The Anacrusis News

Hey everyone, welcome back! Today, we’re going to talk about game mods, which we think are a required feature for social games in 2021.

But first, we want to answer one of the big questions we got from last week’s post. Anacrusis is pronounced like it’s spelled: anna-croo-suss.

With that taken care of, let’s talk mods. At Stray Bombay, we love mods! We love to play them because we love to see what players do when given agency over their favorite games. Heck, some of us even got started making games in the mod scene. We love mods so much, we’ve hosted weekly mod nights for the last year. Every Thursday, we get together with the community and try out a different mod. (Would you like to know more? Free up your Thursday nights and join our Discord!)

In the dawn of the first-person shooter, mods started with simple texture swaps and gun tweaks. What started by replacing Imps in DOOM with Barney the dinosaur became talented teams building entirely new mechanics, games, and even genres using the bones of their favorite game as the base. The grappling hook? Came from a mod. Class-based shooters? Came from mods. Asymmetric multiplayer modes? You guessed it, mods again. The mod scene was filled with bright-eyed dreamers, making the games they wanted to play, without the pressures of commercial success or AAA budgets on their back.

One of the earliest mods we saw for DOOM replaced demons with Barney the Dinosaur.

In those early days, mods lived on the fringes of gaming—they were the domain of creators who wanted to push gaming’s boundaries and players who couldn’t get enough of their favorite games. Eventually, those mods went mainstream—Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, and League of Legends were built on the bones of successful mods. But in the last decade, mods have gone mainstream. Minecraft and Roblox have become the game-of-games for entire generations. And where there are players, there are also steady revenue streams that allow talented modders to convert passion projects into successful careers.

So what does that mean for The Anacrusis? We think mods are vital for the success of our type of social multiplayer game. Mods give us the opportunity to let players decide how they want to play our game.

We enjoy shooting thousands of aliens over lunch, but if you'd rather shoot thousands of velociraptors or Minions™ instead, who are we to say no? That’s why we decided support for mods was a core requirement for The Anacrusis. Because we’re working in Unreal, it was important to make that decision early. Including mod support shaped the way we built the game.

We're excited about user-created clothing for our characters. Here are some concepts we made for Nessa to get you thinking.

Eventually, we want to support the entire range of mods—up to and including new campaigns and distinct game modes. But we’re going to start with cosmetic items like costumes and gun skins and maybe include a map or two or new weapon or grenade effects. As always, we’re going to work with the larger community to figure out where to focus our efforts, but as it stands now our post-launch plan is to focus on adding support for new weapons, perks, and game variants.

To make that process easier, we’re ready to share the tools we use to turn the raw 3D geometry of a map into a space that the AI Driver understands well enough to create challenging, fun combat encounters for the player. We put a ton of work into building tools to make map creation faster and easier. There’s a lot of technical detail that we’ll get into in a dedicated post in the future, but the upshot is that we can build a map, markup a few special areas, then run tools that automate person-weeks of tedious labor so you’re ready to playtest your map in a matter of hours. We love our tools, and we think modders will love them too.

We can’t wait to see what the mod community comes up with. We just want to play other people’s maps, try their gun skins on, and see what weird game variants they come up with. And if you want to try something that wouldn’t work within the limits of our current mod support, give us a call! We’re all for turning the Terminal into a food court simulator, we just want to be the first in line to order space pizza! (Hrmm, would our heroes call space pizza, space pizza if space was the only home they’d ever known?)

Isn't all pizza served in space inherently space pizza?

We’re still a small team, so we have to be strategic about every choice we make. But we’re committed to mods. That’s why we’re going to launch with a handful of cosmetic mods that will be available on both PC and console when the game is released later this year. And because we firmly believe that modders deserve to get paid for their work, we’re going to launch with both paid and free mods in the store. This decision is entirely up to the creators—mod makers will decide whether their work will be free or paid.

One last thing. Because we’re making a co-op game, we think that mods should be cooperative too. For most of the mods in the store, if one person on your squad owns a piece of content, it will be accessible to everyone else in the game. Don’t worry, we’ve got a lot of Buy One, Get Three Free stickers printed up and ready to go.

Our mod tools are in private beta now, and we’re already talking to a small, dedicated team of external creators, but there’s always room for more. If you’re interested in building mods for The Anacrusis, we’d love to meet you. Fill out this quick form and we’ll get in touch with you when we’re ready.

And as always, if you're enjoying these posts, smash that Wishlist button and they'll pop up in your feed every week.

The Anacrusis showed its first trailer at E3, and it left me a little worried. It's a four player co-operative shooter from Chet Faliszek's new studio Stray Bombay, but in a swarm of in-development Left 4 Deadlikes, it looked the most shambling.

I still have hope though, and the game's first dev blog offers plenty of encouragement by going into detail about the team's process of adapting to feedback and playtesting.

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Hi there! Welcome to our first update for The Anacrusis.

Since we announced the game in June, we’ve been busy working on the game for launch, and we’re finally ready to start showing you more of it. We love having conversations with players about our game, which is why we wanted to show actual gameplay in our initial trailer. We thought it was important to start our conversation with you by showing you the actual game we're making, not a pre-rendered cinematic. (It had nothing to do with the fact that pre-rendered trailers are big and expensive, and often not-quite-but-almost-entirely-unlike-the-final-game.) In the spirit of listening to and acting on feedback, we've already made some changes based on it.

New variations for the common aliens are in the works, including these mid-transformation variants. Fetching, aren't they?

We often say that we're a small team, but we’re making a big game. And a big part of our process is playtesting, both playing our game and other multiplayer games. To that end, we’ve been playing co-op games on our Discord with our community for more than a year now. We’ve also had a continuous flow of outside playtesters giving us feedback on our game since it was first playable. Those streams of information have shaped our work on The Anacrusis, but because the game we’re making learns what kind of player you are and changes every time you play it, we need a large, diverse group of players to test effectively. Yeah, we’re finally ready to open up testing to more people.

It’s easy to wait too long to get external feedback, until the time to make any substantive changes to the game has passed. That's why we’re actively soliciting playtesters now for observed testing sessions. This isn’t a typical demo-disguised-as-a-beta, it's a crucial part of developing a game that's designed to deliver a unique experience every single time you play it. If you're selected, we’ll have people dedicated to watching you play, so we can learn where we need to do a better job—whether it’s explaining the game, demystifying our over-the-top weapons, or figuring out why that one person always chooses to use the pistol.

We pull playtesters from our community on our Discord, which you can opt into by following the instructions in the welcome dialog. For now, you need to be in North America, have access to a computer where you can install Parsec, and have a decent Internet connection. In the playtest, we’ll get four people to play the game without help or hints from us as we silently watch. Again, we’re looking for our mistakes, not yours. Are you new to co-op shooters? Don’t worry! Thanks to the AI Driver, the game will automatically adjust for a wide range of skill sets. No matter your skill level, you are needed!

This heatmap from a level in Episode 1 shows where playertesters were standing every time they took damage. The warmer the color, the more aliens bopped players in those spots.

We're going to be working on The Anacrusis for many years to come, so we expect to be collecting feedback this way for a long time. It has already proven invaluable to us, not only to make sure that the game we’re making is fun, but to ensure that we’re sticking with our initial vision for Stray Bombay’s games.

What's that vision? We have a series of design pillars that make up the foundation of our game. Whenever we add, remove, or tweak something in the game, we ask ourselves if the changes support these basic ideas. They’re big, serious ideas, as befits a small game studio that wants to take over the world. Here they are:

Our games are highly replayable. • Our games are about players working together. • Our games empower players to instantly jump in and be productive. • Our games create awesome and often surprising moments. • Our games are about shared experiences, not the difficulty. • Our games minimize skill gaps so everyone can feel like part of the team. • Friends can always play our games together. • Our games give players enough information to make plans, which can then go horribly wrong. • Players have long-term goals that they can invest in from session to session. • We recognize that trust between players grows over time. • We create opportunity for players, not work. • We do our best to make our games welcoming places, and take explicit steps to reduce hate, harassment, and disruptive behavior.

Clearly these are high-level aspirations, but we regularly use them to make lower-level design decisions. For instance, originally character upgrades, or perks, were simple drops that were placed around the levels by the AI Driver. The first person to find one added it to their collection, but everyone else missed out. This encouraged some players to race through the levels, hoovering up the best gear. It was tempting to blame the players who turned into loot goblins (*cough* Ryan), but it wasn't the player's fault. It represented a design shortcoming that discouraged players from working together. To solve the problem, we moved perks into a new device called a Matter Compiler. Matter Compilers are world objects that the AI Driver places throughout the levels. They present every player with a selection of perks to choose from. Each player gets a chance to select an upgrade that best fits their playstyle or their in-game goals. Now when a player finds a Matter Compiler, they're excited to share their discovery with the team, since it means that everyone gets an upgrade.

That’s how we work. We come up with a new idea and get it into the game as quickly as we can. Then we can test it, learn from it, and iterate on the design. Sometimes this means players get a surprise—the other week some external testers got to try a few new prototype weapons that most people on the team hadn’t even seen yet! (Look, officially we aren’t talking about the rocket launcher that shoots a rocket that shoots even more rockets. But it’s rad and you’re going to freakin' love it.)

So this is where we’re starting. Next week, we’re going to talk about mods, which we think are incredible important to the kind of game we want to make. (Hint: It’s about giving player’s agency to play the game the way they want to, not only the way we make them.) If you have topic requests for future blog posts, hop in the Discord and drop a suggestion in the #dev-blog-requests channel! In the meantime, thank you for caring about the game enough to read this post! We’re really excited about The Anacrusis, and can’t wait to show you more of our game.

While the original studio behind Left 4 Dead are making an unofficial sequel in Back 4 Blood, one of the Valve writers who gave L4D its personality is making a new cooperative monster-mashing shooter too. Stray Bombay, the studio co-founded by former Valve writer Chet Faliszek and former Riot designer Dr. Kimberly Voll, today announced The Anacrusis. It's a four-player FPS set aboard a giant stranded spaceship, and you can see a bit in the trailer below.

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