Dead by Daylight: Object of Obsession

all right let's start I guess yes okay let's go yeah all right so I'm Dave creative director on the by daylight thank you so much for being here today this is what we're going to talk about today so a little bit of introduction on our studio or sin story of the game I was made the preparing for to release the live operation there was a lot there's a lot to talk about so I had to take some very specific subject but I think they're key to the success of day by daylight so I mean let's start so I wanted to present the studio at the studio I work for behavior digital it's it's part of the of the story it's important you have to know that behavior interactive has been operating for 25 years and our usual business model is to do work for hire so we develop the game

of others you know others ideas and this is great we I mean we can work with big publisher big studios and learn a lot from them well we also add our own stories that we wanted to tell so four years ago we started a studio within the studio called behavior digital and the goal would be to develop and publish our own titles our home stories and we add this vision remarkable games we would play our way remarkable as in having a unique appeal that we would play because they would be for us we would be the market so hardcore mature game and our way because we would have creative and limpid independence so we would choose our own solution how we would build the this game or these games so our first project we had very specific goals we knew we wanted to do an o'er game because we're really passionate about this genre it would be an a symmetrical

multiplayer game that was the unique aspect to the game it would be long lasting we would aim to keep this game growing and alive for as long as we could and it would introduce the digital to the world to players so a lot of big goals for first project and that by the light is exactly that project so I just want to know if you can raise your hand if you played that by daylight or if you watched that by daylight okay that's great thanks so just for the benefit of people of the future that might be looking at the video and still gonna explain really quickly what the game is so that we're all on the same page survivor game play right so it's a symmetrical multiplayer game for v1 in a procedural world you can play the survival or the killer role the survivor goal is you spawn into that procedural map you need to find five generators repair them that will power an exit gate

they go and activate that gate and escape to live another day the killer objective is simple find the survivor hit them twice to put them on the ground pick them up and bring them to a sacrificial hook where they go get out and be sacrificed to a giant monster that lives in the sky which we call the entity simple we release the game on June 14th 2016 on Steam with this offering so we had three killers at the time for survivors all with their unique perks a lot of different items with different upgrades there were two mode one ranked and one offline called Carol Duke friends 12 maps across three teams all procedurally generated and this is where we are today we've added a lot of content to the game we a lot of players have tried the experience we've added new killers new survivors a lot of new

maps and themes and also iconic characters now our guest to our universe this is pretty cool and what is really special of the game is that in this space it's pretty rare to see community and player engagement such as this players are staying they play our game for a long time so it's it's it's really special so we did this game we add ambition that it would work obviously we had a mission for the game but we were the first surprise of how we had exploded in popularity on release so today we wanted to talk about the good things we did to achieve this some of the mistakes we did too because we did quite a few and our learnings and experience on this project first let's start with the origin of the project so we were thinking about this game for a long time almost decade we did a lot of pitch at that time and we

add issues getting partners it was we heard a lot of different thing or would not sell it's too risky to build or the tech wasn't there and certainly to do this type of game but over all these years every time we could we would still use these mechanics that we wanted to do like for example in Naughty Bear there is an asymmetry called multiplayer mode and there a tree normal bear versus naughty bear the killer bear using bear traps to to trap them so like it feels similar right it's pretty close to where the body light is but one day we've decided to start this this project and we tasked a designer to start doing a lot of different prototypes to test this symmetrical our gameplay so this is stage one we call it the prototype it's actually prototypes before the real prototype where a lot of different ideas

were tested in unity at that time it was a 1v1 local multiplayer I'm going to explain the photo real quick actually what you see here is a giant piece of cardboard that we still have in the office just used to separate a giant TV screen to simulate the multiplayer aspect of the game very analog the the the demo was absolutely unbalanced the killer was super powerful and it was just one survivor with lives to simulate the four players aspect and we were already trying different procedural scenarios or ran scenarios for the maps and really quickly out of this prototype we could find the we found the one the one that was fun so we could identify the core loops of the survivor and the killer really really quickly so this this prototype was so fun and promising that we decided to create a pitch to actually

start this project for real what is great at behavior is that there's no red tape you we can actually go and see the executive and and try to get there their faith to build this kind of project so what you're seeing here is actually part of the original slides that we use for the greenlight process dead by daylight was a working title but it's stuck so the goal of this green light demo was to recreate the prototype but in a five player multiplayer so it would be networked and networked at that point the fantasy still the same as we have in the game right now slasher as the feeling of power survivor is having fun being scared we had very strong inspiration I kept this slide to show it today because what's really cool about it that we actually have a lot of these killers in the game right now and three big goals we wanted to show that

fear could be real we didn't want any UI or mechanics that would show that your character is scared we wanted to prove that the the player would be scared and would make this mistake because he stressed we wanted also to prove a visceral combat system something very binary the killer finds you and hit you you're you're dead you're done and we wanted to prove that this game would be a long last thing that the it would be ever changing that every time you play you would have a different experience so we we got permission to create this stage to prototype the company add fate into the product so we continued in unity to build this real prototype that is networked so this one was 41 networked it was a more balanced experience of what the final game would

be like and with still using random maps the idea where we succeed with this demo was to prove that the fear intention would be real and fun we solidified the core and we could focus on the core and cut everything that was secondary right now and that says the risk oops and it worked with this demo was built we played it a lot and we passed the internal green light so that we could get to the next stage and actually make it happen the process was so good that we now have a division within within the studio called you go which only does this so they build prototype after prototype all day we test them and when we find a gem something that's really fun they can become actual games so here the lesson is a very basic one but a very important one find the fun fast and stick to it as

you can see the first prototype already showed what the final game would be like and we really stuck with it so Stage three we actually start production we switch engine we go to one wheel and we start building a team so the photo we see here is more of a recent team it's it's the biggest name we we have yet but when we started with quite small we were about twenty on the team each member of the team was an picked to make sure that everybody had the same goal and we're passionate about the same subjects aim subject that they really wanted to build that game and this was key because one of the best tool we use during production are regular play tests constant play testing of the game every time we change something all the team with play and try the game and what was amazing for us and that we tried to keep is that when team members would stop to

play the game and go get a coffee instead of talking about features or bug or a specific mechanic they would start that we talked about the stories the emergent scenarios that happen during the match this was this was really really interesting and something that we wanted to keep until the game was actually released it's also in that time that we discovered a new goal one time we showed the game to the whole company during an event an alumina vent so players would play the game and we had this giant screen in the cafeteria and what we discover and created a new goal is that our game was not only fun to play but while also really fun to watch and this became a key in to the development of day by day light and its success so get the right people for your project absolutely important and take care of them just as

a reminder we really wanted to have a long-lasting game and really the hard work really start when you complete the game and release it so don't burn the team take care of them actually I'd behavior on that specific project we did very very little over time we're quite proud of it and it's perfect because as soon as you get live people are still fresh and want to continue to work all right so we're in production there's a lot of thing I could talk about but I would never have the time in an hour so I've selected two important features that I think are interesting to talk about today that support the longevity of the game sorry my mouth is super dry give me a second all right so first one is procedural Maps so we use a tile based system to generate all the maps so the tiles have different asset on them different

gameplay so we agent's them together so every time it's different and we use also random spawners to have the survivor spawn in the unknown and our intention with that was to create billions of different scenarios so that every time you play it feels really different and you don't know what to expect so it creates uncertainty but it is also a very sustainable way to create new Maps because you don't have to n craft them so our idea was really players are gonna have million of different Maps it's gonna be it's gonna be amazing but we found out really quickly that the players testing our game would really have a feeling that there's just one map it's the the chaos that we put into the random generator was not appreciated to its fullest like they couldn't really explain where there were or what the difference was between all the maps are

all the permutation so we went back to the drawing board and found some rules to use to to fix this problem so first off we would build about five maps within each team so we created that concept of team so you have here McMillan estate called wind farm oughta wavin wreckers the first teams that we created they have very different mood and lighting so they're recognizable second rule is that every map would be I would have a specific name and a specific building that would be static so usually found in the middle of the map they're really recognizable and you know you know as soon as you see the name of the map where you are and what to expect on that front the other thing that we made sure is that we use a landmark asset that were used usually in corner of the map to be used as a navigation navigational point and also recognizable that you can actually know where you are and recognize them so this

fixed our problem and added something really interesting so as soon as the map is loading and you see the name of the map the player would be able even though that there's a lot of random component that we'd be able to start preparing their strategy because they knew that something specific would be in there also the people watching the game could also start hypothesis of what the player should be doing to win so that was really interesting we gave the players in the Watchers a language to be able to talk about the experience - you know this awesome thing happened to me on the second floor this Asylum is something that couldn't be made before because the the random aspect there were no anchors so Lilith lesson learned here is that you need well we needed to create expectation and anchors in the procedural world going fully reigned random and fully chaotic it's not something that is really pleasant or

that you you will be feel good in your game next big compliment I want to talk about that we did during production is loadout and progression so our goal our intent was to create a lot of you know bulk of items add-ons offerings and all of these all of these things that you can customize your character with so we add items that gives you secondary action in the game such as a toolkit for example that repairs generator faster add-ons to add-ons to add to these tool to customize them each character would have four perks that would also change their abilities and the offering is the wild-card that actually changes how the match is going to be played and all the procedural aspect of the the map could be tweaked and we thought that the more we would put in the game we would allow a player to experiment that would be fun so every time you go into a match you

put these components it changes the map it adds chaos it adds different stories and it adds uncertainty the other thing that we did is this infinite progression through the blood web so this is a procedural skill tree and all of the nodes the component that you can buy to evolve your character or also procedurally chosen so you every time you evolve your character you don't know exactly what it's going to be and you need to choose how to build your character so again this was to create a near infinite progressions that players could play for a long time the first really the big problem that happened so at first it was really good I mean was appreciated that there was a lot of content but experimentation stopped quite quickly in a competitive game players won to win so obviously there's going to be a meta build the build that is judged perfect for survivors and killers it's going to be on the web and then players will want to

have this specific thing and our procedural skill tree the blood web would become more frustrating than anything because you really wanted to be able to achieve this specific loadout and it was real difficult to get there also it stopped completely experimentation like this is this is what you would see so the way we change our approach with that now is that instead of doing bulk of different items to release when we do an update we focus on less things but there are more meaningful and that shakes the meta so that the players actually start to experiment and adapt again to a new meta another problem with a bulk of items like that is that it adds exponential weight on your team so an example this is the the moon offering so these are a set of four offerings that changes the lighting of a map so you can change the moonlight so that the level is brighter or darker and every time we create a new

map the artistic team need to do a basic lighting pass for the normal experience and then make sure that the combination of all the different moon offering that the players can play will have a great lighting too and then we also add a perk that will also affect the lighting of that specific character so there's all these permutations to it it's it's a lot of work just to have a perfect lighting for all of these things so our solution for that I mean it was a great gimmick of an idea at first it was cool but since it's not used that much and adds so much problem to the team we decided to retire these items that's fine too so they just disappeared they don't appear in the blood web anymore players cannot play them anymore so the lesson here is don't be afraid be courageous you might have released with something awesome but the game evolves in a way that you don't need anymore and that you should change so that the game

becomes interesting again and that's fine all right so fast-forward to end of production we have a great game in our ends we know that it's fun to watch it's fun to play but nobody knows about our studio nobody knows about our game so we started thinking about building a community and ID players so I want to you know in this section go quickly over the different tools that we use to get that community built up so for us we started on Steam obviously this is where we release the game so the steam forum is where we wanted to start talking with the players and at that time we had the partner Starbreeze who have a game you might know about payday 2 and at that time they had one of the biggest community on Steam they had about three million members in their community so the deal we did with their player is come join our community and you will unlock three awesome masks in

paid a teamed on that by daylight so a lot of players came in the community obviously a lot of them were there for just the free [ __ ] but we had a way to talk to them so now every time we did an announcement on our on our community page they would receive this message and quite a few of them were converted I mean they wanted to know more and started to follow the project another big thing we did is our first event we went to pax to talk about our game and this was a first for for the company we didn't know really what to expect we shipped five pcs and most importantly the dev team to go there and talk about the project we had a super cool nondescript black box of boot with only the title and the most important thing was the giant TV screen all around the booth

we know our game was fun to watch so players would come here and test the game and play a real match and then people around we'd be able to look at what was happening and have fun just watching the game the first day was selling the game you know one person at a time super difficult but people were intrigued they were looking around it's the second day that was awesome for us in the revelation really because there was a lot a lot of people just backed around the boot and we didn't need to explain the game anymore the the the crowd was able to explain to newcomers what was going on the concept is is easy to grasp and easy to explain and this is it's awesome for these kinds of events and most importantly at the end of the event we had a lot of content creator streamers youtuber that came to see us to tell us that they were hyped about the project they couldn't wait to get their hands on it to be able to stream it they they understood like the the

power of this product as a really entertaining game to watch it was actually so important this factor that when we came back we really add the choice in production before release we had the choice to create one extra mode and we needed to choose do you want to do an offline mode killed your friend mode or the survivor friend the social group that you form survivor with your friends and we chose kill your friends because of the content creator we wanted to give them a platform that's safe and offline so that they could create their videos and have fun and it served us really well I mean the streamers really pushed visibility on them by that I don't release another another tool we use is that we started at that time doing the weekly death stream which is something we still do we're going to do our hundredth episode soon and we started to talk with the

community on Twitch so people would come and interact directly with us in the twitch chat to be able to ask question about the game and would show them some gameplay show them our works and sir these questions and it's at that time that a lot of questions would come back and it was clear that we needed as a team to start and take commitment and do promises for the future of the game so it was time for big promises so doing promises is to the community is scary but you really need to do it to start building trust with that community and for us I'm gonna expose you what the three big promises we did were they were quite easy to do because they're part of our values as a team no pay to win it's something that was asked out of our community it's something that a lot of them lived in other project and they wanted us to make commitment that there

wouldn't be any pay to win and it's something that I mean that we've put some systems in the game to make sure that perks abilities would be available to everybody even though we we sold DLC we actually just announced today that we're adding a new system or a new way to unlock characters in the game so all of our original original characters will now be unlockable with play time so that's how we fulfill this promise we actually did pay to lose the first DLC we released was a customization pack really flashy team Don the 80s and of course if you're a flashy character in the game where we need to hide it's paid to lose right our second problem is promise is no fracture in the community and now we did this is every map we released was going to be free and accessible to everybody that was super important to us and last one will be as

generous as we can since the release of the game there's two full DLC content drop that we did completely for free because we could at that time so that's it and also some some charity case to give back to the community something we did with the streamer we created specific items for them and then sold them and all the money went to charity super appreciated by the community so the lesson here is start building your community as soon as you can be transparent be available youyou can't wait till you know the game is out obviously so as soon as you can interacting with them is super valuable and if everything is going all right you'll have a community so for us we wanted as a team to be really involved with the community we didn't want like the company to be the the person

interacting with the community so all of us on the team we did go into the forums and answer directly and interacted with the members of the community answering the question the concerns and having fun with them creating characters talking about the lore and this was this was truly amazing since then we've added or we transform some people into dedicated community manager because I mean it's it's a lot of work and we have to do other things obviously so let's talk a bit about community let's start with the bat let's get this out of the way I actually saw a couple of conference this week about exactly this problem it's something that every one of us need to tackle especially in the online multiplayer with subject like killing like our game you're gonna get your personal life invaded like if you have your personal Facebook or Twitter and you're having fun on their fans are going to find find you they're gonna ask

you questions some of them are really toxic as well and it's it's dangerous to start and work 24/7 really because you have your phone and you want to interact with them and because the game is worldwide it never stops this is something you need to be careful about when toxicity becomes really really I some of them I mean we'll also get to threats targeting you directly and my point here is that I mean this thing it shouldn't happen but they and you need to be ready to support team members that are going to live these kind of scenarios so that they feel supported and protected but the good of having community tremendously outweigh the bad it's great for motivation interacting with the community seeing what they build the arts and crafts they write stories they contribute and make the game much better I had only one

slide to show you the kind of thing that the art community is doing they create their own chapters the sheer surprise it's awesome I want to build that eventually tattoos of our main character it's crazy I mean cosplay obviously videos I mean they're all over and they make the game richer lesson ears one of the most important one when you release a game that's going to be live you create a relationship between you and your community and you need to give them this ownership it's going to make the game richer it's gonna make the game better so it's as much as theirs as it is yours you should embrace that all right so Stage four we release the game we're now alive we have the biggest team yet I want to talk a bit about the early days what we did in in the first month about on the live operation of the game so continuous monitoring communication with

with the community super important fixing bugs aggressively and starting work on our major updates so ear is a quite small it's the first things that we release during the the first month so we've listened to the community demands and one of the feature that would ask the most was the survive with friend feature so that mode that we had to cut before release so a way to be able to play with your friends so obviously we because it was a top demand we wanted to show that we we had a commitment to that game and to them so we started working on that other thing we did is that we monitored the different language in the community and we found out that we had a big community in China and a big one in Russia as well but they didn't have their language support and in the game so they you know they had to I mean they had to deal with English so we added these language in the first

month as well which was really really appreciated we also release the free content Maps outfits just to show that these are the type of things that we would give away and again to show commitment that we would support this game it's not because your community is asking to change a game that you should do everything though there are some small rules that we kept that we never touch I just want to do the first the first two example I think that since release every single day someone asks for voice in the game I want to be able to talk to other players I want to be able to scream in the game with a mic and for us we knew we knew that this would break completely the immersion so we've always said no to this feature and even today we don't have it one other thing that was asked a lot was the ability to actually goes the other way

the ability to change the survivor third-person perspective to go into first person to have a better immersion and be and be more scared basically as a survivor and we've always pushed back because survivors are supposed to work as a team and if you make your experience harder by going first person you might make the other survivor experience kind of sucky so we decided not to go there there are some small rules we broke though in the first month killer speed is an interesting one when we develop the game we the the the chase economy the speed of the killer and of the survivor was sacrosanct values that we decided that we would never change but then the first killer that we release post-lunch is our nurse she teleports she goes through wall so we add to balance her by by lowering her speed so this is something we broke in the first month survived with friends

like like I explained in our vision original vision we wanted players to experience the game alone with strangers this is like the uncertainty makes the game better that way but I mean something that was requested a lot so we decided to break that rule and let survivors play together with friends and last one last example new killer powers we were supposed when we obviously originally designed the game that every killer that we would release post-lunch was going to be stat change and little tweaks to create these new killers so like we start with the trapper and we change this and a little bit things here and there but we decided to go another way which is much better in my opinion whereas we basically created complete new powers for these for these scalars so lesson here be confident not stubborn I mean it's fine changing your game you

still need to be true to your vision but the community is going to ask for something in your games and it's also fine to change it it's gonna make something better so there's two types of things that we do during live operation pretty basic stuff we add new content and we do some services so this is an example of our content drop that we do in there by daylight we call them chapters it's a format that we use that it's always the same so when we release a content drop we have a killer we have a survivor and we have a new map that's accessible to everyone survivor comes with new perks and the killers most important of all comes with new fiction a new new lore and a new power that redefines the gameplay of of the game so here are some example when

we create these new characters really try to break the game in a good way so the nurse teleports changes the the chase completely so breaks the game in a good way really interesting players need to adapt the entre switch released one year after the launch is our first character with a range attack so again changes the dynamic completely because all of the others would have normal melee so again need to adapt to this new gameplay the pig which we is the last killer we released adds a new objective to the survivor completely so she adds a reverse bear trap so she's from the South franchise she adds the reverse bear trap on the head of the survivor and they can't escape even though they they repaired the five generators and they have the the exit gate open they have to find the chick sub box and find the correct key to get this thing off their head so it adds a new core loop to the experience so again need to adapt drastically to this new character so

what is cool about having a format like that is that it creates a solid pipeline for your team so having the same kind of format every time you create a DLC the the team knows exactly what they have to do and what to expect it is it is also very clear for players when we announce a chapter they know exactly what is going to be in there and it adds to well everyone experienced in our case adding a new killer with new gameplay means that you can play this killer and have a new experience but you can also as a survivor and counter this new character so it's like we're adding a new bus fight to the game limitations though redefining the whole gameplay every time we do a content drop is difficult for a small team it takes a lot of dedication and bandwidth so takes away a little bit of focus of supporting what's already in the game it adds complexity to to the

players we're actually reaching critical mass at the moment by adding all of these new gameplay components every time we release a killer it depends the gap between veterans and new players so to to fight this problem we just have to do a lot more onboarding about these characters add more and teach our players did these new gameplays so that they don't get confused now services so this is the first year of all of the updates we did there's a lot of stuff a lot of service so service just so that we're on the same page they're free updates just make the game better and I just wanted to go quickly over some the one that served us better it's it's good to put names on them base features so we had to cut a lot of things to focus on the core of the game so that it would be solid and

releasing a game on PC there's obviously things that the player will expect day one now in our case for example the we didn't have remapping we couldn't customize the control and this is something that players expected day one so these services are really nice you should do them early as possible if you can just add these features make your community a P so that it feels like a more complete game onboarding we do it regularly just like I explained with the with the chapter it's to support a new player to explain the new mechanics we actually release the game with two videos that was our tutorial and they became outdated really really quickly so we had to get rid of the videos and we changed that to a manual so text-based explanation and tutorial and that was much easier to update so it's a much better choice for a long term onboarding quality of life or updates that lowers

frictions within the game one one example that we live recently we had issues some time with our matchmaking sometimes people would deal with players that would be laggy and they had no way to know their ping so they would go out of the game and use the third-party software to be able to know the ping of the players and we didn't want that we didn't want players to get out of the game for that so we've added this feature to the game lowers friction makes the experience better for all the players and these this guy are based on community needs so when community is asking requesting for something like that we make it happen safety not glamorous but something that we have to do always so every day making sure that the game is a safe environment we we've added a lot of feature actually since since release report function so a way to report players and band function

and also making sure that the the new cheats and the new cheat engine are addressed so that there's no cheating in the game events is one of the most interesting one something that we started last year actually so you know a lloween winter event the anniversary they're great create excitement around the event for a week or weekend and they're a great way to test special gameplay as well and they are great to lower the toxicity for a moment every time we do events with objective that are usually community based we see that within the game the toxicity is lowered it brings the community members together so that's really interesting and last one but at least balance something we do regularly as well so to balance issues and to shake the meta so I'll go back with more on balance a little bit later so lesson here is really to you if

you're aiming to have a live game that you're going to update regularly you need to focus on the foundation of your game at the beginning it's okay to cut a lot of secondary system because you will have time afterwards if the players buy in and want to be part of the experience of your game then the rest can come later and you can do that indefinitely alright let's go to balance now so balancing game is difficult I think we can all agree balancing a symmetrical multiplayer is is really difficult and I really wanted to go quickly ow or what we use to balance the game so we use three sources gut instincts data analytics and community feedback all important quick note about gut instincts when you're creating something new where I mean we we had no clue doing

the symmetrical multiplayer or game doing new characters that changes the game completely working in design you don't have players you don't have any lytx you don't have anything to use so you know your game your team knows the game so a team debate and going with your instinct is the normal way to go at that point data analytics is really interesting for us for the team it was the first project where we actually use analytics and one of the best addition that's Julianne by the way you hello Aloha game you can say I is a really fun guy a data analyst that we added to the game to the project sorry is a PhD evolutionary biology so this guy is awesome addition he will crunch through our data but also can make link to the

psychology of our players so he works with our designer to find what we can change in the feature or what we can balance to address some specific personality based a problem data analytic is not optional now we make sure that everything we design and everything we add it's a part of the scope we think about what we'll need as analytics and it's always taught in the feature be mindful of the hooks when we ask before release we weren't sure what we needed as hooks into analytics so we've added books everywhere analytics about everything and this is a problem it's something that you won't be able to use if you get data about everything it's going to bloat your your data you will be super expensive and you won't be able to analyze this we had to scrap most of it actually and

make it lighter so not enough is a problem too much is also a problem you just need to design and be mindful of what you need and the last point that a versus perception is really important data analytics is really strong but when the community thinks that there's a problem it doesn't matter how how strong is your data they won't believe you like the perception is much stronger and that's why it can't be the only tool you used to balance the game so another tool that we use is a discord group so we formed that last year with an elite group of our of our players so we found players that add more than a thousand hours in the game that were really invested that could play the game really well and that add constructive feedback about these features and we invited them into the discord group where our designers some engineers and community

manager interact with them directly we actually talked with them pretty much every day to talk about a balanced path that we want to do a new feature to get their feedback there you know they really represent the community and what the community thinks they're also under NDA so it's possible for us to create specific builds just for them and we can play with them and they I mean they are so invested in the game that they're much better than anyone in the team so their feedback is super valuable so just true lesson learned about balance first of all don't react to first reactions we found out that every time we release new content it takes at least two weeks for the players to adapt the data analytics that you receive in this first two weeks is rubbish you can't use it and their reaction is also not real they need that time to that and understand when exchange in the game leave no one behind

when we do a balanced pass for a problem that is for the I rank for example we always need to make sure that this change will not affect in a bad way the lowerings players so need to be inclusive and communicate a lot when we do changes like that we usually communicate before we do the change to get the feedback we communicate when we do the patch and we communicate a lot afterwards to make sure that there's no wrong interpretation of the changes right so patches last segment so obviously if you're going to do a lot of services and a lot of the content you're gonna do a lot of patches and we add a we have a crazy Kadence where we would do patches and not fix every two weeks about so we did about five million give or take different patches and I think that we did all the mistakes possible when doing

patches so I prepared a blitz of different mistakes so we'll go quickly through them huge patch to download with no player facing changes patches are too far apart patches are too close together I ping a patch that never comes I ping a patch that doesn't deliver forget to communicate about an awesome patch nobody knows about it patching without patch notes leaving space to interpretation in the patch notes forgetting to mention the change in the patch notes forgetting to remove the mention of a change that was reverted in the patch notes patching on the Friday because of limited support during the weekend that's bad you know about that one patching on the Thursday because one day is not enough patching in a Wednesday because two days is not enough patching on a Thursday because the last four patches were awesome and surely this one will be too horrible mistake patching just before the holidays against limited support

patching because it's time horrible patching a bug fix which heavily impacts the game balance patching a bounce pass on a character that released yesterday is no that can happen patching with data we don't want to reveal just yet so we did a couple of weeks patching PC way before passing on console they're going to be mad about it and patching console one hour before patch on PC they're gonna be superfast about it so some best practices I don't want to go through all of them but some important one if this wasn't clear enough batch early in the week so that you can add fix have an emergency plan so we put we put a pipeline for this which is which is great so if something happens during a weekend or an evening the team members can know who to contact so that the problem is fixed as soon as possible and ptb so public that's built super easy on Steam whenever possible you can create this the specific build

give to the player before it's actually released they will test it they will be able to comment if you have the analytics in there it's super useful to see if your patch is gonna be okay and you can even do survey to make sure that you get the feedback you want from your community so less than a year probably the the lesson of lesson for our project you can fail it's fine we we did a lot of mistake it's fine acknowledge learn out of them become better and then repeat so as a summary I want to expose what I feel are the big points that made our project successful one create a remarkable game with unique flavors and emotions to consistently redefine the game with new content and updates three work and an end with the community give them ownership for be available to your

players be transparent honest and generous five be passionate and stay true to your vision thank you okay so we have a bit of time here if you want to ask questions and then we can go somewhere else I think there's a wrap-up section where that we can use afterwards math is also with me so if you have questions for him please go to the mic if you have some all right easy-peasy so you talked a little bit about responding to the meta has there been anything you've seen where you you know created an item or a perk and you

expected it would be used in one certain way and then as soon as you saw the way players were actually using it you were like that wasn't what that was for or like that wasn't our intention with that change absolutely you're for sure I don't have an example that comes to mind do you have one the party starters that was used that was used okay I guess I don't know yes I mean or we didn't expect to be that important that that is one that happened for example borough time or decisive strike we knew they were going to be important those second chance perk or huge but that there would cause so much pain to the killer's that that was that was a surprise I was curious about how you guys felt you needed to handle the licensed killers or named killers like Freddy and Leatherface as opposed to

your homegrown ones which which from what I could tell you guys had more creative control was there pressure to like make them different so doing licensed character are super interesting creatively actually because you know they're already established and making their power fit into our game is sometimes a big challenge when we started working on Freddy you know which exists in another world only in your nightmares like okay this is gonna be it's gonna be a challenge and these limitation are actually super fun original character where we can go you know anywhere is also it's also a lot of fun yeah a licensed character with this challenge is it's quite cool I mean it's not a problem it's really a fun thing to have one last question how many how many killer ideas did you come up with they do not use wow we have a like a done of character in our documentation and we

might have 30 ish just waiting there so they might come up in the future they're not necessarily cut but sometimes it's just a matter of time like this one is too complicated for now so or well yeah it's one that's definitely cut yeah oh yeah the final one well maybe when maybe one day yeah we we did have a killer in the prototype that was flying so of course it's it's kind of Opie that case yeah we got rid of that one yes just had a question about how you work together with the that payday 2 team to do that kind of cross promotion with the masks did you have any kind of information exchange did you learn stuff from them on payday 2 do you do you still speak yeah for sure I mean our relationship with star breeze when we we started this project we learned a lot of them out of them I mean now to build up that community this might mean for sure you

have anything to add to that question yeah it was good because they they said you know you you will do the the push to you know push the disability of this project you will do the you will have to work hard for it and we want it to do this you know it's our game and we wanted to be involved in our community and build it up so it was guidance and then we did all the hard work really just had one kind of follow-up question did you find out you had a lot of overlap from players that were you said

you had a pretty good conversion of players who tried that by daylight that came from the payday to audience I think so I don't have any any stats but I mean at first building that the community and having people in our beta a lot came from the payday community that's for sure right so he said the first 10,000 at least everything no great thanks no problem anyone else okay thank you so much [Applause]