Deadside News

Hello friends

Vladimir Savchenko here, I run Demagic Games studio, where we work on Unreal Engine projects, specializing in solving really complicated problems. I’ll be stepping in as the production director for Deadside. Our team is working on Hello Neighbor 1&2 with tinyBuild and a while ago Alex Nichiporchik asked us how we can assist the guys at Bad Pixel with their game’s development. We immediately fell in love with the project and after many hours spent with the game and the team, I’m here now to outline the 2022 roadmap for Deadside.

First let’s talk global. The Bad Pixel team will be rapidly growing to speed up development, shorten updates delivery time and improve the overall stability of the game. Team expansion is never an easy process and we’re hopeful for your support as we build up momentum.
Deadside has an outstanding community, your feedback is extremely valuable for the team and we are working on improving this process. A major part of this improvement will be extended updates staging on Public Test Server (PTS) prior to going live and establishing more convenient feedback channels for you to report issues and suggestions based on PTS, as well as voting for features. All voices will be heard.
Now let’s talk tactics. We aim at delivering 6 major updates throughout 2022 and several minor updates in between. We will be sharing the exact dates and detailed scope for all every update closer to its release, meanwhile here’s an outline of the main points we will be focusing on:

1. Technical foundation and groundwork.
The team did a fantastic job delivering the game in its current state to Early Access, and in Q1-2 we will be focusing heavily on getting the project’s base ready for expansion. We’re talking movement optimizations, death and damage registration improvements, inventory and items storage expansion, support for advanced base building and systems, vehicles, significant increase in encounters density on the map, etc.

2. Spawn system overhaul.
We are working on a design for a new spawn system with custom respawn markers and more control on the way players are spawned on the map. Though being relatively cheap to implement this feature has a significant impact on gameplay and balance. It will take several iterations on the PTS for it to hit all the live servers.

3. Resources and craft system redesign and expansion.
Current state of this system in the game is the first step towards its original design with weapons disassembling, crafting and improvement and during 2022 we’ll be adding a lot of features

4. PvE events, missions, map density and expansion.
The world of Deadside is a beautiful place to live in and we want you to have plenty of things to do in it. Over the course of 2022 we’ll be adding new non-combat mechanics, missions with unique rewards, PvE events, uncharted encounters and much more.

5. Weapons system and content overhaul.
Deadside strikes a great balance between arcade and realistic gunplay, but as many of you mentioned it lacks distinct division between weapon classes for CQB, midrange and long range and the balance across all weapons lineup could be better. We’ll be addressing all of it in the nearest updates as well as adding more depth to the weapon system itself with features like more detailed recoil feedback pattern, progressive spread, damage drop and overhauled ballistics over mid/long range distances. On top of that we’ll be adding improved sound positioning, reworking all guns sound effects and animations

6. Base building system and raiding overhaul.
We’ve got a huge number of requests from you for the late game stages features such as more content for the bases and improved raiding, so we will be addressing these points in 2022 as well. The team has great ideas for electricity, workshops, traps and a whole lot of other handy devices to complete your base in the grim world of the aftermath.

7. Vehicles.
This one is a long time coming and due to the complexity of the feature itself and the colossal impact it has on the gameplay we will be implementing it in several stages throughout all of 2022. First stage - propeller swamp boats and rivers to support it will be introduced in Q2 with land vehicles to follow in Q3-4. We will share more info as we progress with the feature.
8. 100 players per server.
With the proper foundation in place and all the core features implemented the team’s ultimate goal for 2022 is having 100 players per server along with an increased number of NPCs.

9. And more

We have tons of more features and content planned for you that we’ll be sharing the info on starting from January. As for now we’ve prepared the New Year Update that is currently being deployed on all live servers. It marks the beginning of a new era in Deadside development, with super talented guys at Bad Pixel at the helm and tinyBuild as a publisher the game cannot be in better hands.

Stay tuned, friends!

Hello, friends!

Today starting at 5pm CET (Amsterdam) / 6pm Moscow / 11am New York time, the servers are getting a thematic Halloween update alongside permanent content for the game.

The thematic update includes the already familiar masks and helmets from last year, and 28 new wonderfully eerie weapon skins. The event will run until November 2nd. Happy Halloween!

Here's everything you need to know, thanks to Loaf:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Changelog:

• New point of interest (a town next to the plant)
  
• Various level design changes around the map
  
• Rebalanced ballistics for sniper rifles: M99, VSD, Mosin-K
  
• Optimized bot spawns to improve performance during beginning of missions
  
• Improved obstacle animations
  
• Fixed: throwing grenades through obstacles
  
• Fixed: incorrect distance showing when dying from hunger or thirst
  
• Various fixes for bugs and exploits and performance improvements
  

Location Screenshots:











Weapon Skins:


We are working hard on future updates and can’t wait to share news on them soon
See you in the game

Hello friends,

Next week, on October 27 we will be releasing the Halloween update. It features a new map location, sniper rifle ballistics tweaks, and a time-limited Halloween themed weapon skin event.

There's also something very bright in the works. A few screenshots:







See you next week!

Hello friends!

Alex here with a brief update on the latest and greatest. We’ve spent the last couple of weeks on administrative & planning tasks as we look to scale up the development of Deadside.

I wanted to talk to everyone here and give some transparency to the things we’re working on/planning around. This isn’t an official roadmap or feature list, this is an overview of the challenges we’ll be going through as we ramp up. Think of this as a behind the curtain look at game development and the discussions happening. And let us know in the comments if you'd want more updates like this.

[h2]How to scale a team
[/h2]
Before we can start hiring new members, we’re doing an in-depth evaluation of the code with a co-development team. It’s not always a good idea to start rapidly hiring new people as you need to identify the positions you need. This co-dev team (I won’t name them yet) has previously helped us on several Unreal Engine 4 projects (Deadside’s game engine) and worked on AA-level shooters. The idea here is to have a team come in and help evaluate the amount of work, start helping the original team, and gradually form a structure within Bad Pixel itself. There are engineering challenges which are difficult to scope out, and due to this we don’t know exactly what kind of profiles/positions we need to hire for until we evaluate the amount of work. This is already in progress.

[h2]The Netcode Challenge
[/h2]
The biggest challenge will likely be the netcode in general. So far we’ve discovered that the main limitation for the game comes from the server-side code. Things like storage are limited mostly due to this. We do want to give players more boxes in bases. Player count is also currently limited by some fundamental bottlenecks. These challenges are all solvable, they will just need time and resources.

[h2]VEHICLES WHEN
[/h2]
Vehicles have been a highly requested feature in Deadside. While I can’t speak for the team on if/when, I can talk you through the backend challenges that arise from implementing such features. First off, if we talk about ground transportation, the biggest issue is that we would want the server to have authority over the vehicle. The server needs to verify movement of the object, and give minimal “trust” to the peer (player). Otherwise cheaters could have a field day - feeding data into the server and you’d see cars flying all over the place. For collisions to work properly, a lot of work needs to be done and tested in live circumstances. In its current implementation, ground vehicles would feel very “rubberbandy”. A stepping stone for this could be vehicles that don’t require collisions - floating or flying ones. So expect a stepping stone before ground vehicles would be considered.

The second challenge with vehicles is building a system that “binds” passengers to the object, so that everyone is moving in sync.

And third is game design. There needs to be lots of thought put into how vehicles would spawn, where they are kept, how/if they decay, and most importantly - where to go using them.

I anticipate both the netcode and vehicle challenges will collide and require some work under the hood, so we will need to balance that with other features that can currently be done without issues (i.e. new locations).

[h2]THE SNIPER TTK DEBATE
[/h2]
Like many of you I fell in love with Deadside because of its gunplay. The only real challenge we have there is to figure out how to increase the TTK (time to kill) by snipers. Nerfing the weapons would be an obvious choice, however might not be the most fun. We’re exploring different options here - from sound design to more ways to med -- to more “out there” ideas like tactical shields (tell us in the comments what comes to mind when you imagine that!)

Speaking of sound design - in many games, you hear the gun pop before a bullet lands or wizzes by. In real life, it’s actually the opposite - a bullet flies faster than the speed of sound, especially in sniper rifles. So this is a question of realism vs practicality. If you could hear the pop sooner, it gives you a moment to react to sniper fire. In reality though, you’d hear the pop post-factum.

[h2]VARIOUS DISCUSSIONS
[/h2]

1. Raiding. We believe it’s the best fun you can have in an online shooter when a raid is happening on the map. We also believe there should be a system that gradually decays bases when owners have left, so that at one point you could offline abandoned bases. This creates both gameplay for non-confrontational players, and eases the servers. This would need to come with more tools to raid.
   
2. Building. We need more things to do in the bases, alongside building more interesting structures.
   
3. Optimization. There’s already a plan in place for an optimization pass for the game. We will find a time to plan that in as we scale the team up.
   

[h2]Outside-of-game housekeeping[/h2]

We’ve done some housekeeping on the Steam page, and I hope you’ll enjoy some of the community-picked screenshots. The page description has been updated, a couple of pieces of missing artwork were added, and we’re working on a redesigned website that’d also host a press kit for influencers.

[h2]SUMMARIZING[/h2]

This is a nutshell a summary of the latest behind the scenes developments without talking about what the development team is actually working on right now. I hope it gives you an idea of how we think about the future of Deadside, and would love to hear what you think in the comments.

I also hangout on the official discord - https://discord.gg/u4pYuZ9g4F

Thanks for reading
See you in the game

PS some work in progress visuals

Friends, we have exciting news to share with all of you. We've partnered up with tinyBuild to help accelerate the development of Deadside. Please meet Alex, CEO of tinybuild who has more details:

Hello everyone!

Alex Nichiporchik from tinyBuild here - we’re a video game developer and publisher,.

Last year, I started playing Deadside. Much like many of you here, I was excited about every single update. So much so that I got in touch with the fine folks at Bad Pixel to see if we could help in some shape or form. We started chatting with the team, and turns out they were going through a lot of the things we’ve been through -- challenges of scaling a team, establishing communication lines with the community, excitingly watching every single update get played by users (and the adrenaline of hotfixes), and more. Many of the teams tinyBuild started working with were just a few people, and grew into dozens.

The video games industry exists because of great people, and I can tell you that the team at Bad Pixel are great at what they do. And what I love is helping teams figure out how to scale up, and deliver upon expectations of really engaged fans.

We have seen how we can help, and decided to join forces and help Bad Pixel develop Deadside into a full release, getting more frequent updates out and helping the team scale up. Bad Pixel is joining tinyBuild, and will remain a separate studio working on Deadside, with the backend support from our side.

Let's do this!