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

Above: Yikes. Dead by Daylight features a killer, played by a human, hunting down four other human players.

Image Credit: Behaviour/Starbreeze

GamesBeat: Does a client give you some of that needed feedback on Hugo projects? Or do you guys mainly use the company itself to do that?

Osborne: The company itself. Normally it’s progressed beyond Hugo by the time we show it to a potential partner. We don’t show everybody what you’ve just seen. Some of that could come to fruition years from now, as an idea or a concept. I do have a tendency to keep my cards too close to the chest. But when it makes sense — if you look at Dead by Daylight, once we got to the end of that prototype and we were starting preproduction, we found that the more eyes on it, the better. The more criticism, the better. The greater the input, the better. There’s a point at which you need a lot of feedback, especially when you’re deciding whether or not to do it.

Mulrooney: There were people we showed Dead by Daylight to who we know we were never going to work with. It was just to see them play the game, to get their opinion, and to see them watching the game. That was very informative for us as far as the decisions we made and the direction we went.

Osborne: Every company out there has specialist people who do this. In my previous position, I was at Jaleco, Japanese Leisure Company, in New York. I was head of external development. I used to be on the other side of the fence, evaluating and looking at hundreds of prototypes. Before that I was in development running R&D. I’m kind of back on the side I started at.

GamesBeat: Where does a storyteller come in? Do you have a backstory that you’ve built for Dead by Daylight or any of the Hugo prototypes?

Osborne: For Hugo it really depends, because at that stage we’re concentrating on the moment-to-moment gameplay. The fiction — there isn’t anything that’s especially story-centric. It’s very expensive to do a linear story-based thing that you’ll go down one way. If you want it to branch it gets even more expensive. A lot of our Hugo prototypes rely on fun multiplayer interaction.

The fiction for Dead by Daylight we keep deliberately vague. When they were making Lost they said, “We’ll never tell you anything and you’ll keep watching. If you understand things you’ll stop.” I feel like that’s a good way to go. You feed the community with a bit of information and then some of the hardcore will explode. “Oh, is that linked to that?” They can make it much bigger than it actually is. Sometimes you’ll listen to that and maybe even change things slightly because of the community. It’s growing more organically with the product and the DLC as we add new killers.

The entity itself, the darkness that runs this whole eternal nightmare, we don’t explain much about that at all. It’s just there. I feel like the less you explain, the better. The game itself feeds into that. There’s no in-game communication. You can’t talk to each other, unless you’re playing with friends. That makes it very international, too. You can play with people all around the world, because it’s a visual game. We put in some emotes so you can say things like, “Come here.”

It’s funny, though, because the community has turned that into a bitch slap. I was watching one of our streamers the other day. One will go up to the other and do the “come here” like they’re slapping their face. It’s amazing how the game is growing beyond our intentions. That kind of stuff says, “Hey, maybe we should add a slap.” Or if you put somebody on the hook, if they’re being camped because the killer is hiding there, they can use their escape animation, or only part of it, to announce that they’re being camped. We really want to capitalize on that kind of gameplay people have been finding.

Above: The haunting atmosphere of Dead by Daylight.

Image Credit: Behaviour/Starbreeze

GamesBeat: We’ve seen a wave of these kinds of asymmetric games — Left 4 Dead and then Evolve.

Osborne: Left 4 Dead is a little different insofar it’s a bit fairer. It’s against the AI, like Payday. Evolve, of course, we looked at that. We monitored its initial — it sold okay. But it’s just now transitioned to free-to-play. That’ll be interesting to watch. I played a lot of it. It’s quite different there in how you start off so weak. It’s like a scale that at some point goes *donk* on the other side, whereas in Dead by Daylight it’s *donk* right off. [laughs] With the exception of Michael, who gets stronger as you play, it starts out pretty brutal.

Mulrooney: And Michael still starts out stronger than you. In fact, there are people who play Michael to their advantage in the first level of his evolution. It’s easier to sneak up on survivors in the first stage of Michael. You pull them off generators and stuff and just put them on a hook without even injuring them.

Osborne: I always like explaining to people, “As a survivor you can’t damage or kill the killer. You can only escape. And by the way, he’s faster than you.” They say, “How will that be fun? That sounds miserable!” And then you go in and the moments are real. The fear is real. That was very much the pillar of the game – the fear is real.

GamesBeat: Did you ever consider arming the survivors?

Osborne: Oh, yes. They have a torch, for example, which is the nearest thing. They can flash the killer and he’s momentarily stunned. We prototyped guns and things like that. But it’s a balance you really have to watch. Give someone a gun and all of a sudden there’s an expectation of that. Our slashers, or otherworldly creatures, none of them are killable, just like in the movies. Shoot them, bury them, cut them up, whatever, they’ll come back. It’s a fortunate trope in horror.

Above: Caught by a killer in Dead by Daylight.

Image Credit: Behaviour/Starbreeze

GamesBeat: What are these drawings in your office?

Osborne: Lots of concepts from other works, prototypes, other horror ideas. We were working on a horror concept at one point where you could possess people and walk around as them. That’s something we’re looking at now for a killer in Dead by Daylight. Some of this work goes back — goodness, this is the late ‘90s, when I was working with Nintendo. Not all of this work is from Behaviour.

GamesBeat: How many platforms is Dead by Daylight on right now?

Mulrooney: It’s only on PC. It could be on other platforms, but it would have to be a different experience, for instance to take advantage of mobile. The IP could definitely end up on mobile someday. But we’d have to figure out how to do that and still keep the core experience in a different way.

Osborne: We took Naughty Bear, which was on console, and put that on mobile. It was our first mobile game. We used assets from console, put them down in Unity, and learned a lot doing that. It was a different type of game entirely, built for touch. But the possibilities for the brand are strong in every direction.

Disclosure: The organizers of MIGS 2016 paid my way to Montreal. Our coverage remains objective.