Funday Games on how a beer with a friend spawned Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor
Spinoff devs speak on unlikely origins and recutting a co-op gem
While the bug-squishing autoshooter is itself still in the larva stage, Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor already looks like a worthwhile Vampire Survivors-like. It apparently helps to crib the mining, mineral hoarding, and maladroit approach to industrial safety that makes source material Deep Rock Galactic one of the best FPS games going.
Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is in the works at Funday Games, not original DRG devs and fellow Danish outfit Ghost Ship Games. But it does fall under the latter’s new publishing arm, Ghost Ship Publishing, and can trace its origins back to a casual meeting between Funday co-founder Anders Leicht Rohde and Ghost Ship CEO Søren Lundgaard – and beyond.
"So it started 17 years ago, when Søren was my mentor when I was studying," says Rohde. "I've known him for something like 17, 20 years now. Either way, we're good friends in the industry in Denmark, and we were at Gamescom last year, having a beer at the THQ Nordic stand. And then we started talking about the Vampire Survivors craze, and we talked about how we should do something together."
"And then we just went home to our studio, and tried building a small prototype in a week, where we tried adding mining to the survivor genre and see what that did. We sent it to Ghost Ship and then, really quickly, we were off. So it was actually us just catching up for an old friendship’s sake, and then that turned into this."
Adding mining, it turned out, did a lot. Although replicating the scale of DRG’s three-dimensional, randomly generated, fully destructible cave systems was never feasible for the flat-planed confines of an autoshooter, the ability to pickaxe a path through smaller rock formations would carve open fresh opportunities to shape environments to the player’s advantage. Or disadvantage, should they tunnel themselves into a corner, or accidentally chip a vital bug-blocking wall that becomes a doorway for the encroaching horde. "It doesn't feel like Vampire Survivors because you're moving way more actively, and dodging more actively, and building your own routes," Rodhe explains. "So we think it changes the genre a little bit from just standing still or walking east to doing more active stuff with your character, which we really enjoy."
John Muller, an artist and designer at Funday, also reckons this ability to sculp the battlefield is one of the qualities that made Deep Rock Galactic such a fitting inspiration for a Survivors-like in the first place.
"Obviously, blowing up Glyphids is part of your normal everyday outing in DRG, so it makes sense to have that same power fantasy in an autoshooter," he says. "Just dialed up, of course, to 11. But we think the extra mechanics of mining and exploration add a whole new dimension to the genre in a way that just works. I think it's almost a lucky coincidence that it just happens to work so well and opens up so many interesting or tense moments, and interesting choices, without overcomplicating the core formula of an autoshooter."
"Also," Rohde adds, "because they've had five years to update Deep Rock Galactic, there's so many weapons, so many overclocks, mutations, items, stuff that we can tap into. And being an autoshooter we need a lot of content, right? So that’s a huge universe that we can tap into, which was also why it felt like a really good fit with this genre."
In addition to the autoshooter shift, Survivor isn’t planning to restitch every fibre of the original Deep Rock Galactic’s being. There are no plans for co-op, for instance; instead you’re joined by AI-controlled robot buddy Bosco, as you are when launching solo missions in DRG, and Rodhe insists he’ll provide some camaraderie despite his current support abilities feeling "quite undercooked." Muller also points to the scores of sci-fi weapons, new Glyphid enemies, and cosmetics that DRG has added in its long history of patches and updates, noting “it would take years to cover everything.”
Even so, Survivor is teeming with designs, concepts, even sound effects directly lifted from its parent game, and from what I’ve played, they’re not there so much for fanservice as they are for... well, a lack of reasons to use anything else. How much support is Ghost Ship Games – the developer, not the publisher – giving to this spinoff?
"A lot," according to Rohde. "We’re playtesting with them every week or every two weeks, where we have either Søren, the CEO, or Mikkel [Pedersen], DRG’s game director, stream it live on Discord to us and we watch them play as we discuss with them what they're seeing in the current build."
"We also have direct communications with their art department, we get voice lines and everything, so we do get a lot of help with the DRG tropes or getting the right feel for what a voice line for Mission Control would be like. Also, Søren and Mikkel are avid autoshooter players, they play maybe even more autoshooters than we do! So they have a lot of feedback on the game direction as well."
"But it's a partnership, there's nothing directive about it. It's just a really good partnership, where we help each other make the game better. Obviously, we're building the game, so they're only on the feedback level. But it's been super great so far. And it's just a great IP to work with it because there’s so much stuff and it's easy to integrate into to our game. Finding, like, funny items and artifacts that John can use for artifact systems and stuff. A deep partnership, I would say."
Challenges remain for adapting certain other facets of Deep Rock Galactic into autoshooterdom. Among the toughest will be the original’s four playable classes, a quartet of eager yet (appropriately, given the circumstances of Survivor’s conception) usually drunk dwarves. In DRG, these fellas all have distinct weaponry and tools for traversing the hostile caves of Hoxxes IV, though Funday concede they may have to focus on the former far more than the latter to maintain survival-standard movement dynamics. Only one of the four, the Scout, is currently playable, and his signature grappling hook has been left back at base.
As for wholly original gear and upgrades, Survivors has got a few all-new pieces, including a short range energy pistol and a trio of defence drones than scoot around your dwarf and cryo-slow attacking aliens. Still, Funday’s creations will always be – for want of a better word – dwarfed by kit, characters, biomes, and even mission types from Deep Rock Galactic. Rohde and Muller say this is a pragmatic choice to make the most of available resources, while also sparing their partners a fan expectation-induced headache.
"We’ve been given a little leeway with weapons to make our own things, and maybe that will expand," begins Muller. "It depends on our ongoing exploration with Ghost Ship of 'What does this game mean for the IP?' Because inevitably, if we add things here, people go 'When is it going to be in Deep Rock Galactic?' Ghost Ship does worry about that a little bit. So if we add a new character, people say 'Then why isn't it playable in Deep Rock Galactic' and all that."
"So to be honest, we will probably hew quite close to DRG. But there might be more, if we find the right reason to do it. We definitely want to have more missions. Right now, when you get to the bottom biome, you fight the Dreadnought. And it's a bit like the 'Kill the Dreadnought' mission in DRG. We'd like to do others. We've experimented with other mission types in the past, but we found that they if you were doing them all the time, it stopped feeling like an autoshooter. So we still want to explore those missions and so on, and try and integrate them in some way in the future. Maybe. But yeah, it's still very up in the air."
"Yeah, obviously we're starting with all the stuff that makes sense taking from DRG," says Rohde. "And when we get to a point where we’re like 'Okay, now the fans had their fill,' and we're ready, I'm sure we'll be able to add a more completely new content to the game. But right now, there's no reason to do that, since we have such a huge base of content to add from DRG."
Following the current closed playtest, Funday will continue to Survivor-ify as much of that DRG source material as possible, before launching into early access sometime this year. There’s no specific timeframe for this, according to Rohde, though he tells me that "some of" the component parts I haven’t seen in the test build – potentially including new biomes, bosses and playable dwarves – are up and running behind the scenes.
"It's not that we're just kicking off with all that content right now," he says. "But yeah, early access when it's ready. Luckily, the Ghost Ship guys are aiming for the best possible game and not a rushed timeline, which is super nice for us, as developers, to work with."