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00:00We were prepped and ready for the heist.
00:04We had stolen tier 7 passkeys,
00:08acquired the building schematics,
00:12and rerouted the security comms.
00:16The package was as good as ours.
00:27Every variable accounted for,
00:29but we fucked it up anyway.
00:44Next time, we gotta be even more prepared.
00:59Dino Wolves is a first-person shooter, four-player co-op heist game taking place in the future.
01:14We focus a lot on player agency, story, and keeping the player on their toes with some interesting elements that take you out of the brick-and-mortar world of Midway City, where the game takes place.
01:24It's a power fantasy, even though there's obviously tension as well with like stealth segments and stuff.
01:29But the identity of Dino Wolves is primarily just balls to the wall.
01:39Dino Wolves is stepping back into our payday roots.
01:42The big difference is, of course, the sci-fi area, where we can play around a lot with design.
01:49The freedom we have with this sci-fi space is a bit terrifying, actually, because you can go nuts, basically.
01:56We've actually told ourselves to not try to over-design stuff, but not limit us creatively.
02:02So, designing the Midway City from the start, we knew we wanted big megastructure buildings to actually place our levels within and be free of how big levels we want them to be.
02:13It's this very large city arising from the sea.
02:15You want to look out at the city and see, like, okay, so this is a living, breathing city and it works.
02:33Coming back to the heist genre is sort of a, I don't know, after Payday 2, I felt like I had so much more things to do in my head than what I wanted that game to be.
02:43A contemporary setting limits you in so many ways.
02:46Everything you do to enhance the game breaks the theme.
02:50With a sort of a sci-fi theme on it, it enables you to stay in the pocket of thematics and still solve things from a gameplay angle.
02:59When making a game concept or a world, you have to think about what tools it gives you to solve problems in the future.
03:06And the sci-fi thriller theme gives us a lot of tools to play with.
03:10Midway is just a corporate haven. There's no rules. There's nothing. It's divided up into districts.
03:16There's even, like, district wars and this kind of thing within the city.
03:20So, it's a very classical in a way, a dystopian take. Kind of like a classic role-playing game of saying, like,
03:27Oh, this is the backdrop. And I'm gonna hand you a new adventure and have a bit of fun.
03:33So, there's something called dives in the game. It's basically a neural heist.
03:37In the middle of whatever you're doing in the normal mission, you can basically jump to this other place.
03:42Thematically, there's these architects that build these defense mechanisms that get injected into people's minds,
03:49and then you're trying to break into one of those.
03:51The dives allows us to explore a little bit with visual art design and gameplay design.
03:57Just tracking down this specific person that you need to make a dive into to extract information.
04:03We don't need a bank vault for that. It could be a suburban, gritty area, or it can be a very high-end luxury apartment of some sort.
04:12The dives provide change of patience, change of intensity in the gameplay, and change of scenery.
04:17And it could be a nightmarish sort of abstract thing.
04:20Imagine trying to navigate a forest or something like this.
04:24But it could also be a Japanese temple or a fortress in the Swiss Alps.
04:30We could just mix a lot of different stuff together, because it's this very abstract place.
04:36And also with gameplay, we could go from a shooter to a platformer to a horror theme.
04:42Or we can have sort of parkour experimentation where you can run on walls.
04:46We make the rules for what the dives are and what they can be.
04:53The heist fantasy in general maps really well to game psychology.
04:57I'm a psychology-driven game designer to a large extent.
05:02Because we want to motivate you to keep playing and also, like, what are we stealing and what's the economy of the game.
05:09And I'm not talking about getting people to spend more cash.
05:12It's what's the drive of the game.
05:15And I think building new things or crafting things is a very interesting area.
05:21A good example would be, like, this thing we did for Payday where you would craft masks and this kind of thing.
05:27Yeah, we're going back to the masks.
05:29I've heard people tell me before, like, oh, it's GTFO.
05:32And then, oh, it's a masks game, right?
05:34I'm like, really?
05:35Yeah, maybe it is.
05:36But we wanted to make something different.
05:38Like, we didn't want to go fully masculine, maybe doing, you know, these big skull masks.
05:44Like, we don't want to limit us to not do it.
05:46But with the mask we have now, we actually wanted to bring some feminine, some sexiness, you know.
05:51So, one of the inspirations we actually had was the Keira Knightley pout that she has.
05:56And there's also, like, these Japanese theater demon masks with Hannibal Lecter type of style.
06:03So, as in the dives, you know, we can basically make anything.
06:06The masks are this expression to allow them to expand the world inside of themselves.
06:12So, finding the signs where they don't really know where to put it, in what categories, we try to hit kind of a sweet spot there.
06:21This is going to be a high-paced, intense, and a very fun collaborative game.
06:26Playing together with friends is a beautiful thing, right?
06:29Especially when we have these situations where shit hits the fan, we panic together and try to solve it.
06:35So, if you put four people in a room and they play it and you start to hear the voices go up and they start to be loud in the room,
06:41then you know, like, yeah, it's something, you know.
06:45If you want to find out more about Den of Wolves, head to our Steam page and make sure to wishlist now.