The Anacrusis News

Welcome friends, to another edition of The Anacrusis Dev Blog. This week, Chet and Will sit down to talk through our playtesting process--why we do observed playtests, how they work, what we expect to get from them, and a whole lot more.

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If you want to be notified the moment these posts go live, the best way to do that is to hit the Wishlist button on Steam. If you want to chat more about special enemy designs or are just interested in talking about co-op and modded games with our awesome community, hop into our Discord. We're also actively recruiting testers for observed playtests from the Discord community too, so it's the best way to get a sneak peek at the game. And if you make mods and would like to be among the first wave of modders for The Anacrusis, the signup form for early access to our mod tools is here.

Thanks for watching and we'll see you all next week!

We've got a bonus post to start this week. Chet and Will have retroactively started going back and recording new versions of the conversations that kicked off the first few blog posts. The first one, about our design pillars, is live now!

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Every choice that we make as a studio is filtered through these pillars. When we add a new feature, weapon, or game mechanic that contradicts one of them, we iterate and build/test/repeat new versions until we get something that fits our goals and is ridiculously fun.

If you want to be notified immediately when we post something new, the best way to do that is to wishlist The Anacrusis on Steam. If you want to chat more about special enemy designs or are just interested in talking about co-op and modded games with our awesome community, hop into our Discord. We're also actively recruiting testers for observed playtests from the Discord community too, so it's the best way to get a sneak peek at the game. And if you make mods and would like to be among the first wave of modders for The Anacrusis, fill out the signup form for early access to our mod tools.

Thanks for watching and we'll be back later this week with another update!

Ahoy-hoy and welcome everyone back to another fabulous edition of The Anacrusis Dev Blog. This week, we're trying something a little different. Instead of a straight blog post, Chet and Will just recorded one of the chats they have that usually leads to a blog post.

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This is new for us, so please let us know what you think either here or in the Discord.

We dig into the intent behind The Anacrusis's special enemy designs—why the Spawner, Flasher, and Gooper behave the way they do, what reaction they're trying to provoke in players, and why we want players to have those reactions. It's a fun chat, and you learn why it's always good to grab any +resistance to fire perks when you play games with Chet.

If you want to be notified the moment these posts go live, the best way to do that is to hit the Wishlist button on Steam. If you want to chat more about special enemy designs or are just interested in talking about co-op and modded games with our awesome community, hop into our Discord. We're also actively recruiting testers for observed playtests from the Discord community too, so it's the best way to get a sneak peek at the game. And if you make mods and would like to be among the first wave of modders for The Anacrusis, the signup form for early access to our mod tools is here.

Thanks for watching and we'll see you all next week!

Hello there Space Cadets, and welcome! This week on the dev blog, we’re going to talk about how you design a game to foster cooperative play, but first, a bit of housekeeping. We’re still recruiting modders to build the first wave of maps, costumes, weapons, and more for The Anacrusis. We also need more people for our weekly observed play tests. You can help shape the game by signing up either on Discord or using this handy form.

We often say that we designed The Anacrusis to be cooperative from the start, but we haven’t really talked about what that actually means. If you recall from our first post, one of our studio’s core goals is to make games that are about players working together. That’s the lens through which we make every design decision. When someone comes up with a new feature, we build a prototype and test it, both internally and externally, to see how it works in practice.

As an example, our first version of the perk system was a big hit with most testers. Players loved being able to choose meaningful, fun upgrades that add different twists to each run of the game. But, the perks created a competition problem. In our first version of the perk system, we placed them in the world like health or weapon drops. That worked great for the players who like to play out in the front of the pack--they always got the best perks. But it encouraged unfortunate loot goblining tendencies of some players, instead of sharing perks with their teammates, they’d hoover them all up for themselves. It was less compelling for the players who tend to trail the group. Instead of the vaunted Explode-y Headshots perk, they got everyone else’s unwanted castoffs, if they were lucky. Perks were a good feature, but they encouraged competition between players. How did we fix them?

Matter Compilers turn a moment of excitement for one player into a thrilling co-op moment for all four players.

Enter, the Matter Compiler. Instead of letting the Driver place random upgrades in the world, now we spawn a single item called the Matter Compiler. Each player can use each Matter Compiler, or MC for short, one time. When they do, the Matter Compiler lets them choose one new perk from a set of two or three potential upgrades. Instead of furtive players grabbing all the loot, a moment of excitement for one player and disappointment for everyone else, finding a matter compiler gives all the players something to be excited about.

As a general rule, we try not to make players compete for resources. Weapon drops are a perfect example—we never want someone to see a primary weapon and not be able to replace the one they’re already carrying. Most weapons you find in the world are infinite spawns, meaning as many players can pick them up as want that gun. Again, this fosters cooperation, and encourages players to use the ping system, which we designed to make it simple for players to share information in the game, even if they aren’t using voice. When a player pings a gun, a marker pops up on the HUD and their in-game character plays a voice line that gives the other players even more information about the drop.

There are exceptions to every rule. We build a handful of weapons that are so staggeringly powerful they’d break the game if we let everyone have them (fear not, we’ll tell you more about them in an upcoming post). We give players so many grenades that they’re effectively unlimited even though the individual pickups are discret. And we do some good, weird stuff with health kits to encourage even more cooperating.

Instead of distributing health evenly amongst players as pickups, but we use a couple of tricks to encourage players to distribute health amongst the team. It feels great to help a teammate, so we make it easy for players to heal other players. When you’re holding a health scanner, left-click heals you while right-click will heal the player you’re facing. But there’s another layer. Our experience making Left 4 Dead taught us something interesting. The longer a player holds on to a healing item, the more likely they are to use it on a teammate instead of themselves.

How do you encourage a player to not heal themselves when they are injured? It took a few tries, but eventually we landed on a perfect solution. We made healing items restore a percentage of the HP the player is missing instead of a percentage of their total health, as is more typical in games. That means it’s harder for them to reach 100% HP, but the lower their health is when they use the kit, the more HP they get back. After some cycles of testing and iteration, we settled on each kit healing 80% of the damage you’ve taken.

Our health scanners heal deliver heals based on a percentage of the damage you've taken, not your total health pool.

This is a little bit tricky, so let’s run the numbers for a few different scenarios. If a player has 60HP out of 100, they’re down 40HP. Remember, we calculate the healing amount based on the HP a player is missing, not their total HP. If they use a health scanner at that moment, they’ll get a total of 40 * .8 = 32HP. If they hold that health scanner until they lose a few more HP, and have, say, 40HP left of 100, then that same health scanner will heal them for 60 * .8 or 48HP. That’s a pretty good return, but if you really want to powergame your healing, you wait until you have 1HP left to use that scanner and you’ll be rewarded with 79HP back. It just makes good sense to wait until you’re on the verge of death to crack the seal on a health scanner.

But what, you might ask, could you do if you really wanted to crank up the incentive to play cooperatively? Does it make sense to make healing another player more effective than healing yourself? Seems smart, right? We thought so too, until we discovered some negative side effects in our testing. Giving too much of a bonus to smart co-op play resulted in players telling players who healed themselves that they were “playing wrong”, which turned an opportunity for a co-op moment into a transaction that takes agency away from players and feels more like work than fun. Not a good outcome.

So what have we learned this week? Sometimes a small, subtle buff is much more effective at encouraging co-operative behavior than a bigger buff. And it always feels really good to take a moment in the middle of a huge fight to give your friend who is badly hurt a giant heal. But most of all, encouraging cooperation is a goal that affects almost aspect of the game, so if you’re going to build a co-op game, you need to start thinking about that from the beginning.

If you’d like to know more about our design pillars, the rules that we’ve used to develop The Anacrusis, you should check out our first Dev Blog, which gives a good overview of them all. If you’d like to know more about how we’re making The Anacrusis, head on over to our store page and smash that wishlist button and you’ll be amongst the first to hear when we post a new update. And if you want to get into the conversation, be among the first people to play The Anacrusis, or just hang out and play in our weekly co-op game streams, hop into our Discord where you’ll be surrounded in the cooperative embrace of other wonderful co-op game fans.

It’s that time of week again. We’re back with more hot behind-the-scenes action on The Anacrusis. This week, we’re talking about social games. What they are, why we love them, and what we’re doing to make The Anacrusis a fun place to spend some quality time with your pals.

But first, a reminder from our last post. We’ve had a great response from the modding community and are starting to reach out to folks. If you’d like to talk to us about making mods for The Anacrusis, you can sign up over here.

We’ve been playing social games for a long, long time. Our first social gaming moments were often a byproduct of geography—like playing Wizards and Warriors with your neighbor or that year-long series of late-night games of Madden that stopped the moment we all moved out of the dorm. There was that brief, perfect storm of a neighbor who loved Quake and had a basement big enough to host a ten-person LAN party. When multiplayer games moved online, social games became centered around our communities, both on- and off-line. Sometimes it was just a group of beautiful souls who read poetry to each other while they were playing Team Fortress 2. But the one thing common to all of these social gaming moments was that they happened because the people playing wanted them. The games were just convenient settings.



We want The Anacrusis to encourage those social moments, to give players positive, fun, shared experiences whether they’re physically together or not. It turns out that there are a bunch of moving pieces that have to work together to make that happen--it means making the game easy for anyone to pick up and play, making combat that’s challenging for everyone, creating short- and long-term tasks that are meaningful, and controlling the game’s cadence, so that the challenging periods of uptime are broken up with downtime.

But if any part of that formula breaks, the social element disappears first. If the action is too relentless, there’s no time to recount that moment of triumph. If the tasks you have to complete don’t require thoughtful action, they feel like busywork. Without challenge, engagements are unsatisfying. When it’s working well, the game gives players something to talk about and then gives them time to chat. And if the game isn’t accessible enough that you can play with whoever you want, wherever you want, does that really count as social?

Let’s break down one aspect of the social gaming equation--cadence. The AI Driver is our main tool to control the cadence of the game. It spawns every health scanner, every weapon, each Matter Compiler, and every enemy in the game. If the players are moving too fast, the driver ramps up the number of enemies it spawns. If the fights are too easy, it will change the mix of common aliens and elites. At the same time, making players fight never-ending hordes of aliens is exhausting. You need that downtime between fights to rest, recover, and chat about your triumphs, but then we make sure there's enough time for you to get back to giving your friend who thinks the Cleveland Browns are the single greatest sports team of all time the grief they deserve.



Naturally, there’s a lot more that goes into making a game social. We have to make sure you can always play with your friends, whether they’re on console or PC, whether they’ve played for hundreds of hours or just downloaded the game from Game Pass, whether they’re experts or are brand new. It means that we don’t force players to level up a specific character or class, which can prevent them from playing with friends who are different levels or who chose the same class. It also means that we won’t enforce level or rank requirements, which can keep friends from playing together if they don’t devote the same amount of time to the game.

At the end of the day, this is why we spend so much time playing the game ourselves and watching new and returning players play the game. The only way to find out what works with the nearly infinite range of players who will eventually play The Anacrusis, is to test with as many people as possible. (BTW, we’re still recruiting testers! Join the Discord and come play with us!

When we do everything just right, it makes The Anacrusis a very satisfying place to hang out with your friends. When you need a break, you get a break. When you’re ready for more action, you get some more action. Awesome stuff can happen in the game, but you’ll still have a moment to have a heartfelt talk with your friends. It’s a place where you can just have fun hanging out, and along the way, you’ll kill a few thousand aliens and maybe save the human race.

It is, after all, still a video game.

If you want to read more posts like this, we’re putting them up every week right here on Steam. Mash the Wishlist button and they’ll show up in your feed the moment they’re posted. Have questions about The Anacrusis? Head on over to our Discord and join the conversation!