How to Survive Interview - New Gen, DX12 & More

A new week, a new developer Q&A for you to read! This time, we’ve talked with How to Survive developer Eko Software about their Storm Warning Edition (out now on PC, PS4 and Xbox One), their experience with new generation consoles and more. Enjoy!

• How did you get the idea of developing How to Survive? What were your inspirations?
  After developing Wanted Corp (a game with similar gameplay to the original HTS) we were very frustrated because we thought we missed something with this game, it was fun to play but not over a long time, something was missing. We thought we were able to do something better and started to think about what we should change or add. A lot of us were fans of zombies games (left 4 dead) and zombie movies (Zombieland or The Walking Dead) so we decided quite fast that we will do the game into this theme. Then we thought about what to add to make it more valuable for the players, so we added the crafting and the survival aspect. Finally came the Kovac character… I won’t say too much about him but we had very good feedback on “Kovac rules!!!”

 

• What kind of additions have you made for How to Survive: Storm Warning edition, and were these based on player feedback?
  The Storm Warning Edition includes all the DLC you can find on Steam, that means a story extension on the El Diablo Island, with new weapons, new enemies and more. There are also two new game modes ; the first is “One shot escape”, it’s a rogue-like mode with permadeath and random resources where you start with nothing and must escape from the islands. The second one is “Barricade!” where you have to protect people against zombie hordes; to do this you can build barricades, automatic turrets and try to last as long as you can. It also includes all the new skins, the additional character and weapons like the flamethrower and the electric gun. We look at game forums to see what players think and would like to see implemented in the game. But rather than just listening to specific comments what really helped us was to run a survey covering a wide range of aspects from the game. From playability to fun factor, or the type of content they would like to have. Out of it we got comprehensive and structured feedback that allowed us to understand that the community wanted to increase the “survival” factor as they felt the game was too easy on some aspects. So, when developing the DLC for the Storm Warning edition we kept this in mind. For example “One Shot Escape” and its permadeath is clearly coming from this feedback. We have also changed some rules of the game to increase the survival aspect of the game, there are less resources, the torchlight can run out of battery, you need flints to start a fire… and weather effects such as rain are not merely aesthetic… they really change the game rules! It puts your fire out so you can’t see or cook but, on the other hand, it refills the wells for you to get water! So you need to be really prepared for anything. Also we found out players really enjoyed the crafting element. They felt it was intuitive and easy to understand, and wanted to have more items, more recipes for new weapons and tools. So we introduced more!

 

• Provided that this release is successful, do you have any further ideas to explore for How to Survive or would you rather be moving onto other IPs/genres? If so, can you give us a hint on what you’ll do next?
  The original release of How to Survive was around a year ago now and it got to great chart positions worldwide. Ever since the game has been moving up & down the charts – we were even still number 3 in the Japanese PSN chart last week! – so I’d definitely say that the game has been a success for all involved.  We’re confident that the Storm Warning Edition will go on to do just as well with all the improvements we’ve made and great additional content included in the package.  As for our next project?  Who knows – we’ve got a great, stable team here and our relationship with 505 Games is really strong so we’re certainly excited about the future.

 

• As a developer, how did you find PlayStation 4 and Xbox One? Is there a significant performance gap between the two?
  PS4 and Xbox One are very similar to a PC as it was already the case for the Xbox 360. Porting our in-house engine on these new platforms was not very hard and when developing our first game we didn’t notice any important gap between the two platforms. I think that the developers will make the differences, not the hardware…

 

• Will the game run at 1080P@60FPS on both platforms? Did you have any difficulty with this target?
  We are happy to confirm that the game runs at 1080P in 60FPS on both platforms. First the game was not very smooth on the two platforms, we had some performance issue with the CPU… The first optimization was to use more the multicore architecture of the platforms. Once it was done we were OK. Then we have added meteorological effects into the game, as well to increase the visual aspect than the gameplay possibilities, and here, we needed to optimize a bit again.

 

• Did you explore the chance of crossplatform play and if so, why did you choose against it?
  No. In fact it simply means to have our own servers and not use the solutions provided by Sony and Microsoft, mainly for the matchmaking system. We are definitely a little studio and this is not something we can neither we want to handle for now.

 

• On PC, there’s a lot of talk about the upcoming DirectX 12, which supposedly will let developers harness more power out of PC configurations. Do you think users can expect major improvements in performance with DX12 based games or not?
  From what I know from DX12 the goal is to allow the programmers to access more directly to the GPU and so free the CPU as most as possible. Allowing more freedom to a programmer had always given him more possibilities, so, based on this , yes, you can expect improvements in the future. In other hand it may also means more difficulties to achieve this kind of result, and it won’t be possible for every developer to achieve this…

 

• Thank you for your time.