Hold To Reset

Building a new game, a new studio and a new life from the ground up

Alex Hutchinson hasn’t shipped yet, but is still designing DLC

This is usually the point they kick me out of the office. The game is done and apart from final lingering bugs and tiny polish issues, I am banned from entering any new requests or badgering any team member to change anything in the game. We need to close, ship the data to the printers and get the game onto shelves for its January 28 release date.

In a normal job, this is the perfect time to take the vacation you have put off for the last nine months, but in the world of videogames one deadline usually just makes way for the next one, which right now means thinking about post-launch content. As a one-team studio this means anything from any initial patches, to downloadable editions, to free items for early players, to a potential sequel, on the assumption this first one works out okay.

Much has been written about the increase in the costs of making games relative to the much slower increases to the cost of buying them, so I won’t bother to rehash it here, except to say that most major games need to factor in some income post-launch to give themselves the best chance of breaking even and hopefully actually making some money. And then to add that the data shows the sweet spot for releasing this DLC is 30 days after the main release, otherwise (outside of a service game) most players have already begun to move on to the next big thing. So we need to make extra content, and we need to do it fast.

For Savage Planet we’re aware it’s a new IP and people are taking a risk in supporting us, so we aim to be generous. We have a few free additions planned, and engineers and artists are slowly migrating to these as they run out of bugs to fix, plus a paid DLC which will include a whole new area to explore, some new story elements and some new bad jokes. We are toying with adding a New Game+ as it will allow us to lean on the work we’ve already created and give people a new way to play (with a few new twists, perhaps). I’ve become enamoured with the idea of games that enable speedrunning, by not patching areas that may seem like an exploit, but in fact are just cunning uses of existing mechanics. And perhaps a new game mode that asks the player to win fast (which seems appropriate for a second playthrough) but also adds some tools to make it crazier.

It feels a lot like shooting in the dark, though, as we are building the first one, at least, without any large-scale player feedback. We think we know what people will enjoy, but we can’t be certain, so it’s as much guesswork as it is a science. The first drops for any game, even a liveservice game, are likely to be more of the same, or a few features that may have been close to finished but ended up on the cutting room floor due to time constraints and a need to ship.

Any feature that sits slightly outside the game, such as photo modes, are also good options for early DLC: they’re fun, they don’t mess with your balance or tuning, they don’t complexify your game and, best of all, if they work they allow people to start posting pictures of your game to remind people who haven’t tried it yet that you exist. Which, to be completely honest, is the goal of all our DLC. Just adding more content is unlikely to work, so we need the paid DLC especially to generate a story for magazines or websites that will put the game back in the public eye, so we’ve been looking at every feature we included in the game and seeing where we left some meat on the bone.

What can we do that would tip you over the line if you had passed on the main game? Add more funny stuff? More ridiculousness? At this point I wish we were making a game based on loot. Making things bleed bigger numbers is always motivating, and if it isn’t, your game bombed and the DLC ain’t moving anyway.

Instead we’ll flesh out our world. If you work for the fourth-best interstellar space exploration company, who is the thirdbest? What would they be like? Maybe we’ll do it like an ’80s movie and make their leaders obsessed with martial arts and personal hygiene. Either way we need to get coverage out of it, to remind people the core game is on shelves. You’ll know we did it right if you see at least one online headline saying the DLC exists: and you’ll know we whiffed if it sinks without a trace.

Most major games need to factor in some income postlaunch to give themselves the best chance of breaking even

Alex Hutchinson is co-founder of Montreal-based Typhoon Studios. He can be found on Twitter at @BangBangClick