Hello all!

We love game universes. The way they evolve, the way they grow, the shared journey with your audience. We live by Tolkien, by Asimov, by Lovecraft, by GRR Martin. When we see games like Path of Exile or Fallout we feel, that’s the way to go! When we see Eve Online, we feel “that’s a masterpiece”

Killsquad is our tribute to that. We dream of a day where you have dozens of Killsquad heroes, and many planets to explore. But, as Tolkien himself would say “Little by little, one can travel very far”. So, today, we are happy to reveal our vision for the next 6 months. The season 1 of Killsquad, which has the theme of REVELATION. REVELATION will present the actors of the Killsquad universe: the factions, their agendas, and how do we, the Killsquad, work to get what we want.

A few disclaimers before getting all excited about the Plague and the Federation. You guys know we like to be 100% transparent, both when we get it right and we get it wrong. So here’s a couple warnings:

• There’s an overall task, bug fixing / general improvements, not listed here. But of course that’s ongoing and you’ll get updates frequently.
  
• We will drop new contracts during development, they are not part of these major updates.
  
• This is a development plan. Things may change. New features may take priority. If that happens, we’ll keep you posted on our progress. Best is to be around our Discord, that’s where the magic happens.

Here is the roadmap of Revelation, click to open in Full Size. We'll be posting it also in the screenshots section.

• New game area: Colosseum of the Unseen
  
• Unlock In game vendor
  
• New Enemy Reveal: Fed Forces Expansion

• Community Features
  
  • Leaderboards
    
  • Player profiles
    
  • Skin packs
• SpecOps league unlock
  
• Fed Forces Expansion
  
• • Artillery
    
  • Barricades
    
  • New unit types
    
  • Contracts for Fed Forces
• New Hero Reveal: Engineer

• New Hero Released: Engineer
  
• Contracts of the Plague: Contracts where team members are cursed with different types of plague.
  
• Reveal: Refugees

• Expand spec-ops league
  
• Contracts involving refugees
  
• New perks for enemies
  
• New hero reveal: Rogue Fed

• New hero released: Rogue Fed
  
• New planet Skúa

Each update is going to come with an expansion of the Killsquad Lore, fiction, and an evolving story.

We hope you will join us on Revelation, which starts July 16th. Because there’s no journey worth doing that doesn’t come with travel companions. Frodo is nothing without Sam. We’re gonna go on an incredible journey. We hope you tag along.

Hello all!

We said we'd announce our pricing on July 4th. Here we are with the price one day late: it's great news, but this requires an apology, and an explanation.


First, the good news: we're pleased to announce Killsquad is coming out July 16th as planned, on Steam Early Access, at 19.99€, 16.99 GBP, 19.99 USD, and equivalent conversions into all other supported currencies. Pricing should appear on the Steam page on the next page refresh cycle by Valve.

We said early on in our Discord channel that we wanted to work on the price with the community to be fair and accessible. We spoke with you guys at E3 and discussed options as part of our commitment. We decided then that we preferred an attractive price so we could build up a larger community. We're happy to confirm we're sticking to our philosophy with the price.

This price gives all the Killsquad experience as described on our previous Dev Diary post, and as shown on all the videos we're sharing with you guys on Youtube.

As we said, Killsquad comes with no loot boxes, no microtransactions. You buy the game, and you have fun. Easy as that.

A second piece of good news is that the game comes with a content roadmap which we will announce next week. You're gonna get new enemies soon. New heroes. New missions. All as free updates in the next few months.



Second, an apology. We said Thursday. It's Friday. So we missed the date by one day. Sorry about that. We communicated yesterday on Discord that we needed one more day to do the math on the prices, but clearly people on Steam didn't see our post and thought we didn't show up. Which was wrong on our side. So again, apologies for the inconvenience.



Last, the explanation. Committing to announcing prices this Thursday was, in hindsight, a terrible idea, as we didn't realize Thursday was Independence Day (congratulations to our USA fans). Which means when we had some issues with the currency tools at Steam, we couldn't contact our friends at Valve to get help as we would have done on a regular working day, as they were on a National Holiday, understandibly.

We hope this clears all this issue once and for all. If not, feel free to post questions on the comments below and we'll respond right away.

Have a great weekend everyone! And keep an eye on our Twitter. We're gonna be posting some cool stuff for you all.

Hello all!

Welcome to our 4th Dev Diary. We've been really busy, so sorry it's been too long! But we have so much cool stuff to share today.

We’re very happy to announce we just wrapped our Release Candidate build. This means all team members now shift to pure testing, no more changes are allowed to code, art, animation or design except to fix bugs.

As a consequence, we can give you guys a sneak peek at what’s included and not included exactly on our Early Access build coming on the 16th. It’s looking like a terrific release, can’t wait to share with you what we have prepared. Here we go:


Day one, your squad will consist of Cass, Zero, Kosmo and Troy, as you’ve seen them on all our videos and tutorials. All of them come with their full skill tree, ultimates, and so on. As you’ve seen, they play very differently. I for example almost always play as Troy. Which means I’ve played with him for 4 weeks now, and still haven’t touched the other 3 heroes, so we feel there’s quite a bit for me to discover here in terms of skills, styles of play, etc.


For each of the four heroes, we’re giving you 2 skins. Skin packs will come later, but we wanted to give you 2 skins of each right away, just in case there’s two of the same hero on your team.

We’re working on new squad members, but those will arrive later of course ;-) Stay tuned!


Heroes from Killsquad hate to share their weapons. As a result, weapons in the Killsquad universe are owned by a specific hero, and each one is unique. Cass has her weapons, and so does Troy, etc. Day one, each hero will have 12 weapon models in their personal arsenal. Of course, each hero comes with a default weapon, and you can buy new ones by beating contracts and spending their hard earned cash on them.

Weapons are not just more or less powerful: each one has specific passive abilities, which define its personality. Take Kosmo, for example. Will he just use his basic Tool, a massive hammer which increases Kosmo’s overshield capacity, or does he feel extravagant today, and prefers to bring along his Exorcist hammer, which causes wildfires that slow down and roast enemies?
Each weapon exists in three variants:

• Common
  
• Rare
  
• Epic

The difference is price and, of course, configurability. By default, all weapons have one initial characteristic or perk.


Commons, being the cheapest of them all, offer you one additional slot for a perk. Thus, common weapons can only be perked up or configured once. They’re great, but what you see is what you get, mostly.

Rares and Epics is what pro players will buy later on. These have 2 and 3 perk slots, so you can upgrade them and invest to make them fit your fight style. Maybe the weapon gives you a passive regen. And then you unlock a perk to increase damage against bosses. We’ll let you guys discover that for yourself.

To perk up weapons, you need to gather resources, which are found on specific areas of the planets. And some materials are harder to find… so you’ll have fun for hours to come.

So, all in all, roughly 50 weapons, configurable, are waiting for you to come claim them.

And we’re already working on new weapons and a Legendary weapon tier, but that’s something we’ll talk about next week when we unveil our roadmap.


Weapon manufacturers of the Outer Reach are always thinking of better ways to sell new toys to warriors like us. That’s why they invented gears: gears are the ultimate in survival and letality.

Gears are body-mounted devices that grant special powers to the wearer. Maybe you have a life extender. Maybe you can summon turrets on the level. Maybe you get better prices at merchants. That’s what gears are all about.


Each hero can carry up to 2 gears: one Support gear and one Prototype gear. Supports are usually all about survival: shields, regens, life extenders, and so on. Prototypes are… well, we’ll let you figure them out for yourself. But get ready to feel like a super hero.

All in all, there are around 25 gears on the release day of Killsquad. Gears, unlike Weapons, can be used by any squad member. We did this on purpose. We love this idea of players having to decide which hero they care more about, and so who gets what perk. Besides, some gears have specific perks for specific heroes. You didn’t think we’d let you guys decide so easily, didn’t you?

Gears, as weapons, come in Common, Rare and Epic versions. So again, if you want to have your Cass tuned up to the max, you’ll need to go on resource hunting sprees, and then decide which of your weapons and gears you care more about.


Day One, you’ll be able to explore and scavenge three massive game worlds, our planets. These are Kemmekh, Wasteland07, and the Palace of Pain. Each of them comes with specific flora, fauna, resources and events.

Kemmekh is a massive open-air mine, where the crystals of Kem were once mined. These crystals are extremely valuable, as they are the material from which the lenses of directed-energy weapons are manufactured. The miners of Kemmekh dug deep fueled by greed. They opened galleries which connected with creatures that should never have been unearthed.

Wasteland07 is one of the hundreds of planets of the Outer Reach that fell due to nuclear war. Radiation levels are off the charts, and fauna mutated into creatures of nightmare. Explore Wasteland07, its cities and barren landscapes, and try to get out of there before the next meteor storm strikes.

The Palace of Pain used to be a huge space prison where only the worst of the worst were sent on a one-ticket to hell. Decades ago, a very special inmate led a revolt, killed everyone, and turned the prison into his own special lair, the Palace of Pain.


Killsquad will contain around 40 contracts on release day. These come in different shapes and forms, as we feel our contract engine is the core of the game. First, contracts come in two tiers: Recruit and Veteran. These don’t need much explanation. We’ll add the Special Ops tier later, but that will be post-launch.

In terms of the contracts themselves, these cover a lot of different activities, from boss battles, escort missions, and so on. Some contracts may have secrets for you guys to find out, others may have special events. All of them end up in a reward, which you can bring to our game vendors to acquire new weapons & gears for you to buy.



As we’ve explained before, you can undertake contracts with any team size, from 1 to 4 players, so Killsquad can be played fully solo if you so wish.
Contracts is the area we plan to expand the most, but rest assured, day one you’ll have plenty of missions to enjoy!


Next week, we’ll post another update with our 2019 roadmap, so you get a vision of where we will be focusing our efforts once we release our Early Access version. We’re designing new heroes. Monsters. Missions. Weapons. There’s a whole universe we just can’t wait to create with all of you!

Welcome back, bounty hunters.


Team is working really hard to deliver a killer E3 demo. If you come to LA, come say hi in the Indiecade booth (West Hall, #5200). We’ll have a really nice playable version of KILLSQUAD. We’ll give you KILLSQUAD goodies. It’s gonna be a blast.



Today, I wanted to talk about what I feel makes KILLSQUAD great. Yes, the visuals are nice. Yes, the fast-paced control feels great, both on keyboard or gamepad. We have monsters that’ll make your jaw drop. But there’s something else we try to do on all Novarama games, which we think sets our games apart. And it’s this: our games are not just games: they are places.

If you think about it, when you go see a movie, if the movie is great, you’re not on the theater. If you’re watching say Lord of the Rings, you’re not in a Cineplex: you’re in Mordor, and Aragorn is your buddy. Mentally, movies have a capacity to transport us to places and generate powerful emotions.

Games, being interactive, are ten times more powerful.


KILLSQUAD, like all Novarama games, wasn’t born as an experience. We didn’t think: what do we want players to do? What is the gameplay? We thought: where do we want players to go? And we all agreed: remember that scene on Star Wars (the original one, yes, of course), where Luke and Obi Wan go to the Mos Eisley space cantina? That feeling of: “this is revered ground, the place where bounty hunters flock to find gigs, collect rewards, and make new friends or team mates”? KILLSQUAD tries to be that place.

Everything in KILLSQUAD is designed so the moment you boot it, you are mentally in a seedy Bounty Hunter Space Cantina.


So, we started working, and designing a story mode. But it felt weird. Because, if you’re in a space cantina, you have no clue what comes next. Maybe you’ll go on a bounty hunting trip to kill the Helldörren, a warlord. Maybe you’ll lead a revolt against the Federation. Cantinas bring adventure.
That’s why KILLSQUAD doesn’t have a story mode per se: what we have instead is a contract screen, where all the players in the world receive proposals to go places and get stuff done. That’s what would happen on Mos Eisley: somewhere on the cantina there would be a crappy wooden board and, on the board, adventures for you to pick. That is exactly the structure of KILLSQUAD. But our “board” has two characteristics that make it special.




The first one is that contracts are shared. Which means you see the same ones I see. So, if I say “ok, I’m gonna pick this one, kill the Jotun who’s running wild on Kemmekh”, on your screen you’ll get an update: “someone is assembling a squad to go kill a Jotun on Kemmekh”. And, you know what? You can tag along. Like on a space cantina. So, missions are improv. Wanna go with a friend? Sure! Want to assemble a team of perfect unkowns? Go for it.


Of course, players can always tag their contracts as private, so they are not visible to the rest of the bounty hunting community. Do this if you wanna play with your mates. If you wanna go solo (yes, you can play Killsquad alone). Or if you just have a bad day and wanna go solo. Like Han. Yeah, terrible joke, I know.

The second thing is that the contract browser is adaptive. So, it’s gonna offer you things that make sense to you. We don’t force you to do this or that contract: you’re a bounty hunter. No-one tells bounty hunters where to go. So, we’ll offer you custom experiences that fit your level, so you can choose your poison.



This is tied to your vector which I’ll cover in a future article, but is basically your hero level. We compute your hero level, which depends on your weapons and gear, and think “ok, what would be cool contracts for this guy?”.
You’re gonna get some easy ones, but there will be tough stuff as well. And there may be events. Hey, maybe this week we’re doing a competition, so we’ll show you that as well.

The last thing is that our system is always evolving. Which means we can do all sorts of cool stuff. Maybe we have special contracts on weekends. Maybe we ramp up difficulty and do a suicide week. Maybe we celebrate Independence Day with a specific, only that week contract. A living system means a living game universe. And a living game universe is… well, a living universe is cool. Period.

So that’s our vision: KILLSQUAD is a bounty hunter cantina, where all players meet, build squads, to go on quests together. It’s a place of socialization, of community. It’s designed to adapt to you, so there’s always a cool adventure at your fingertips. And it’s alive, so it will be ever changing.

Now, you guys bear with us for a bit while we test the game.
Ship will depart to the Space Cantina soon.
We can’t wait to open the door and say “welcome, bounty hunter".

One of the benefits of being independent and self-publishing your own game is full control. For example, we can look under the hood of our game, and share with you guys how does the game work inside. And… guess what? That’s what we’re gonna do in this installment.


We started Killsquad with replayability in mind. We knew:

• We like games you can play over and over. We played Left4Dead until our thumbs went sore
  
• We couldn’t afford to do a massive game, say Skyrim, much to our disappointment

So, early on we knew Procedural was the way to go. But we didn’t want a procedural game that looked all the same: we wanted AAA procedural. The kind of proceduralism you see on Diablo III and still makes your eyes go “wow!”
As a result, we decided we’d want to combine a procedural AI to build the game world and populate it, with the quality only hand-curated content can give you.

In Killsquad-speak, a chunk is a section of map. Chunks can have different shapes and sizes, and artists are free to do pretty much whatever they like inside a chunk: so, our map is cool and exciting, from the barren wastelands to mines and space palaces. The only restriction is, chunks have connections to other chunks. Needless to say, chunks are hand-made, carefully crafted for your visual enjoyment. We then sew then together using a bit of technical wizardry, and you get a seamless map.
Here you can see some chunks of our game world:







Examples of chunks across our game world

Now, imagine we had an engine which was able to build a puzzle with chunks, connecting them pretty much like a Lego. Every time you played, a different map would appear. That’s exactly how Killsquad works. And, because we have a rough estimate of how long should a chunk last, we can build missions, which we call contracts, of a certain duration. A 30-minute game session typically will consist of 10-15 chunks.
Of course there’s a ton of magic going on behind the curtain: we have starter chunks, boss chunks, we have a ton of tags within our chunks that indicate what can happen/not happen where, and so on.




If you’re following us so far, we can do maps. Really cool ones. And they will be replayable. Good.
However, Killsquad is not a barren landscape: there’s life everywhere, from the tiny Arisera of Wasteland 07, to the massive Helldörren that dwells in the Palace of Pain. To spawn monsters, we have a second AI which controls what to spawn and where. This second AI takes into consideration:

• The world we’re in, as each world has specific fauna
  
• The number and level of the players, so the level of challenge fits the skill level
  
• The stress level of players. We estimate stress level in real time using the variation on the life of the players. This will determine if we should spawn more or less enemies
  
• And a few other parameters which are too obscure to cover here, but allow us to decide what goes where.

So, combining all this, we have a believable world, full of monsters who want to eat us. Excelsior!



A chunk, tagged for gameplay. Those red circles are spawn areas, the white splines are paths for enemies to follow

Killsquad is not a senseless shooting alley: there’s goals, quests, subquests, events and whatnot. This is the final cog in the machine.
To do this, we have a system of “cards”: the AI director is given cards by our designers. And, from those cards, it will use them so each mission sequence fits different. Maybe you’ll find a meteor storm. Or maybe the Space Police will siege your team. Cards are a great way to make each session feel unique.
At the same time, cards provide good control: if we wanted to, our designers could heavily script a mission, by stating the cards and the order among them, and thus build a more controlled mission. We don’t usually do that, but that doesn’t mean we can’t.

All in all, this is a big system, which controls the game session.
Part of the behavior works at load time, such as map generation and mission sequence planning.
Part works on-the-fly, such as enemy placement and numbers and all mission game logic.
Last, but not least, a third part is reactive to the player’s actions, such as the stress-controlled enemy population.
When the three wheels rotate in unison, the experience you get is a single, cohesive, high quality game that you can play over and over again. And that’s no small feat.
See you guys next week!

Every journey starts with a story. Here is ours:

The development of Killsquad goes all the way back to 2016. Our studio was a Sony exclusive for 9 years, working on games for the PSP, PSVITA and PS3. We developed a saga called Invizimals, which was quite successful in Europe: we did 6 games, trading cards, even a TV Show you can still see on Netflix. For a long time, we got the benefit of working on a single brand from the cradle, and see it succeed. And focusing on that one brand for so long gave us two very unique advantages.

On one hand, it allowed us to build a thriving community. We did events in Moscow and Cannes. We did E3, GDC and many more. We had games, t-shirts, posters and merchandise. And all along those events, we met fans, the people who played and bought our games. And boy, that was cool. Nothing beats the feeling of working hard on something, then seeing your community grow, evolve and respond. There’s nothing like that. Nothing compares, and nothing will ever compare, to you guys. We’re here because you are there, simple as that.

The other precious advantage we had is time in our hands. Yes, we were doing Invizimals, but we Novaramans are night owls. At night, when the studio lights faded, we played Diablo. And Left4Dead. And Heroes of the Storm. And so many cool games we have all played, respected and enjoyed. And slowly our studio built “The List”. This was originally a Word document full of weird thoughts and sketchy game ideas. With time, it became a Google Drive file, where we put all our wishes for that game we would once build, if we ever had the opportunity to do so. Every new game we played, we learned something about what makes games fun, and that something was added “The List”.

The List had many items: we wanted something driven by the community. We wanted coop. We wanted a rich, evolving universe. We wanted lore. You know, we *do* love lore. In a nutshell, we wanted to build the perfect game. The one that would keep us and our friends awake at night and take over our lives completely. The dream all developers have of one day getting to build *The Game*.

The other thing we wanted to do was to self-publish the game. It’s hard enough to agree among ourselves at Novarama, so trying to sync up with a publisher? No way. Too many cooks spoil the dish. If we ever did our dream game, it would be an affair lead by us, and you guys. No one else we need to report to.

At that time, we were rather busy. We shipped games. We cancelled others. But every time someone had some free time, we took ideas from “The List”, and tested them out. We did paper prototypes. Concept art. You name it. And slowly, the list became a design. Words became features, features became prototypes, and we had our first demos. And from our hands and brains came monsters and myths and legends to explore. And we thought: hey, this plays kind of nice, we should keep going. Other things were thrown away. Nobody’s perfect, and some things didn’t quite work out.



Prototyping damage areas and collision boxes

With time, we managed to save up some money, and had the human resources available to work on The Game. We saw the opportunity, and we jumped at it: we began building a proper game. We chose to go with Unreal as the engine from the start because we wanted to focus on rapid iteration and gameplay. We didn’t want to build the car: we wanted to win the race.

And so Killsquad was born.

A lot of Killsquad feels very classic: enemy behaviours, bosses, spatial patterns: we didn’t want to re-invent the wheel, we wanted to pay tribute to so many good games out there. In fact, we consider ourselves just heirs to a long line of games, the A-RPG genre. Our bible is Gauntlet. Baldur’s Gate. Heroes of the Storm. Lost Ark. And there’s rules that were not meant to be broken and doors meant not to be crossed. A boss is a boss. And when you meet a Killsquad boss, and you feel the power and the audio kicking in blasting, all we hope is you will feel that thump in the chest, and feel: “yeah, this is exactly how this should feel like”.

Yet in other areas we felt we wanted to do our own thing. This is an ever changing industry, where each game needs to claim its own land. In our case, we wanted short, adrenaline pumping sessions. Maybe it’s because we’re getting older, or maybe ‘cos we love the feeling of winning a huge battle every night, but we wanted something where you can feel rewarded in one session. And just say bye to your mates with a “tomorrow, same place same time”.


Very early stage of our procedural map generator

We also wanted to put the community first. A game should be a place to meet your friends, old and new. A place of communion and shared experience. Our contract system is exactly that: us telling you guys: “This is your lair. You guys use it to build myths and legends”. Killsquad is not about the stories we tell you: it’s about the stories that emerge from the game, and you tell your friends.

And we have a ton more in store. New heroes. New worlds, New game modes. This will be a live development. Wanna chat to us? Go for it, we’re gonna be on Discord all the time. Wanna propose something? Go crazy, your ideas are as good as ours. We’re all gamers, we know these games and what makes them great.

Killsquad will become what you guys want it to become. We’re not here to preach: we’re here to listen. This is our origin story. Now, in the world of Killsquad, the time has come for you to start writing yours.