GB: One of our favourite parts in Dying Light is the easter eggs, such as the force choke and DooM ones. What’s your approach to Easter eggs? Is it a way to get a bit of goofiness in the game?
TS: “Yes, but it’s also a way to let our team get in on the goofiness and gives them space to blow off some steam. As I said, making games is complex. The closer we are to the finish line, the more serious things get and less time and resources. There’s not much space for creativity at that point, as everyone is rushing to make that deadline.
“What we like to do is around two to three months before release, we tell developers to set aside a week or two to have fun and do whatever you want. It serves as a reet point for the team and gets them focused for our final stretch of development.
“The other side of easter eggs is players expecting them. We’re not sure how things work for Call of Duty or whatever, but we need easter eggs. Of course, we are putting the bar higher and higher for us to jump over net time, but hopefully, we’ll manage to do so.”
Techland on Crunch in 2022
GB: Given the recent delay of Dying Light 2s first major story DLC, what’s your stance on crunch and deviating from the strict guidelines of the game design document?
TS: “When working on a game, there’s an understanding that things aren’t going to go to plan at some point. Game development is extremely complicated. I don’t know about spaceships, but I’m sure they are far less complicated to build.
“With intricate digital machinery such as a game, something is bound to happen in production. I think every developer understands that they need to be flexible and find a solution to the issue.
“We will sometimes take a week or more to stop production and develop a plan to solve an issue to eventually complete the game. The important thing for me is that there always needs to be a plan.
“We try not to have any crunch time, and it’s not something we want our teams doing. Often our teams find it hard to not do that extra hour here and there to get their project done. This isn’t just for Techland; this is their portfolio and a piece of art; they want to achieve as much as possible.
“As I said, we tend to stay away from and avoid crunch, which also goes back to making sure there’s a plan in place at all times.”
GB: Thanks so much for taking the time to answer all our questions, Tymon. We think a good way to end this interview would be to ask, are there any games that seriously impress you from a tech standpoint? Are there any games that are impressing you at the minute?
TS: “From a tech standpoint, I’m not sure; I don’t even see differences in display resolutions (laughs). I’m currently playing Returnal on PlayStation 5 due to missing it when it was first released.
“I started with Xbox this generation and recently bought a PS5, so Returnal was my first choice given I was asked to work on the game by Housemarque as a game designer. It’s nice to go back and see how the game development could have been, specifically because they certainly didn’t need me, seeing as it’s an amazing game.
“The development team have done an amazing job, and it’s a unique game. I treasure this greatly with all AAA games as they cost a lot of money and resources.
“Putting unique ideas into a new AAA title is a huge risk worth millions of dollars on a game that can take up to four years to develop. Developers, unfortunately, just have to have their fingers crossed in the hope that this huge investment pays off.
“I get why AAA games tend to repeat the same patterns because they’ll get a safe business return. These unique ideas might also become useless two or three years into development, which is again a big risk.”
We would like to thank Tymon Smektala and the Techland team for taking the time to speak with us at Digital Dragons 2022.
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