Dev Blog #8 - Production Insight

Ahoy everyone,

As we come to the end of the first phase of development and get ready for an Early Access launch, I want to talk a wee bit about our journey so far. First off, I am Paul - A.K.A Pixel Sword - and I‘m the Producer for Junkfish! I have been with the company for nearly 2.5 years, roughly the full length of Monstrum 2's development, and during that time we faced many challenges. Not only that, we have grown from having only 3 people on the team working on the project to a still-growing 16 (which is a big increase, but still small for an ambitious project like this!).

With Monstrum 2, we started off by building a tonne of prototype levels and mechanics before settling on the ones you saw in the Closed Alpha (if you were part of it!) and Closed Beta. Our first tests were built in Garry’s Mod before we moved onto our engine of choice for Junkfish, Unity. We chose to start with Garry’s Mod as we could easily develop the design without needing to address the colossal challenge of networking so early on. It also allowed us to find out if we could make the core mechanics fun to play with a very light procedural element. This worked by having different areas be blocked off at random, even though the map was the same layout. Some of the more out-there stuff we experimented with back at this time included having multiple escapes active at once that you had to bring items along to complete, and vents that connected rooms together to crawl through (and some even dropped you down a floor sometimes!).

Once we moved to Unity, we started playing around with more and more ambitious features; integrating networking and some other crazy ideas before we settled on what we have currently. As we moved from prototyping into full development, we merged the Attack of The Earthling's team - who worked on the original Monstrum - onto the sequel. We also hired some new talent too, like Vaughan, our Level Designer, Marius, our General and Character Artist, Ed, our Lead Artist, and Eltanin, our Community Manager, as well as other talented, amazing developers.

The team as it stands now is 16 developers strong and everyone is working hard to provide an awesome multiplayer horror experience in Monstrum 2, which I should add, is Junkfish’s first networked game! For those lucky enough to try the Closed Alpha and Closed Beta, I hope you have seen the hard work the team have put in and the direction we are taken this version of Monstrum. We’re still very much in polishing and developing our ideas, so if you did join us for the Closed Beta, I hope you got our feedback in! We have also been using these tests to try out our networking to ensure it is as stable as possible for Early Access, and to find out the area's needing targetted most to improve performance.

We’re all really excited for you all to play Monstrum 2 and can’t wait to get it into your hands soon. To those who have joined us on the journey so far, thank you for your support and feedback, and to those that haven’t, we all here at Junkfish hope to see you soon.

Pre-order's are available now at a special discounted price! You can grab it here.

Signing off,

Paul