GAMES HAD FLOUNDERED before Deathgarden. There were proven solutions to turning a product around, and Behaviour Interactive considered all of them. Some were less viable than others.

Free-to-play was one option. Frequently co-opted by MMORPGs after subscription numbers drop precipitously, the free-to-play model can be a boon provided developers don’t let paying customers gain an advantage by paying real money to instantly attain powers or weapons that everyone else would have to grind away for hours to acquire. But rebranding as a freemium—free game with microtransactions like costumes and hats—title was a panic button Deathgarden’s developers weren’t ready to press. Going free-to-play would break too many gameplay systems the team saw value in. Those systems needed to be fixed, not scrapped.

“We could have made that decision to do our U-turn,” says Ash Pannell, creative director. “But at the time, the level of U-turn we were choosing to take on—in terms of optional cooperative gameplay, changing the team mechanics, darkening the fantasy—all these things were already significant changes to the core experience of the game. I think at the time, it wasn't really a viable option for us to go free-to-play in a way that would have worked and felt 100 percent right. We felt we had a game we could make work as a premium product, while adjusting our premium product to reflect the product.”

Other possibilities included a heavy patching schedule that would update the game once or more a month, or chipping away at systems one by one, iterating until Deathgarden was greater than the sum of its parts. The option that made the most sense was to rework everything, from the lore to the characters to motifs, and relaunch again. “It is an unusual situation, relaunching an early access game. It was never going to be an easy decision for us to make,” Pannell says.

Deathgarden was an early access title, and early access meant the freedom to experiment. Don’t Starve, a horror-themed survival game, added a multitude of features such as food that spoiled over time and inclement weather—features that players couldn’t imagine the game existing without. Sunless Sea’s developers implemented a framework for real-time combat and gradually improved it by culling feedback from their player base.

Deathgarden’s team turned to their community, who were all too eager to tell them where they’d gone wrong. “There's a lot we wanted to add in order to feel we had this full loop of product that was our vision,” says Geneviève Forget, senior product manager. “But we do want feedback, and we want the community to help us get there. That's why we're re-launching early access: To make the full product that perhaps we would have officially launched [at the outset].”

“This is the first time we've had a genuine contender for a new experience we want to present,” continues Pannell. “We've taken on huge amounts of good feedback from the early access, and from before then as well. Iterating would have been ideal, but given the level of change in the core experience, we want to present it to get feedback on this version as quickly as we can.”

One of the team’s first moves was to fast-forward their lore 60 years into the future. Following a war, society attempted to rebuild and divided into the haves (the one percent) and have-nots (everyone else). “There was a post-scarcity society where everybody had everything. That was the previous version of the game,” Pannell explains. “Now we live in a world where greed is pervading again, and a group of people have decided to hoard all the resources of the world, put them inside these fortified cities, and cast everyone else out.”

The elites appropriated cities, built borders around them, and dubbed them Enclaves. Within their walls lay a veritable paradise. Anyone from the Slums—everywhere outside an Enclave—who desired food, safety, and shelter would have to prove themselves in the Bloodharvest, a twist on the blood sport from decades earlier in the fiction, only bloodier, and the rebranding for Deathgarden. “There's an aspect of entertainment, there,” says Matt Jackson, design director. “Previously you could compare it to American Gladiators. Now it's much more of a blood sports. Imagine if somebody got killed in American Gladiators.”

Before the war, the Deathgarden was pure, or as pure as the site of a blood sport can be. The Deathgarden’s new incarnation reflects a civilization in ruins, scarred and twisted by war, out for themselves instead of looking out for each other. Runners have been replaced by Scavengers, citizens toiling in the Slums for supplies, and aware that every second they spend on the outside could be their last. Previously resembling futuristic space marines, Hunters are depraved gatekeepers. They’re in the Enclaves. Others want what they have, and Hunters want to stop them from catching so much as a whiff of it.

“That's the kind of change in philosophy,” Pannell says. “It used to be a sport; now it's become a rite of passage for humanity to survive. It's sort of like, despite humanity's best efforts to create something good and meaningful, we always fall back on greed and power. We live in a world where these Hunters are sent in to slaughter. And of course, humans are humans, so they end up liking it for the sake of the violence.”

“Deathgarden is a lot of things,” adds Forget. “It's an action-based survival game. If you're playing Hunter, it's a first-person shooter with a twist. If you're playing a Scavenger, it's more hide-and-seek times 10. ‘Survive or kill’ is the choice you have to make.”

Before entering a Deathgarden, players select a character—one of several Scavengers, or one of three Hunters—and spawn in a locker room-type area. The locker room is a gray, dreary place for Scavengers. For Hunters, it’s brighter and more opulent, dotted with trees and plants. Life, real living, exists inside the Enclaves.

There are five Scavengers to choose from, and each is a unique character with a name, backstory, customized loadout, and perks that grant abilities. Perks and loadouts can be mixed and matched to varying degrees, never straying too far from a character’s defining characteristics. “We have some that are more skill-based defensive abilities,” explains Geneviève Forget, senior product manager.

The five Scavengers are Ghost, Switch, Fog, Sawbones, and Ink, survivors who have either obfuscated their real identities, or forgotten them in the day-to-day stress and heartbreak that comes from trying to gain entry into an Enclave. “Ghost can be invisible, and Switch has clones to multiply herself. That's more skill-based, but more selfish,” says Geneviève Forget, senior product manager.

“We're giving you one Hunter and one Scavenger to start with,” says Jackson,” and you start with enough currency that within one or two matches, you should have enough to unlock another character.”

After choosing their avatars, Scavengers are grouped in a sort of holding area. Glass walls overlook the garden below, but the arena is cloaked in fog. While players jump around, chat, gesture, and practice firing their Vambraces—crossbows that fire standard and power bolts depending on a Scavenger’s abilities—the game is piecing together a procedural playground, like a puzzle built from terrain, lighting scheme, and décor such as trees, hills, and ditches.

Deathgarden’s maps follow specific themes. Those themes make them recognizable even though the particulars are reshuffled every match. “Every time you play Blowout, it won't have the same layout. There are different elevations, various pieces are in different spots. You'll get unique gameplay every time,” Jackson says.

“You can learn the general concept of a map, but not, ‘Oh, I know there will be a health crate here and some ammo over there,’” Forget adds.

When the match begins, the glass walls melt away, and Scavengers are free to leap down into the garden. The Hunter won’t arrive for another 10 to 20 seconds, precious time Scavengers should use to scout ammo crates and health stations and stake out prime hiding spots. Once the Hunter arrives, usually at the opposite end of the map, the harvest begins.

Before, the game demanded coordination from the team of five if they wanted a chance at winning. Deathgarden: Bloodharvest is a different beast. The main objective is still to escape. Exits are opened by harvesting blood from piles of corpses and depositing 125 gallons to spires here and there across an arena, or by waiting eight minutes after which time all exits are opened and all Scavengers revealed to the Hunter. But escape is just one way to win, the top layer on a multi-tiered cake. Below it are myriad other layers, all of which players can collaborate on or fly solo to achieve.

“We retained team-play elements, while also exploring personal goals that you can do without anybody's help,” Jackson says.

“This time around, it's all about rewarding personal goals,” adds Forget. “It's about setting your own challenges for yourself. What do you want to power-up on your character? Where do you want to go, and how will you accomplish it in the garden? It's all up to you. Every action is rewarded, and you don't have to cooperate. It's five individuals and a Hunter, and they happen to cross paths.”

Every action earns players experience points, regardless of whether which side they’re on. Some, such as marking objects by shooting them, generate less XP than, say, harvesting and depositing blood toward the group target of 125. Even players who go into business for themselves will end up helping the group. Pinpointing the closest healing station, directing allies to hard-to-find Blood Needles, the spires where blood can be deposited, distracting the Hunter so a teammate can make a quick escape or concentrate on performing the lengthy blood-depositing process, completing global or character-specific challenges—every action comes with one-for-all benefits that bring Scavengers one step closer to entering the sanctuary of an Enclave.

“We're essentially asking you to play your game and do what you want to do,” Pannell says. “It has the advantage of helping the team, but that's not as important to some people. If I deliver blood, I get XP, but I'm also helping the team. You don't feel like you've ruined the team's game if you do poorly. You only need to take on team challenges when you feel like it's something you can do.”

Vambraces dramatically increase a Scavenger’s odds of survival. Standard bolts are more plentiful, and should be used to mark creates. Power bolts are unique to each character, and scarcer on each map. Ghost’s power bolts fire camo arrows, and anyone caught in its area of effect turns invisible for a few seconds. Fog’s power bolts create a cloud of fog that cloaks anyone in its radius and disrupts the Hunter’s tracking ability. Various perks bestow upgrades such as moving faster while crouching and healing bolts that restore an ally’s health, which, naturally, also grants XP to the good Samaritan who did the healing.

Tying personal and team goals together feeds into the Deathgarden: Bloodharvest’s larger goal of balancing accessible gameplay against difficult-to-master match scenarios. “It was very heavily team-focused, and people who were into that were really into that,” Jackson explains of the game’s original incarnation. “But if you were on the outskirts—if you were more of a solo player, or you were still learning the game—it was a bit unforgiving because you didn't know all the rules, the meta [objectives] going on with this focused team play. I feel like we've really broadened the audience in that way by making the game easier to get into.”

“If you don't want to get too risky, you can get a little bit of XP by doing secondary activities such as marking crates,” adds Forget. “As you start to learn the game, you'll want to get more involved to earn more XP. That's when you'll start collecting blood and working as a team—or not. You can always work alone.”

WHILE MANY OF Deathgarden: Bloodharvest’s core systems have been overhauled, Kirk Sandiford’s core responsibilities remain the same. As director of animation across all projects at Behaviour Interactive, he gets involved at early stages to assist in bringing games to life through character design and movement that facilitate a title’s themes.

“You’re really trying to set up the feel of the game,” Sandiford says of the beginning of a project. “If you’re not there at that point, it can be very destructive later on. You’ll come in and want to make changes, but you can’t, because a lot of the programming has already been done, or the gameplay has been set up in such a way that you can’t touch it.”

Deathgarden: Bloodharvest was and is a game built around the three Cs of game design: camera, controls, and character. All of those stem from input as well as animation. When players press jump, for example, their character should respond with a level of feedback and style of movement that feels satisfying to players, even if they can’t quite articulate why.

“People don't want to wrestle with controls,” Jackson says. “The difficulty and challenge of the game should come from evading the Hunter, and using your brain to trick them and find ways to escape rather than wrestling with the controls.”

Sandiford got involved early in Deathgarden’s first version. Jackson and Pannell talked to him about the type of movement they envisioned for Runners and Hunters, a style that Bloodharvest’s characters have retained. The gist, they explained, was crisp, snappy parkour that would let players flow across terrain. “As move forward to the Scavengers, we’re still keeping that parkour feeling, but we want to get an individual character out of them now,” Sandiford says. “Everyone has their own personality, and we’re trying to strive more and more toward that. It’s not just everyone having the same animations; now everyone has their own flavor. You can tell when it’s Ghost doing this or Ink doing another thing. It’s particular to their own persona. We’d work together back and forth, even on some of the key bindings. They’ll ask us, ‘Does that feel natural to have that [control mapped to a certain key]?’ I’ll usually say, ‘Yeah, sure, because I’d never even thought of that.’”

There are two styles of locomotion. Tapping a direction sets players at a smooth walk uninterrupted by start-stop jerkiness. Hold the key down and they break into a sprint. Eventually they’ll come to a hill, wall, or some other obstacle. Scaling it is as simple as pressing against it and holding the space bar. Tapping the evade key causes the player-character to hurl himself or herself in one direction, and depletes one chunk of the player’s stamina bar. The bar recharges gradually as long as players don’t continue to perform moves that require it.

While parkour-style moves are still the centerpiece of every character’s arsenal of acrobatics, Sandiford and his animation team did recalibrate their looks to match Bloodharvest’s darker lore. “When we had 1.0, it was more of a team sport. We were thinking about a ‘rah, rah’ feeling behind the characters. Now it's more dystopian, so the characters are more cagey, less comfortable in their environment.” That process entails going back and forth with Pannell, Jackson, and other directors and leads, gathering adjectives and concept art that describe a character’s style.

Sandiford sees Ghost as more laid back. He’s a grizzled veteran of the Deathgarden. He knows what’s at stake, but this isn’t his first harvest. Fog, meanwhile, is all business, an alpha who will do whatever it takes to leave the Slums haves. “The concept art is key. Right away, you get a sense of this person's personality when you see these drawings,” Sandiford explains.

Everything about a Scavenger’s look, even his or her idles—the little animations characters go through while they stand still and wait for player input—communicates personality, as well as play style. “Each one of them has a play style for what you want to do,” Pannell says. “I'm a fairly in-your-face kind of Scavenger,” he continues, which makes him more suited to brash and confident survivors. “That means I need to absorb more damage. If I've got a bit of a tank, I'm [in my element] because I can absorb an extra four bullets or whatever before I get to a health crate.”

Cool and collected or perpetually on edge, Scavengers have everything to gain and everything to lose. The Hunters of Deathgarden: Bloodharvest exist to take it all away.

“It's really two very different games with two very different experiences,” Pannell says. “We're making sure the balance on both sides is working and connected. That's what makes it such an interesting challenge. Jumping between the two is interesting. Someone who plays as a Hunter might say, ‘That's not what I thought [scavenging] would be like,’ because you get a very different perspective of things like hiding.”