All Things Marauders (March - August 2023)

It’s been a while since I talked about Marauders on here. In fact, I realised I hadn’t written about our progress since the Red Barron update in December 2022, so I thought it was about time to have a big catchup! Loads of exciting stuff has happened over the last 6 months (March till now) and we’ve made a great deal of progress. To summarise it all, over the last 6 months we have done:

• 6 Updates

• 5 Hotfixes

• 3 Events (GDC, Develop, Gamescom)

• 2 Twitch Drops Campaigns

• 1 Free Weekend

• 1 GDC Talk

• Launched A Merch Shop

So here is a breakdown of some of those main moments from over the last 6 months in rough chronological order:

MaRCH 22nd 2023 - GDC talk

We teamed up with Amazon to do a GDC (Game Developer Conference) talk in San Francisco. It was great fun and I appreciate the opportunity. The talk was called 'HOW SMALL IMPACT GAMES BUILT "MARAUDERS" ON AWS USING AMAZON GAMELIFT'. Juho Jantunen (a Senior Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services) did an introduction to Game Lift and then it was our time to shine. The three of us, Mitch, Cam and myself all had a go at talking. Cam explained Marauders overarching design and its art direction. I spoke about our journey so far; from prototype, through core development to our pre-launch Alpha/Beta/Tech testing. Explaining some of the key issues we encountered and things we learned along the way. Then Mitch wrapped it up by talking about the games launch and the technical side of how we have been using Game Lift.

Overall it was a great experience and we had a bunch of people come up at the end who have enjoyed the game and wanting to ask questions, which was nice. I didn’t get a chance to see many other talks because we were busy in meetings but I did catch a great talk by Andrew Shouldice called: ‘TUNIC’: This Was Here the Whole Time. I’m a big fan of emerging complexity in game design. For example, I love how in the game Kingdom you slowly understand more and more and through gameplay and over time you realise that there are secrets or more depth to techniques to be discovered (without tutorials). If you are into game design I would definitely check out his talk. I also randomly met the game developer who made Endoparasitic, which was cool and we had a nice chat. It’s definitely a game worth checking out as it is a short unique horror game.

April 25th 2023 - United Allies UPDATE

We were developing the United Allies update for a good three months and it ended up being the biggest update we have done even to this day! The update went out smoothly and we did a full wipe alongside it. It had so much new content but its defining feature by far was a new raid location: The Colonly Cruiser. A raid area that moved through space, had defensive turrets and was dockable as well as breachable with pods. We also introduced a tournament system, a space salvaging system, grenade launchers, the Stoner 63 rifle, new voice packs, VOIP, new items, missions and many more things. Check out the update trailer below and read the full PATCH NOTES HERE

Creating more voice packs was one of my favorite things to work on for this update. Originally, we had three voices: English (my voice), Polish male and French male. Then with this update, we introduced another 6, keeping to the concept of using native languages for the voice lines. Something which I think really helps to build the vibe/atmosphere of the game. We added an Australian male, French female, German male and Female, Romanian male, Hungarian male, American male and a special streamer voice pack. Getting people to shout swearwords at you into a microphone is very funny and I had lot of fun recording them (especially with the Australian guy). I think they all turned out great.

For the Streamer voice pack we reached out to SterDekie to see if he wanted to get involved and he did! I thought he would be a good fit because of his “space madness” persona that he put on during some of his Streams and because he genuinely was a fan of the game. He even made a cardboard ship interior which he streamed from while doing a Twitch subathon during our original Marauders beta playtests back in the day. He does great content and you should check out SterDekies Twitch channel here. Below is an example of one of his insult voice lines we put in the game.

We also did our first Twitch Drops campaign alongside the update and we were really happy with how it all went. It was a chunk of work to setup, but with a bunch of hard work and a lot of testing we managed to get a smooth process down for logging in and collecting Twitch Drops. The only way to actually test it prior to launch was to actually go live on my own Twitch account. Funnily enough, a couple of people caught me streaming and started following me even though I was only streaming a blank screen, ha!

This update we also started work on Unique Actors: Interesting in-raid interactions. Something to enrich the gameplay and build atmosphere/theme in the game. This was possible because we came up with a lightweight and flexible system to create interactions that work over multiplayer. I love this stuff because traditionally making stuff for multiplayer is complex but this makes things so much easier, we can quickly build and iterate on ideas. Put simply, we only replicate a single string which we use as a current state. Then I can use that string to make pretty much anything happen and be network-aligned. It took a little while to refine the original system but now we can make so much cool stuff. For example, for this update, we created: Vending machines, breakable barriers, barbed wire traps, fire that hurts players, weapons detectors (for the prison) as well as secrets! We try to get at least one new Unique Actor in with every update. Below you can see the original prototypes for the vending machines (left video) and the barricades (right video).

April-May 2023 - United Allies Hotfixes 1,2 & 3

Not the most exciting thing in the world but a necessity for the game's health, we put out a series of hotfixes over a couple of weeks after the United Allies update. These were mainly for exploits, crashes, hit reg issues and misc bug fixes but we also did a bunch of balancing, some optimising as well as some smaller content additions like sounds and animations. Check out the patch notes below: Hotfix 1 Patchnotes - Hotfix 2 Patchnotes - Hotfix 3 Patchnotes

MAY 19th 2023 - Merch shop launch

On the side, behind the scenes we had been working on a merch store for a long time and in May it was finally ready to launch. We started out with a few items and have been slowly adding more over the months alongside our updates. We currently have cups, hats, large mouse mats, t-shirts, hoodies and jackets. You can check out the merch store here. People definitely like their Marauders memes as one of the most popular items is the F1 Cup!

JUNE 10th 2023 - Meetup at the Team17 Office

We had a meet-up at the Team 17 office with Sterdekie , Pestily , Micheal and Jared . It was great fun and I really enjoyed chatting. They are nice guys and are really into games so we had loads of interesting stuff to talk about. They were also on a cool adventure at the time, climbing the tallest mountains in Europe, which sounded like a blast. It seemed like the perfect time to meet up as they were already in the UK for the three peaks challenge where you climb the highest mountains in England, Scotland and Wales in 24 hours.

You should definitely check out each of their channels and check out the videos of their adventures on YouTube HERE

July 4th 2023 - Excavation Update

This update was another chunky one and it was also a lot of fun to work on. We released another new raid area The Mining Frigate which went down really well. We added 2 new weapons the SPP1 (silent dart pistol) and the Mas44. We did a pass on weapon attachments and also on healing, laying the groundwork for further enhancements to the respective systems. We also added a new boss to the Prison Colonly level: The Warden, who is hard as nails. We also made it so Escape Jump Gates took some time before they became active. This ended up being a very polarising feature, but it was important to the design of the game (which I’ll chat about a bit more later on). Watch the trailer for the update below and read the full patch notes HERE.

Another thing we did which isn’t super exciting but was pivotal to the game’s health was reworking the way our matchmaking region assigning worked. Instead of your region being auto-selected based on your ping we changed the infrastructure/menu UI so players could select where they want to go from several regions (from their best ping regions). This was important for us to sort out because although it wasn’t obvious to the general public we had been dealing with a bunch of bad problems behind the scenes. Examples are: a very small percent of people could never find a match, unreliability of values used for the auto selection of servers, and at one point everyone randomly getting sent to one specific region of servers (annoyingly the most expensive and furthest from where most of our core players live). We put these changes into the game, gave it a bunch of testing and then deployed it for this update. Things worked well and I’m happy to say things have been working so much smoother since.

Up until this point, Marauders didn’t have any in-game music in it (apart from the main menu). This is because, similar to other extraction shooters, the game is highly competitive and non-diegetic music is distracting. However, I still wanted to get music into the game as I think it can really help build out an atmosphere and create a vibe for your game. So instead of music playing non-diegetically, I decided to use spot ambience from sources like gramophones, jukeboxes etc, to digetically get music into the levels. This worked well, giving an immersive feeling to areas of the levels and from a gameplay perspective created sound traps. Areas that are more dangerous because the player can’t hear as well, so they have to be more attentive, or risk getting ambushed/snuck up on. It took me a while to find the right kind of music that would give the right feeling for the Marauders universe. I tested a bunch of different types of music to try and find something that worked but in the end I settled on a 1940s style, which seemed to fit well with our alternate timeline feel. You can hear an example below:

The update as a whole was pretty solid and we only had to do one small hotfix a couple of days later to fix a few problems that snuck in. You can check out the patchnotes for it here. It’s funny, we’ve done so many updates now and we realised that no matter how much we test a build as soon as it goes out into real players hands, new problems always show-up, or we will get feedback about a change. Nothing beats having real people playing your game, especially if you are making a live service game like we are with Marauders!

July 11-13th 2023 - Develop: Brighton event

We are only a small team and so most of the time we are bunkered down getting work done but since Marauders launched we have been trying to attend more events. So in July, the three of us (Mitch, Cameron and myself) went to Develop in Brighton. Develop is a big networking event for game developers. We chatted to a bunch of people, spoke about games, made some good connections and went to a few parties. Even bumped into some people we haven’t seen for a long time! But like always time went quickly and unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to go to all the talks we wanted to.

15th July 2023 - Dev Blog 005 with Spicy Bean Dip501

For this live dev blog, we teamed up with the fun streamer Spicy Bean Dip 501 to go over some of the latest changes that we had been putting into Marauders. It was a good time and like usual we ended it with a bit of a Q&A with their audience. I like Spice Bean Dips content, I still remember the first video I saw from him, this video here, where the Red Baron Boss is killing loads of pods around him, a funny video that still makes me laugh today. This was the first dev blog video that we recorded and uploaded to our own YouTube channel:

JULY 20th 2023 - EXcavation 1.1 update

This was the start of a new cadence of work for us. We had been trying to work out how to grow the game further and best deliver updates to players. We had been thinking a lot, talking to people, looking at analytics of other games etc. In the end, we decided to change our focus from larger-scale updates ever 3 months, to instead a 2-week update schedule. With a plan for slightly larger updates every 8 weeks-ish (new levels or some larger mechanic).

Yes, that’s right 2 weeks. I’m not going to lie it’s been pretty tough but I think it’s been making the game a lot better. Technically, we are diffusing the content we had planned for the bigger updates across these smaller updates. At least that was the plan. Funnily enough, we always end up adding more than we originally planned! The overall goal for this is to keep people engaged, be more clear marketing-wise with whats in an update and add more manageable bites of exciting content for people to come back to and play. We think that sometimes our updates were so big that a lot of new content was getting lost in the noise of the update.

The biggest addition to this update was the 2 new types of pods that you can use: The Attack Pod - A pod that can shoot and the Heavy Breacher Pod - A pod with more heath that causes the player to take less damage when breaching. We also added a new gun the APS Rifle (another dart ammo weapon), more Unique Actors and a Gate Transmitter item, which players could use to Early call the escape gates. Read the full patch notes here.

August 3rd 2023 - Plunder update

For this update, we added a big new feature: Raider Mode! This is basically a quicker mode in which you go in as a solo. It was designed to help players who are getting kicked in on our normal mode. You go in with nothing and can come out with “free” loot if you survive. There is no space section in this game mode. Instead, you are given a random loadout and thrown straight into an in-raid area (either the Mining Frigate or the Merchant Cargo ship). I personally find it super fun and intense, especially when you combine it with VOIP!

An extra cool thing about putting in the groundwork for this new mode is it technologically opens up the possibility of doing other game modes in the future. We have a bunch of ideas that we are excited to explore! Check out the trailer for the update below and you can read the updates patch notes HERE.

Some other honorable mentions on new content we added include the Bandit A.I, who is basically a loot goblin, with a big bag full of lots of items. As well as the addition of a new weapon the SVU special, a heavily modified Dragunov rifle that shoots our new dart ammo type. As well as adding two new languages to the game Polish and Turkish (bringing the total languages of the game to 13).

We also added an in-raid shooting range and kill house to the Navy Outpost raid area. This was a fun little side project, built using our Unique Actor system. Below in the left video, you can see the early prototyping stage and in the right video, you can see it fully implemented in-game in the Kill House! Cameron’s time of 28 points in 14 seconds is currently the best score we have been able to get!

This update went out pretty solid and we ended up only doing a single hotfix on the 9th to tidy up a few issues and exploits before the next exciting thing that was about to happen…

August 10th 2023 - First Free Weekend

This was a big event for us. In the middle of August, we ran Twitchdrops, did our biggest sale to date and most importantly ran our first Free Weekend, which was officially supported by Steam. This meant Marauders showed up in a bunch of different places on the Steam storefront, which was super cool to see! We had been holding off doing a Free Weekend for a while as we wanted to make sure the game was in a good place before we did it. Over the last 6 months we felt we had been making good progress on the game and we were now feeling confident enough to give one a try. We planned it to be shortly after the Plunder update, where we released the new Raider Mode as we thought it would help out new players who might be bottoming out on money/starter items, because of the games difficulty.

The wind was taken out of our free weekend sails a bit because a bunch of other games were doing key beats at the same time, to name a few of the bigger ones: Escape From Tarkov had an Upadate/Wipe, Dark and Darker released into Early Access. These bigger events were announced after we had locked everything down and couldn’t change them anymore, so we definitely took a bit of a hit on our demographic of players/streamers being distracted. The timing was unfortunate but we are still happy with how things went and it definitely shows us that Free Weekends have a lot of potential and are a viable thing for us to do. I’m sure we will be doing another in the future, hopefully, next time with better timing!

August 17th 2023 - PLUNDER 1.1 Update

The problem with a 2-week cadence is that it comes around real quick ha. Case and point, the week following our Free Weekend was time for another new update to drop. Even with little time, I think we managed to make some meaningful changes which hopefully shows people our dedication to the game!

You can read the full update patch notes here but the main highlights, amongst a bunch of smaller changes, were: timer reductions, fixing some hit registration problems, making meds stackable (a highly requested feature) and adding a bunch of items in-raid whos purpose is just to be scrapped. We also did a pass on the De Lisel gun, which had been in dire need for a pass for a while. It had no bolt pull on the shoot animations and the reload was a super placeholder one. We added a new extendable mag attachment and I made up some new animations and added some new sounds which you can see in action in the video below.

Prior to this update our review score had slipped down to around 62% recent, but after the update went out we flew back up to 74% recent and remain around that number today. I think one of the driving factors for this was that we made some bigger balancing changes to a mechanic that had a lot of contention surrounding it: Timers.

Over recent updates, we added timers to the game designed to help control the pacing of gameplay. It’s something we thought a lot about and didn’t just add in on a whim. For example, the inclusion of an Escape Gate Timer was to combat the problem of highly skilled players, spawning in, breaching lots of ships, killing lots of players and quickly leaving the raid to rinse repeat, descimating large portions of player base who were newer to the game. After listening to the community, playing ourselves and trying some other techniques such as the Escape Gate Transmitter (to early call a gate), we decided to reduce the timers. I think balancing the timer, instead of removing the timer completely was the right decision and the best of both worlds. We control the gameplay a bit without being too restrictive.

August 22-25th 2023 - GAMESCOM

Although we weren’t showing off Marauders on the show floor we went over to Germany for a bunch of meetings. We met some of our current partners like Nakama (great guys) and Denuvo as well other devs and did some other networking meeting new people etc. It was a long couple of days but it was definitely worth it. Again I didn’t get a chance to look around as much as I wanted to (a common theme when we go to events! Something I need to work on). We also met up with some of our team who live in Europe: Shero and Mett, who I’ve met before and Gojira who we met for the first time! It was nice to meet them in person and hang out.

Also met a bunch of cool devs while I was down there including some of the devs from: Headbangers, Dome Keeper, Scorn, Sifu and we even got to meet up with the Escape From Takov guys! Which was super cool as we are obviously massive fans of their game. They were showing off their new game Escape From Takov Arena and Cameron and I got to have a play! The game is looking real good and has that Tarkov intensity. I think it’s going to smash it when it releases, I can’t wait!

Random extra stuff

Those were the main things but here are a couple of the smaller extra things we have been doing over the time period as well:

- We released new videos from our trips to the Royal Armouries in Leeds where we got to chat with Jonathan Ferguson about some of the weapons we wanted to put into the game:

- Heroic Labs: Nakama Interview - We did an interview with one of our backend partners who we get on really well with. If you are looking for some solid backend solutions, definitely check out their services, we highly recommend them and think its one of the main reason we can stay such a small team and do such big things!

- I created some new short-form tutorial videos, aiming at teaching people how to play:

• 01 Gearing Up

• 02 Ready to Launch

• 03 First Flight

• 04 Docking

• 05 Escaping

- Mining Frigate Comparison video - The Mining Frigate level we released was actually an overhaul of the Mine Prototype Level we had in our original Alpha/Beta days. This video shows a comparison of the 2, so you can see the progress we’ve made and how far we have come!

And that about wraps it up! I’m sure there was a bunch of other stuff that happened that I’ve forgotten to include, but these are definitely some of the bigger things!

It’s been a wild ride and this new 2 week cadence is pretty tough but I love making Marauders and I have a lot of fun doing it! I’m looking forward to the future!