intel - Inside the Deathground
Operatives, we hope you’re all doing well. We know it’s been a little longer than anticipated since our last communication, but since the beginning of the new year the development team has been back at work behind the scenes.
This update features just a few of the things we’ve been working on over the past few months, with plenty of effort going into work that makes the whole experience feel more consistent on a foundational level, based on your feedback.
It’s also worth mentioning that we’ve gone through an upgrade from Unreal Engine 5.2 to Unreal Engine 5.7 to make use of several new features, though as with any upgrade, this naturally causes its own set of problems which we’ve been weeding out.
Of course, we’re still working on missions, sub-missions (such as the upcoming sub-mission ‘Biomedical - Feeding Frenzy’) and even more fixes and improvements, but here in this update, we’re going to focus primarily on several mechanics and systems reworks and expansions.
Some of the updates we’re about to talk about below will be available in the next patch, and others will be included over future patches, but we wanted to quickly share them so you know what to expect in the coming months.
AI behaviour and animation reworks
Utah Raptor
Raptors have received several reworks, all aimed at making them more animated when moving around and interacting with the world and players.
After losing sight of a player, Raptors will now search around the environment in an attempt to look for them, opening lockers, checking in barrels and under tables and generally attempting to sniff them out.
Additionally, raptors can now better interact with other objects while roaming around the environment. These interactions will be limited at first, but over time, additional interactable objects, animations, and more will be added - making the raptors more curious about the world they inhabit.
Raptor movement has been given a complete animation system overhaul, thanks to new systems made available by the upgrade to Unreal Engine 5.7. We’ll share more information on this in the near future.
Compsognathus
Vents are home to some of the smallest critters in all of the Deathground, the Compsognathus or ‘compy’ for short. These little terrors are meant to make vents unsafe, rather than a ‘get out of jail free’ card for you to escape the much larger Raptor at any given time.
We found many players felt frustrated with them, in large part because the compy would attack repeatedly without stopping if you stayed in a vent too long or got too close - forcing you to leave the vent without offering any kind of alternative play.
We’ve made some adjustments to their behaviours, which hopefully make them feel a little less like a nuisance, but still like a threat to look out for.
Now, once they’ve spotted you, Compys become more aggressive the longer you spend nearby, and this aggression rises faster the closer you get to them - stay there too long or get too close and they’ll attack, either by quickly nipping at you, or by launching themselves at your face.
Rather than attacking again right away, they’ll instead retreat to a safe distance and wait to see if you got the message. Additionally, throwing an object, like a bottle or a brick, at the Compy previously caused them to retaliate and attack, but now, instead, causes them to retreat for a short period allowing you to gather your thoughts and plan your next move.
In addition to this, Compys can now be found hiding in lockers and barrels, ready to strike at unsuspecting operatives who get too close. And after jumping out at you and trying to bite off your face, they’ll retreat to the nearest vent.
We’ve adjusted raptor behaviours around this change too, and while they’ll absolutely take advantage and swoop in for the kill after a surprise attack while roaming, they’ll also chase a Compy if they spot one making their escape.
Allosaurus
A lot of the work mentioned above relating to raptor movement aims to improve dinosaur locomotion in general going forward, and this includes the Allosaurus. You’ll encounter the Allosaurus locked in a containment cell as part of the ‘Feeding Frenzy’ mission soon, and we’ll share more information on the actual Allosaurus enemy in the near future.
Respawn, healing, and helping up rework
Death is a pretty major part of the Deathground, and not something to be generally concerned about, after all, it happens to everyone - for D.A.R.T operatives usually a few times a mission.
But we found many players were confused with exactly how respawning was supposed to work, often trying to use a medical syringe or field med-kit item to heal a (very, very dead) body of a teammate, unaware of the location of their nearest reconstitution (clone) pod - so we’ve made a few changes which should help you get teammate, or more accurately their clone, back into the fray.
Clone pods now have a retractable holographic display. This screen shows information about the activation state of the clone pod, which player is in the clone pod ready to be respawned and how many respawns you have remaining as a team.
The spectator menu has been re-vamped, showing spectator mode controls, including a new ‘request respawn’ button, which will highlight the nearest active clone pod so that your team can bring you back from the dead.
We’ve also adjusted how many respawns players are given when starting a mission and when unlocking additional respawn rooms. This balancing change aims to make things a little more fair for solo players by granting them more respawns, and a little more challenging for teams by granting them fewer respawns.
1-Player: Starting respawns increased from 1 to 3
2-Player; Starting respawns unchanged from 2
3-Player; Starting respawns reduced from 3 to 2
4-Player; Starting respawns reduced from 4 to 3
All team sizes; Additional respawns granted from unlocking clone-pod rooms reduced to 1
Players can now help up teammates who are downed without needing a healing item, and crawling speed while downed has also been reduced to account for this change.
Additional UI elements are now displayed when healing yourself, healing another player, or helping a player up from being downed.
In future updates, we’re looking to include additional respawn-related items, such as:
The ‘field reconstitution kit,’ a defibrillator-style item which will allow you to revive players without the use of a clone pod (Assuming there’s a body left to revive)
And the ‘reconstitution gel canisters’, which will grant additional respawns when collected.
We’ll share more information on this in the near future.
Item interaction re-work
As part of a previous patch, we adjusted how interactions are presented, increasing the interaction size, making items easier to pick up, and giving you more information via the UI when looking at an interactable item. We’ve made additional changes to improve this further.
All objects now display an animated pulse, similar to the one featured on the collectable items.
This change aims to make items and objects which you can interact with stand out more against the rest of the world, so that it is less frustrating to search for objects as part of a mission objective and far clearer what you can and can’t interact with at any given point.
This glow fades out as you move further away from an object, and In order to differentiate types of items, ‘distraction items’ and collectables blink once, ‘key’ items blink twice in rapid succession, containers and buttons blink half as often.
Audio occlusion and proximity chat updates
Of course, audio is incredibly important, and getting it right is something which we’re taking seriously. We’ve been working on several audio tools and related systems which will help audio shine, alongside additional options for communication in-game.
Audio occlusion is one of the bigger systems we’ve been tackling and one of the bigger concerns players have raised. We’re working to completely remove the issue of sounds (such as raptor footsteps) being heard between floors or through walls using this new system without causing a major hit to game performance.
Proximity voice chat, and AI interactions around it, are highly requested features we’ve been working on since launch. Our core concern with this system is making sure it works into the far-future, without the need for servers or services which could go offline, causing issues.
We’re also considering gameplay balancing effects around this system carefully, as we want to keep it completely optional for those who’d rather stay off-mic.
These two system reworks are intended to appear as part of an update alongside several audio-adjacent features. We’ll share more information on this in the near future.
As always, thanks for your support and feedback,
