Hello! I am Jean Canellas, programmer and designer on Death’s Gambit.



I’m writing this to talk about the future of Death’s Gambit and to describe what has been going on behind the scenes on our end.

My goal is to be as transparent as possible, because that’s what I have always wanted from other developers. That said, it hasn’t been easy. I have opted to spend most of my time fixing bugs, rather than having a dialogue with you all. I stopped tweeting entirely, and I shut myself out. I felt like I didn’t deserve to talk to fans until all the bugs were fixed. That certainly hurt, since talking with fans is part of what I enjoy the most about my job, besides the game design.

The problems we had on release were not what the fans deserved, and as players ourselves, we would be just as frustrated. If you’ve been sticking with us this whole time, you already know that we’ve been working hard to address all of these issues. Thank you for sticking by us, and for all of your help in tracking down issues.

Now, with Patch 1.1 and Patch 1.2 rolled out on PS4 and PC, I feel I can finally take a breather and come out of the shadows again. There are still minor bugs, but for the most part, the game is finally in a good state. And we’re still planning on new patches to iron out those remaining minor bugs soon.

All that said, I want every Death’s Gambit fan to know: We don’t ever give up. This game got made through sheer force of determination and will. And we’re not done with the game yet. We did make mistakes during the release, but we have been learning, and I hope you see that once you play the latest patch.

Addressing cut content and our first reveal trailer.

Many of our fans have really latched onto our first reveal trailer and have since been disappointed by content that seemingly appears cut. Game design is about iteration and much of what you see in that first trailer is simply older versions of existing areas, or early prototypes. At the end of the day, grappling wasn’t implemented in a way that meshed with our design philosophy for the game.

So will we be adding the “cut content” back into the game? Probably not, because it was cut for a reason. That said I believe all the new content we are making for the game will be far better than what we cut. You can read more about how the game changed over time on Gamasutra.

Even some our favorite games like Bloodborne and Dark Souls have been found to have a lot of cut content.

Why did it take so long?

For the past couple months, I’ve been agonizing over how long it has taken us to get out a patch. We began work on Patch 1.1 three months ago . However, we kept running into random new issues every other day. It was a nightmare. All of you deserve better and I know it.

The main issue was dealing with Gamemaker. We would have a patch ready, but find something in the Gamemaker engine that caused all sorts of random crashes. When we thought Gamemaker had a fix, it created more bugs - bugs that we wouldn’t find until after testing the game for days.

This went on for over a MONTH. We have since decided to re-code many features entirely from the ground up to avoid these problems. In the end, that turned out to be the right strategy, since we finished Patch 1.1 in a week and a half. From here forward, we’re expecting updates and bug fixes to go much smoother based on everything new we’ve implemented.

Regaining Trust and What’s Next for Death’s Gambit

Since I feel like you all deserved a better release experience, we are working on a massive piece of free DLC content for everyone who already owns the game, featuring: new levels, new weapons, new bosses, and improvements to the main world. We hope this helps us regain the trust with all of you. I hope you continue to support us and spread the word of our game and future games.

In the coming months I want to do things differently and be more open about the development of the game.

Want to talk to me directly? Want to trash talk me for messing up the release date or for making that one boss that took you hours to beat? Come to my stream >:) I’ll be developing the DLC or playing some of the games I missed during my crunch times.

Cheers,

-Jean Canellas

Death’s Gambit Dev

Streams: https://www.twitch.tv/whitesrabbit

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Deaths_Gambit