How Canada’s Behaviour Interactive hatched its horror hit Dead by Daylight

Above: Killers can lay traps for humans in the asynchronous multiplayer game Dead by Daylight.

Image Credit: Behaviour/Starbreeze

GamesBeat: This sounds like the opposite of Evolve.

Stephen Mulrooney: To come back to the point about different perspectives in the game, with the survivors in third-person and the killer in first, that was proven by the prototype. Yet, it was so counter-intuitive for everyone. If you asked anyone before they played the game what the correct way to do it would be, they’d say the killer should be powerful, so he’s in third, and the survivors should be immersed, so they’re in first.

When we inverted it, though, the flip side was true. The great moments are when the killer walks by you while you’re crouched in the grass and his constrained field of view means he doesn’t see you. You manage to survive because you were just in the right place at the right time. It was something that only came out because we did the prototype first, because we found the fun first. That’s what we’ve kept doing since.

Osborne: We knew we had something special on our hands early on, and that’s what Hugo is for. This would be the point where we’re saying, “It’s okay, but it might not have legs,” and that’s when we’d just move on to the next thing. But this one, it was very much working.

The next step after that was to go into preproduction. We increased to 10 staff. We needed to network it, first thing, so we could try four on one, five on one, six on one, two on one, find out the right balance and the right map size. That’s also when art started getting involved, thinking about the tile system and so on. Still very gray-box, but with proper metrics and so on. It’s not VR, but we did do tests early on in production.

GamesBeat: What did you settle upon for the final game?

Osborne: The incredible thing is that nothing’s really changed, and that was two years ago. The reason is that it was all pre-validated with the prototype. When we ramped that up to 10 people, this stuff wasn’t throwaway. We were doing proper code, building it out properly. Then we go into full production, ramping up the team. At the end of preproduction we had a fully playable gray box experience, four players, and that’s when we did the green light.

The offering at launch had three different killers, four survivors. We’re starting to layer on top of that with DLC. We had a ranked mode first thing. Then we added Kill Your Friends mode. We have three different locations, 12 maps, and we’re adding new maps, new killers, and new survivors. Eventually we’ll add new modes like competition. The blood web, the way you do your progression, is quite unique to our game and unique to each player. Our first DLC was free for everyone as a thanks, because we had a very successful launch. We came out at number one on Steam. We were number one on Twitch that week. It was our best E3 ever. We couldn’t be happier.

GamesBeat: And what’s the result?

Osborne: In July we added a lot of new things like new languages. We’re adding Chinese and Russian. We’ve added new maps, survivor outfits, and key bindings. The plan is to keep the product alive with the live team now. In October we had a big release where we sub-licensed the Halloween IP and put Michael Myers in our game. The timing was brilliant. The sales were really good. The reviews were fantastic.

Total Twitch time has been 200 years a month. That’s how much people watch. Three and a half million hours watched. We do our own Twitch every week as a team. We talk directly with Twitch about things they’d like to see in the game. They’ve been a big vehicle for us, and for future games too. We’re looking at what makes great moments, why something would be interesting to watch.

Average play time is 35 hours, which is crazy. Especially when you look at how quick a game is, six or seven minutes. But that’s part of it. “Oh, I’ll just do one more.” A lot of people play both killer and survivor. At the beginning we wondered whether it would end up being one or the other, but there’s a big crossover. People like to do both. It really is like playing two different games. They have separate progressions as well.

Above: Dead by Daylight won a couple of awards at the Canadian game awards in Montreal.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: Where is it popular?

Osborne: Demographics-wise, we’ve been really successful in Asia. We’re very happy with our success in China and Thailand. We’re looking to add other Asian languages. We have a very big percentage of women playing.

Back to Hugo, in the last year and a half we’ve done 10 playable prototypes after Dead by Daylight. Each of them have their own legitimate future. None of them are cancelled per se. I’m very keen to often drop something and come back to it later, or to be working on multiple things in tandem. We’re never just obsessing on one thing. I want to keep everyone fresh. We can have an idea and jump back. “That would be great for Charlie, let’s go back to that.” They’re just named after the radio alphabet, which I don’t regret, because otherwise I could never remember them all.

The idea is that this will go on forever. We’re up to J, and K is next. Once we go through the alphabet we’ll go back around again. I’ve run R&D groups in the past at other studios. It’s a super-important part, keeping that eye to the future. It’s hard to do, especially when you have to put aside some of your best guys, guys who’d be amazing in production. But we have to think to the future. We want a good solid future for our studio and everyone who works here.

GamesBeat: How long did Dead by Daylight take in the end?

Osborne: The actual prototype was about two months. Preproduction was about six. The product itself was a year and a half, two years. Probably two and a half years in total.

Mulrooney: Not counting all the earlier iterations.

Osborne: If you look around here, even earlier ideas for games where you run around killing people — it started as a board game. We didn’t even go near code. We were playing with dice and little guys, lots of hand-drawn art. Again, super rapid prototyping. It’s about getting into the game as fast as possible. How can I show it to people? How can you experience what I’m thinking?

Like any good skunkworks we keep the team sealed off so they can experiment. It’s a dream job, an opportunity for them. Like I say, it’s a very important part of our future as a studio.

GamesBeat: Do you ever bring the work-for-hire clients in to get their feedback on some of these?

Osborne: Absolutely, trusted partners. Starbreeze, we were working with them in the work-for-hire space when we decided to partner with them on Dead by Daylight. We already had a relationship through our work for hire. Also, of course, the legacy of that and our reputation as a work-for-hire studio has been a strong foundation for us to break out into doing our own stuff.

We’ve built connections not just in the business world, but also in licensing. We have a reputation for getting the job done. What we needed to prove as a studio was that we could come up with something ourselves and do it from scratch, our own creative vision. We’re happy with the result.