Sweden has become a huge player in the games industry. The Division was developed by Ubisoft's Swedish subsidiary Massive Entertainment, and Mojang's evolving sandbox continues to be such a phenomenon that Minecraft YouTube content passed a trillion views this week. Swedish indie dev Niclas Marie previously told Game Rant this has inspired people going to school, and Deep Rock Galactic game director Mikkel Martin Pedersen seems to have similar hopes for its next-door neighbor Denmark.
Denmark has a few notable studios like Hitman developer IO Interactive, or Subway Surfers co-developers Kiloo and SYBO. Unity Technologies was also founded in Denmark, and recently acquired Weta Digital to add components into the Unity engine. Copenhagen-based Ghost Ship Games has also been fortunate with Deep Rock Galactic reaching three million sales in November, and Pedersen said "giving back to the Danish game development industry is something we really want to do." Game Rant spoke to Pedersen about the influence of Deep Rock's community and how Ghost Ship aims to give back in-turn.
Taking Feedback and Giving Back
Pedersen has worked in the games industry since 1999, and has been "ticking off boxes" with different genres. He said he likes developing a variety of games with different audiences because it encourages him to have a "broad perspective." When he worked on the third-person shooter Total Overdose at Deadline Games, Remedy Entertainment's Max Payne was a big influence. Having a broad perspective can also lead to ideas one might not expect, such as Total Overdose also pulling from Virtua Tennis.
Despite Ghost Ship starting on Deep Rock with the desire to make something its team would enjoy, not necessarily worrying about the end user, those fans have a big impact. The developer grew its presence organically, starting with the push to have 10 people sign up for its newsletter. That growing fanbase would amass on Reddit, Steam forums, and Discord, and the team polls users to see what content they want. Because only about 20 people are working on development at Ghost Ship, Pedersen said it has been invaluable to also have fans as testers when the team puts too much time into a given activity.
Community driven changes have also resulted from fan pushback, such as when Pedersen tried adding an animation to grab objective items like Boolo Caps and Apoca Blooms just five days before an update without anticipating the "chaos" of it breaking the flow of gameplay. The same can be said of balance changes, as "we can only take the weapon as far as we can with our closed test community," but people of varying skill levels will wind up touching technical tools like Engineer's LOK-1 Smart Rifle added in Season 1.
While oftentimes a weapon will be "nerfed" because of bugs or systems conflating in a way the developers didn't intend, leading to "complex public perceptions," Pedersen said, "Somehow I'm just happy people care that much." Ghost Ship will continue to tune as it goes, all while adding more weapons, biomes, and mission types.
"The craziest thing is we've somehow managed to come up with a core idea that feels like a bottomless pit, we have endless ideas for it. It's so easy to expand the game, to come up with new features."
Pedersen has spent time as a guest teacher at The Danish Film School and a speaker at The National Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment (DADIU), though not as much as he used to. As a once up-and-coming indie developer, he said the best talks at conferences such as GDC delve into numbers, understanding how marketing or platforms such as Steam work, and not sugarcoating stories about development. He feels Ghost Ship is in a "unique position" to give back to the Danish gaming scene because Deep Rock Galactic is built on open, transparent development.
The six co-founders of Ghost Ship Games had the idea for Deep Rock right away, but also knew they wanted to build a company that could support their families and other employees. It achieved this with the help of government funding and publisher Coffee Stain, but Pedersen said most indie start-ups just want to focus on building games. He hopes Ghost Ship's transparency can help them.
"For us, helping to grow start-ups in Denmark is something we really want to do."
Deep Rock Galactic is available now on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. It will launch on PS4 and PS5 in January 2022.