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Makin' A Dead End Job 02: "A Shooter Without Killing"

Dead End Job · published 7 Nov 2019, 17:05 UTC

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Hello, it’s Tony again! After last week’s post with the team behind Dead End Job, I wanted to write about how the game itself came to be.

The very core of it came from asking the question “how would you make a twin stick shooter without any shooting?” I really enjoy playing games like Enter the Gungeon, Binding of Isaac, Nuclear Throne, and Tesla vs Lovecraft (though I am usually quite bad at them - more on that a different week, I think!) and wanted to make something along those lines, but at the same time they all focus pretty heavily on killing things, and I wanted to try and approach the genre from a slightly different direction.

A few ideas came to mind. One was being a firefighter, spraying your hose and trying to rescue people from a building (the idea of rescuing people survived to Dead End Job, but ultimately fire and hoses seemed like a bit like one-note combat that would get repetitive quite quickly). Another was going in to messy hotel rooms and vacuuming up all of the rubbish (I’m pretty sure that a couple of games have since done this).

That second idea reminded me of Luigi’s Mansion and Ghostbusters (one of my all time favourite movies - pretty much the entire “you’re pest control billing clients” element of Dead End Job comes from it) and so I stuck some ghosts in it. Ghosts make everything better. We ended up with a very ugly gameplay prototype (I was deliberately keeping to abstract coder art at this point) where you went room to room sucking up ghosts with a vacuum and a kind of tug-of-war mechanic.

Unfortunately I found that it wasn’t very satisfying with lots of enemies on screen, as the tug-of-war kind of locked you in to fighting one enemy at a time, and the others would break you out of it. And after getting other people to play I realised that it was really hard to judge where the vacuum was, and what they could reach (a problem you don’t have with shooting - you can always see where your projectiles are going) so players were either getting frustrated because they were standing too far away, or because enemies were breaking out of the sides of the “funnel”.

I went back to the drawing board a bit, and thought more about Ghostbusters (this is a recurring theme in the game’s development). I realised that they shoot the ghosts and trap them to weaken them with a very visible weapon before the capture happens. It took just half a day to quickly hack in a system where you fired energy balls and had to shoot ghosts enough first to weaken them before you could suck them up, and it felt massively better. It just clicked with everyone we handed it to.

A few things in the game have been developed like that: the damage to the places you go is another example. Originally you didn’t cause any destruction at all, which was ok (shooting ghosts was still fun) but something felt a little off. Then one night I was re-watching Ghostbusters for the 100th time (I told you this was a theme) and I realised that making a huge mess, and then billing the client just the same is satisfying and funny!

Over the course of the development we’ve spent a lot of time taking the game to shows and events and then tweaking things. It’s really great seeing how people play and what the expect to happen, and then being able to adjust the game so it’s less frustrating. It’s helped the controls massively as we saw that some people just try to use one joystick to move and aim, whereas some people are very familiar with twin sticks.

An early version of the game kind of worked like a side-scroller, with you unable to shoot straight up or down (think something like Streets of Rage), but we saw pretty quickly that it was too unusual and went against how people expected the game to work (though some of this still exists in the final version - ghosts very rarely attack straight up or down, so get above or underneath them and you’ll be a bit safer. Top tip!)