Howdy doddle heisterinos! We’re trying a new intro, don’t judge.

We hope you’ve been well, we certainly have. Between making levels, fixing bugs and all that jazz, we’re preparing for self-publishing[corporate.starbreeze.com] the best we can, trying to figure out what needs to be prioritized. Meanwhile summer is making itself known outside, other people seem to like that. We’re indoor devs though, so it’s just glare on the screens.

Today’s blog is all about the upcoming heist, Party Powder. We asked level owner Emil Andersson a couple of questions about his experience from its development and he delivered in style!

Also, we’ll show the original key art image that got nerfed due to inappropriate content in the logo and on the floor. Looking back, we can see where they’re coming from, but we still get to share it here at least.

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We wanted that feeling of grabbing the loot under the nose of the cops and to have that classic movie scene of a space being closed down outside a dark alley which is frequently seen in movies and shows.

The level is built to reward those who take their time to go around every corner which is something we wanted from the start. What felt the most fitting and something we haven’t really dug into in PAYDAY 3 was a more gritty atmosphere of PAYDAY 2’s release levels and we haven’t really used the cops from Boys in Blue which are slightly more aggressive so this felt like the perfect fit.

The industrial area of Brooklyn, in the beginning we looked at the new Batman movie and wanted to have a mix of red and dark but we slowly moved away from that because it simply became too dark. We then moved more towards David Fincher’s movies and The Wire tv show for style and inspiration.

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We wanted a level which was quick in execution but would be rewarding if you took some time to discover it all. It was a bit tricky to design with randomization and difficulty in mind but I think we managed to get a solid balance. It got a dark gritty atmosphere and Art played around with the vegetation which gave it its own style (inspired from The Last of Us), the train tracks and street helps differentiate the areas and the parts of the level we reworked the most.

I wish I had a bit more focus on the approach in stealth and specifically how to get inside the buildings. At the time I thought it would be enough to have 4 different spawn locations and that you would get inside differently depending on where you spawned. Looking back on it I think I could have squeezed in an alarm that had to be shut off or power source that needed to be rerouted.

Looking back on the notes from pitching the level all of the details in it are in the final version. We did add a bit more randomization than mentioned in the original pitch and difficulty tweaks.

It was a bit tricky in stealth since we had 4 spawning locations. This makes balancing of carrying loot longer which is why a few windows are open/can be open and the preplanning to secure loot is in the middle of the level. This is also why some doors are only openable from the inside to create shortcuts.
In loud it’s all about combat, making sure AI can reach you everywhere and that they spawn not too far from the players. It takes a long time to test but I think we pulled it off quite well in this heist.
The progression of specials/ heavy units of enemies now also listens to objectives completed and the amount of assaults that has progressed.

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While working on the level the audio guy asked me if it would be cool to have a Rave somewhere in the background buildings, I said sure not really knowing what to expect. A few days later I load up the level and you can hear a full on rave in one of the buildings in the back.

The same guy placed a screaming background sound of a cat in one of the spawn alley ways which scared the shit out of me when I loaded in to test a new function. I think he removed it.

Keep an eye out for the random shutter door that might be open to one of the warehouses, the guard will also patrol a bit differently then (only on normal/hard difficulty). Guards will sometimes go and investigate the shutters being opened in stealth on the two main buildings.
There should be a conversation somewhere in the level where you can overhear two guys that are looking for the methlab meaning that the gang were not the only one who got the same idea.

Look out for donuts and donut boxes around the level.

The spawn point looking over the middle of the level was something Art created and asked to be implemented. Players used to spawn on the ground but Art went crazy with the space and suggested an elevated platform to get a better view which is what we ended up using in the end.
The pre-planning where you escape with a helicopter on a train is risky but it pays off quite well if you can dodge the snipers.


Personally I can’t think of anything right off the bat but I know Art went crazy with placing mannequins everywhere which is quite spooky since they are always placed in the places you least expect.

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Wolf because it’s aggressive and dark

Stressful but exciting.

Anything goes however there is currently no way of hindering players to buy all preplannings so if you buy both helicopter extraction you will get the option to place both flares however the flare which gets placed first is the location where the helicopter will fly to.

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I got a few off the top of my head: A museum with a big destructible T-Rex skeleton, the federal gold reserve which would just be a big homage to Die Hard 3, stealing a transplanted heart from a hospital for a gangster boss (Crank movie reference). If we want to go full on, no budget, a Formula 1 track where the final part of the level you use a Formula 1 car to drive out from the stalls towards a hole created by C4 at the end of the track I call it Car Shop 2.0.

I would love to have you carry things in one hand such as a brief case which would force you to use the secondary if you are holding it and by command being able to throw it to other team members. Using the same co-op function found in the co-op wolfenstein game released a while back where it was used to boost each other.

More guards, cameras and more loot required to complete the level.

I hope they like the more gritty tone of the level and that we delved deeper into actually stealing something more illegal such as cocaine which I felt was missing from the main released game.

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And that’s it! A huge thanks to Emil for taking the time out of his day to answer all these questions. And another huge thanks to you for reading this far. We hope to see you next time, so long space heister!

Good day heisters!

Are you ready for a surprise bonus blog? You better be, cuz you’re getting one!

The upcoming update has something we can call a “bonus feature” that one of our coders took it upon himself to create out of nothing more than stubbornness and the kindness of his heart.

What is this bonus feature you ask? Well, OVERKILL weapons will no longer plop down listlessly on a random street in full view of overeager snipers and cloakers. Instead they get delivered right to your feet, like a dog in old movies delivering the morning newspaper. Good drone.

This absolute beast of a dev had to blaze new trails in order to get this feature done, increasing his own skillset while delivering cool features to the hungry PAYDAY audience (things are getting hot in the kitchen with all the things you want us to cook).

So we asked Suat, that’s his name by the way, Suat Kucukgol—nope, we can’t pronounce it either—to help us understand the journey of this cool new feature from conception to release. We hope you find it as interesting as we did writing this!

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Since the release of PAYDAY 3, there have been ongoing conversations, both internally and externally, about how OVERKILL weapons are delivered to players.

At some point after discussion #69 (nice), I jokingly kept nagging our AI programmer, saying, ‘You should make a drone that drops the weapon!’ His response was, ‘You do it!’ At the time, there was a heavy workload. Fixing AI bugs and implementing a new AI revival system (see patch notes here[t.paydaythegame.com]) were the priorities. While I was working on those tasks, our Game Director at the time came by and asked me if I could make a prototype of a drone that would deliver the OVK weapon. And with that, we were in business!

Yes, it was tough. I think I spent around 3-4 months of side-project time trying to get it to work as it does now. It went through several stages. The first prototype had a limitation. It could only fly to the player if they were in a large, open space. If that wasn’t the case, it would fly to a backup point and leave the weapon there. If it couldn’t find that point, it would just leave the weapon where it spawned.

Overall, the biggest issue I ran into was that all of our original heists weren’t built with drones in mind, because drones weren’t in the game until Syntax Error (having been added with Techies, read more about that here[t.paydaythegame.com]). On these heists, the drone couldn’t reliably fly to the player and would often choose the backup points. I needed to adapt the drone. My goal was to make it function like Techie’s drone. Techie’s drone despawns and respawns to find a new path if the initial path is blocked. However, that didn’t really work.

The next step was to allow the drones to fly to the point closest to the players, hoping to get the weapon as close as possible so one wouldn’t have to run to the backup points, as those wouldn’t have been much different from the helicopter drops. I believe that this is what cemented the drones in this project, as that change made them better than the current helicopter drops. The OVK weapon could now navigate to the players.

Once that work was completed, we added the build into the QA branches for testing. This is where the true fun began, as bugs started to arrive in droves. I was getting reports about the OVK weapons being placed out of reach of players (on roofs, in walls, outside the map itself, etc.). The drone also liked to drop the weapon on the other side of the wall from where the player was when it was unable to get inside the building. All of these bugs made QA question whether the drone was really better than the current helicopter drop, because at least then you could run outside, fight the cops, pick up the gun, and get back inside.

However, I didn’t let this deter me! The next step was the hardest yet: implementing nav links for the drones. For the uninitiated, nav links help guide NPCs through a game world, telling them where they can and can’t go, and how to get around obstacles.

During the whole time I was working on the drone, I had a thought in the back of my mind: ‘Nav links for the drone would have been great!’ Now was the time to finally figure out how to make that work. After all, I didn’t know anything about pathfinding or nav links, so how was I meant to figure this out?

I started to research how pathfinding actually worked and what made a nav link function. After weeks of research and testing (and some banging of my head into a wall), I finally had something that worked! I could get the drone to fly through a nav link and get to places it couldn’t reach before. Great success!

Yes, AI! I hadn’t worked much on AI before this, as I’m a Generalist Gameplay Programmer, so my experience on previous features are on things such as Zipline, Breaching equipment, WiFi circles (yeah I know), and such projects. None of these were really applicable to AI, drones and pathfinding, so I had to sit down and learn more about AI in Unreal, and specifically about pathfinding!

I worked with the audio department to get the right sounds for the drone, and with level design to make the pathing for the drone for each heist working!

Then of course we can’t forget about QA! Without their intensive testing and feedback the final push to allow the drones to fly through doors and windows wouldn’t have happened!

Early on in development the idea was for the drone to follow the players until it was ready to drop the weapon, but that didn’t even get tested by QA because I already found enough bugs to break it. For example, running around the map, or just hopping in and out a window was enough to confuse and break the poor drone.

Delivery drones were incredibly helpful. They revealed numerous bugs we wouldn’t have otherwise discovered. Many of these bugs were related to air navigation. For example, we found large areas lacking air navigation. In other places, the air navigation was too far from the ground. This all meant that you could trick the Techie’s drones to fly back and forth by going up and down stairs for example!

As a final word on this, I don’t know if it was my nagging that got this to happen, but I want to give credit to a person on Reddit who made a comment (after the release of Syntax Error) saying how cool it would be if the PAYDAY gang and Shade could use the drones as delivery drones, which is what got my brain going on the idea. Your name may be forgotten, but your idea lives on!

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If you made it this far then congrats, you get this drone (don’t tell the Techie)! We hope you found this blog interesting, who knows, perhaps we will make more if we have something similar in the future. If not, let us know anyway so we don’t put effort in the wrong places.

The drone delivery system is coming in the next game update. So next time that you find yourself in a tough situation, surrounded by cops, then pull out your phone and call in your new friend! They’re happy to help by dropping your chosen OVERKILL weapon at your location for easy access. Bile on the other hand is getting a pay cut. It seems no one is safe from having their job stolen by a robot, not even in the digital world.