DEEP ROCK GALACTIC BY GHOST SHIP GAMES
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Tale of Two Trailers

31/3/2017

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by Mikkel Martin Pedersen - Game Director
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Hello Fellow Dwarves!

It is time for a trip down memory lane and to take a look at the trailer for Deep Rock Galactic. (I know! ...memory lane is only 10 month long, but so much has happened that it feels much further away!).

Today I'm gonna show you a comparison between the first version of our trailer and the updated version of it. And why is this interesting, you may ask? Well first of all it shows how crazy fast this project has developed. Secondly it shows the game before and after we nailed - or I should maybe say, sort of haphazardly discovered - the high level art direction of the game. And last but not least, I’m doing this because I simply wanted to see the trailers running side by side :-) …. But first I will give you a little background about why we made the trailers.

The first trailer was created around one month after we got together and founded Ghost Ship Games. From the start we knew that we needed to get some funding in place, so we were heavily focusing on making a playable prototype and at the same time preparing a lot of material for the fundraising. The gameplay trailer was the single most important piece of promotional asset we could make. The purpose of it was to give potential investors confidence that we had a strong game concept and that we had the skills and experience to go through with the production of the game.

Our first prototype of the game used a fairly simple voxel based system to generate the caves - it looked a bit like Minecraft. We didn’t like it and we knew we wanted to get away from this look and create an artstyle that was stylish and unique without being too simplistic. Henrik, CTO at Ghost Ship, further developed the terrain tech and made it look more smooth. This system (or the 1st iteration of it) is what you see in the old trailer in the video.

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The gameplay trailer worked and we secured funding from Capnova and received a government grant from DFI. We were happy and in business :-)

The updated trailer was made when we started attending our first couple of game conferences. The first conference was Steam Dev Days 2016 in Seattle. Here, we were attending to connect with Valve, so we could get our store page live on Steam and start the closed alpha. The second conference was Games Connection in Paris a couple of weeks later, where we went to meet with potential business partners.
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Before these events, we had had an amazing breakthrough in the art direction. Henrik had made a system, that enabled us to generate debris and smaller objects like stalactites and crystals and turn them into a diggable and destructible material. When it got in the hands of Robert (our art director) magic happened and he created some amazing looking caves. Now we could see that the combination of a mesh based terrain combined with extended use of debris sets enabled us to create seemingly endless variations in the caves.

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Since we felt that the game now looked so much better we decide to update the trailer. We didn’t really have any time to do a new trailer, so instead we just did a remake of the old one. And almost shot by shot, we recreated the trailer.

The updated trailer looked much better and helped us get a lot of attention from publishers and gamers - signing up for the Closed Alpha (and yes, we will release more keys soon!). It also played a big part in Coffee Stain noticing us and in the end, closing a deal with us. (Read about it here).
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So if there is a lesson to be learned it is that a cool trailer can work wonders for your game and your company, so you better invest time in making a cool one!
Below is the video showing the two trailers running side by side. It is marvelous to see the giant leap we made in the art style between the two trailers and in so short time. To me, It is a testament of the magic and wonder of game development. Enjoy!  


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​We got funded! Again!

24/2/2017

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by Søren Lundgaard - Captain of the Ghost Ship
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Oh, I know - we have been quite silent for a while, but now we are back with some pretty big news! - or at least, it's pretty big to us! :D 

Some of you might remember us writing on Facebook about our trip to Dreamhack in the middle of Sweden. What we didn't write at that point, was that we also connected with Coffee Stain Studios, a band of awesome and amazingly nice Swedish game developers. So nice, in fact, that after some negotiations, they have decided to both invest in our company and publish our game, Deep Rock Galactic!

Perhaps you don't know Coffee Stain by name, but it's quite likely that you've heard of a little game called Goat Simulator, which they created and published to the world. It sold like crazy and has reached more than 20 million people. Even more relevant, they have also created and published the Sanctum FPS co-op games on Steam and consoles, reaching millions of players. We could see a lot of synergies between our companies, and after a quick visit at their place in Skövde during January, it became clear that we were destined to do great things together.

Now, business deals tend to take a long time to negotiate - it is not unusual for complicated deals like this take 3-6 months from start to finish. However, as with everything around Ghost Ship Games, we somehow managed to make this happen real fast. We'd like to send a huge thank-you to Capnova being with us from the start and for making all of this possible. (Some of you might remember that Capnova was our initial investor, and without them we would not have been in this nice situation)

It's been some pretty crazy weeks and it doesn't stop here - over the next few weeks, we are going to tour the US, showcasing Deep Rock Galactic to the world!

Our first stop is GDC in San Francisco next week. Here, we have a very nice showroom at something called The Garage SF, where we will play the game with journalists, platform-owners and other games industry contacts. We share this place with 3 other indie-developers under the umbrella of Coffee Stain Publishing and Raw Fury, another Swedish indie-publisher.

We will showcase the latest iteration of the game, which has been tested extensively by our great Closed Alpha community and has improved quite a bit since we last showed something back in December. Btw, psst, you can still sign up to the Closed Alpha on our home-page - do it now before the entire world starts flooding in! :D

Next stop: PAX East, Boston, where Coffee Stain and Raw Fury has a large booth in the public area. We have designed an awesome booth for Deep Rock Galactic - a bit in the vein of the old Gauntlet arcade machine. PAX East is a consumer event and a REALLY big one. Here, we will showcase the game to future fans as well as whoever else shows up at our booth.

After we get home from the US and relax for a couple of days, the plan is to continue promoting the game with Coffee Stain and prepare the launch of the Steam Early Access version later this year. The exact date is still yet-to-be-defined.

Read the press release on our collaboration with Coffee Stain here:
http://www.coffeestainstudios.com/…/coffee-stain-invests-i…/


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