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What is "The Space Rig"?

3/5/2017

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​By Robert Friis - Art Director

Hey Miners! This is Robert the Art Director, with another short update on just what’s going down on board the Ghost Ship these days. We’re hard at work on Update 4 for Deep Rock Galactic, which will mostly be about implementing first versions of a few big things the game is currently missing: A better menu flow, persistence and character upgrades, better ways to set up missions and customizing your character, as well as a place to hang out between missions (for now simply called The Space Rig). For Update 4, it’s our intention to have the first draft of these things in the game, getting it into your hands as quickly as possible so we can start collecting feedback and improve the designs.
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At the center of Update 4 is the Space Rig - one of many small space stations in orbit around the planet Hoxxes, and owned by the interstellar mining corporation Deep Rock Galactic. Basically, it is where you players will team up before missions, customize your characters, and unlock upgrades and new weapons. It will also be a very handy place for us to start shedding more light on the setting the game takes place in, through news terminals and monitors, as well as hidden within the station itself. This first version will be light on the lore and graphics, but it is absolutely something we intend to put more work into later. Right now it’s VERY basic, but we artists are practically salivating at the thought of skinning that place at a later date. :D
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On the Space Rig will be many things, but to begin with it will primarily be about the first version of the Terminal - your one-stop place for joining or hosting games, as well as setting difficulty, rules, and other parameters for missions. For now, we still offer missions from a predefined list, but in time the missions will be fully randomly generated each time you play.

From the terminal, you’ll also be able to select which character you want to play, customize the basic loadout, as well as unlock upgrades and new items.
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For Update 4, this will all only be a sort of “first taste” - a basic version, without a ton of content. Right now our focus remains on getting the underlying systems in place. Once that is mostly done, THEN we can really start filling them out and really get into the meat of making the game the most fun it can possibly be. It’s gonna be awesome. We can’t wait. And, as always, we couldn’t do it without you guys - your input, feedback, videos, all of that is immensely helpful and a fantastic motivator. Keep being awesome, all. :D​
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Welcome to Hoxxes!

22/3/2017

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by Mikkel Martin Pedersen - Game Director & Robert Friis - Art Director
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Hello everyone!

Welcome to yet another look behind the scenes of Deep Rock Galactic! This time we’d like to present a bit of backstory for the world and setting of DRG. Where in the universe are we and what the heck is going on!

Before we get to that though, a short explanation of our thinking behind it: As you might know by now, Deep Rock Galactic is first and foremost a multiplayer game, and as such is meant to be experienced online together with your friends or strangers (who are just friends you haven’t met yet!). You can play it 1-4 players and with any combination of dwarves. This means that telling a character-driven story centered on the dwarves themselves doesn’t make that much sense. Instead, we will be focusing on embedding narrative within the world itself - a narrative you will uncover as you progress through the game. We want to hint at what’s going on rather than explicitly tell you, and allow you to piece it together at your own pace.

​So what do we know so far? Robert Friis, our Art Director, put it into writing and here it goes…

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Welcome to Hoxxes!  
Hoxxes is a nasty piece of work. A real shithole. A scorched, tidally locked planet, orbiting the angry blue sun of Creus, along with several siblings. Hoxxes stands out among them all, for two reasons:
1: Her extraordinarily rich deposits of precious minerals, and 2: her staggeringly hostile environment.
For years, interplanetary mining corporations have attempted to tame Hoxxes, but up until now they have failed. One by one they have left, tails between their legs, seeking to please their shareholders elsewhere in the galaxy.
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Only one corporation stubbornly remains: Deep Rock Galactic. The company is notorious for its general lack of safety precautions, but famous for taking on the opportunities other companies would not even consider. It offers hefty paychecks and bonuses rather than sanctioned work safety guarantees, which tends to mean that their field operatives are among the meanest and most capable bastards this side of Orion. Mercenaries, soldiers, ex-pirates, bounty hunters...and dwarves. This stunty race of surly, muscular humanoids, otherwise known as “Stonekin”, is known across the galaxy as some of the most skillful miners and hardiest warriors ever to exist. Deep Rock Galactic offers exactly the kind of challenge dwarves thrive in.

Hoxxes bears her battle scars proudly. Generations of corroded mining equipment, crashed freighters, and the withered, ash-filled husks of lost outposts litter her surface, and thousands of miles of half-collapsed mine shafts and vast cave systems stretch deep and enticingly underground, as if to say “What of it, boys? Who’s next?”.
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There’s more to worry about on Hoxxes IV than just the electromagnetic storms, gravity anomalies, tectonic instability, or seas of sulphuric acid however - Hoxxes IV is home to one of the most diverse selections of horrible, horrible life yet found in the galaxy. Fueled by an unending barrage of radioactive emissions from Creus, and aided by a steady influx of biomatter and rapidly mutating micro organisms left behind by the invading mining corporations, the children of Hoxxes grow up large, angry, territorial, and generally impervious to most ammunition short of a tank round. And if the pincers, teeth, tentacles, and altogether too many eyes of Hoxxes’ children isn’t enough to scare you away, rumors of even worse and much older, sinister, and alien things down in the deepest excavations abound.

The road ahead will not be easy on the operatives of Deep Rock Galactic. But that’s fine. There’s profit to be made, and there are always more volunteers arriving.


So that’s what we’re going with for now - a brutal, dirty sci-fi setting that pulls no punches. We haven’t settled on many of the finer details yet, and we’re very excited to discover and develop this universe as the production progresses.  If you want to chip in with your ideas, please feel free to do so. :-)

Well, that’s it for now! You got a hostile planet to mine, and Deep Rock Galactic doesn’t pay you by the hour. 
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The danger and the darkness awaits! Time to get to work!
​
Cheers,
Mikkel

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Exploding Plants

26/1/2017

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by Fran Avilés - Designer
Hi !
I am Fran Avilés, Level Designer on Deep Rock Galactic. However, I am not going to talk about caves yet.
Every new element that we introduce in our game (or in any other game for that matter) needs 3 different kinds of intervention: conceptual design, technical implementation, and visual representation. That’s the case of a very simple (but effective) object that is going to populate some of our caves from now on: the exploding plant.
The specific behaviour was defined by the design team: it has very few health points, they regenerate over time if the plant is not shot, there is half a second of delay between the plant reaching 0 health and the actual explosion, and they can cause chained explosions. The artist created a model that could both communicate its function and fit the aesthetics of Deep Rock Galactic, while one of our programmers implemented all the behaviours.
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The plant now existed in our game and it was working as planned. However, games have to do an extra effort to communicate the states of all their elements. Game effects, particles, etc. have an obvious aesthetic reason to exist, but most of them are also there to let the player know the result of a certain action. You may think about blood coming out of the enemy after being shot in a shooter or the way in which Mario blinks while the effect of the star lasts. We were clearly missing that:
For the past two weeks, our artist has been very busy with other stuff and didn’t have the time to finish the implementation of the plant. This lack of visual effects was having gameplay consequences, therefore, even if I am not very experienced with Blueprints in Unreal, I knew that something had to be done as placeholder.
The material that the artist had created already had more than enough properties for our purposes. Just by connecting the health of the plant to the emission and to one of the parameters of the displacement function, the plant behaviour became more apparent:
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Dwarf Armor Setup

19/1/2017

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by ​Ronnie Ree - Animator

​My name is Ronnie Ree. I'm the animator on Deep Rock Galactic.
I want to show you a few behind the scenes images of the dwarves' armor.
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​Each character class will have very different armor or outfits.
Heavy characters like the Driller or the Gunner, will have big heavy metal armor outfits, for more protection.

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Other characters, like the Scout (also internally called the Navigator), will have a light outfit, so they can move around more quickly in the environments.
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The idea is to make the armor sets very customizable within each class.
So, the Gunner will have many different shoulder plates, helmets, and so on to chose from, that is only available to him.
The same goes for the other character classes.
Below you can see an image of the setup in 3ds max
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The intense colors are only for working, it makes it easier for me to see which armor part belongs to which class - it will look different in game.

I hope you enjoy this little blog post. See you underground!

​- Ronnie Ree / Animator
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Procedural Level Generation

10/1/2017

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by Mikkel Martin Pedersen - Game Director
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Hi, fellow Miners!

It's time for a Behind-The-Scene look at the procedural level generation in Deep Rock Galactic. First of let me explain something, that I think is easily misunderstood when using the words "Procedural generation". When we use the term, we are talking about procedural LEVEL generation - not WORLD generation - like what you see in Minecraft. Instead we have set out to procedurally generate cave-systems that will provide a strong FPS co-op experience for 30-90 minutes of shooter action and exploration gameplay.
But why procedural? Well, In order to create a true sense of exploration - every time you play the game - we need endless variation and we need the unexpected to happen - the crazy and odd cave constructions, that we would find it hard to design our self. Bonus benefit is that we as developers also have fun playing the game again and again :-)
The way we have generated the cave-system you see in the above video (Infested Chasm from Closed Alpha Build), is by creating a series of caves - level designed out of simple primitive shapes that the procedural system dress with a nice rocky surface and debris, stalactites and other geological details. Each cave also gets a random set of bigger features like pillars, crystals, gold, entrances and exits.
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Then these semi level designed caves are randomly chosen and connected with tunnels of various styles - small, tight, wide, enormous and so on. Infested Chasms is constructed like this with only four caves connected with tunnels  (avg. playtime=30 min). This may sound overly simple and straightforward, but the truth is that when you are deep down in the dark it is very easy to get lost - even with a level design that is basically pearls and a string (o-o-o-o). In the near future we are going to expand the procedural level generation and make it more advanced, but for now this rather simple approach has worked fine and has given us a good feeling of what we can achieve.

Until next time...Remember: Don't run out of flares - it's dark down there!
​

Cheers,
Mikkel Martin Pedersen (Game director)

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