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Hey friends,
Tune in to see Mark delight us with a ton of exciting new game reveals and announcements from Thunderful. The event will deliver updates on exciting upcoming titles including the surprise indie hit of Summer Game Fest, Planet of Lana. There will also be more news on Thunderful titles like Firegirl, Cursed to Golf, Source of Madness, Tinkertown and White Shadows. 
Hey there,
Thank you all very much for your ongoing feedback and support!
Hey there, it’s Tony from Ant Workshop again! We've prepared the first update to Dead End Job which fixes several issues you've brought up since the launch of the game. Our goal is to provide the best possible experience so all feedback is appreciated!
Hey there, it’s Tony from Ant Workshop again! I have some pretty bad news for all you ghosts out there (but great news for everybody else): Dead End Job is available on Steam right here and right now! ːsteamhappyː
Just like in real life, the main way that you can make things easier for yourself is by getting promoted, and in Dead End Job this happens whenever you catch enough ghosts. Along with your new job title a promotion also brings the opportunity to pick one of three randomly chosen perks. We didn’t want to show players a big skill tree and allow them to have total choice over how their character build progresses, for two reasons. First, in that situation people will usually figure out an optimal configuration and a whole lot of options will get ignored from that point forward. And secondly, looking through all of the options and making the choices would slow the game down, whereas showing just three choices keeps things nice and snappy.
So this method encourages playing with different power ups, while still allowing you some choice over your build. Some perks also lock out others from being available - for example poison shots & cold shots can’t be chosen on the same build. We found that some combinations, like bouncy shots and multiple shots, were very funny but totally broke the game with how overpowered they were!
Not all perks affect your guns, and some of my favourites affect the game in other ways.
And then there’s Supercharged Vacuum which allows you to use the vacuum to suck up the ectoplasm that ghosts shoot, quickly switching between attack and defence.
Items are spread across different rarity bands from “Common” at the bottom, all the way up to “It Belongs In A Museum” and this affects how likely you are to stumble across an item on any particular job, and how well guarded they might be (rarer items tend to be further from the entrance room, and are sometimes even coated in a slime shell - so you’ll have to clear the room to collect them).
You can make Hector radioactive, or shrink him down tiny, or make his head huge, or how about just turning him in to a magical unicorn, leaving a trail of rainbows?
And so, the last(?) “Makin' A Dead End Job” article comes to an end. I really hope you’ve enjoyed reading these weekly looks behind the scenes at the team and how the game came together. I’ve really enjoyed writing them, even though there’s still so much I could still write about - more items, weird enemies, silly jokes and daft scenes, not to mention the Twitch and Mixer interactivity! And if you’ve still got a thirst for even more concept art, there’s a gallery within the game with thirty unlockable pieces.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/827610
No, friend, it is none of those things (but a kart game where you date 3 matching ghosts at the same time sounds pretty good doesn’t it?). Dead End Job is a game where you shoot ghosts and then catch them, to try and earn as much money as you can - basically a very realistic job simulator, then.
You work for Ghoul-B-Gone, the self-styled “number one experts in paranormal pest control”, and this lovely map shows where customers all across the city are having an outbreak of ghosts. So pick a job and get to it!
Alright, now you’re in an office (or park. Or restaurant. Or … ) and it’s full of ghosts. Pop quiz, hotshot - what are you going to do? You’ve got two goals on every job. Firstly, you need to rescue all of the 
“But how do I catch ghosts, Tony?” eurgh, so many questions today! Dead End Job’s combat happens in two steps. First of all you wear down an enemy’s health with your plasma blaster. So far, so standard shooter. Once a phantom’s taken enough damage they become stunned, and this is your chance to rush in and vacuum them up while they can’t fight back.
Your second goal on a job is to make as much money as possible. Just like in real life. Every ghoul you bust and person you rescue gets added to your client invoice (along with a few extras, such as equipment wear-and-tear, biscuit tax, cups of tea, and the like), and you’ll also find plenty of loose change to hoover up. Top tip: sometimes you might have to “encourage” money to “fall” out of furniture by shooting it repeatedly with a plasma blaster. (Don’t worry about damaging things in the process of getting rid of the ghosts - the clients agree to an extensive damage and liability waiver as part of Ghoul-B-Gone’s terms of service.) 
Catching ghosts also has another benefit, as it fills up your promotion bar. And what happens when you fill up your promotion bar at work? That’s right, you get promoted. A new job title, increased respect from your co-workers, and most importantly a sweet employee perk. You get three to choose from, and these make your weapons more powerful, improve Hector’s abilities, or generally give you some other useful side effect. Perks are persistent between jobs, you only lose them if you get demoted (unless you have the “Verbal Warning” perk - then HR just gives you a telling off). 
Long term in Dead End Job you’re trying to save Beryl’s soul, of course. You have 30 jobs to earn enough money to … well I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but it’s pretty big. You’ve also got Hector’s scrapbook to fill up, it keeps track of every ghost you’ve defeated, and all of the weird items you’ve picked up and used.
So that’s a kind of breakdown of how Dead End Job all fits together. A lot of the gameplay comes from my frustration with being a bit bad at action roguelikes, and getting annoyed when I lose two hours of game progress to a boss fight I couldn’t practice. So I wanted to make something that you could play in smaller chunks and that would keep better track of your progress, while still giving you plenty of stuff to do and variety of things to see. I think we’ve struck ka pretty great balance, and I hope when you play on the 13th of December you feel that way too!
There’s comedy in contrasting the whole weird supernatural aspect of the game with the mundanity of office life, and I felt like this would make it easier for people to jump in and instantly understand the characters and the relationships between them (since everyone’s worked a job with a terrible penny-pinching boss, an over-eager young trainee, terrible ungrateful customers, etc).
Beryl - Hector’s mentor. Originally the idea for the game was that you’d be earning money and competing with the other staff to become “employee of the week” (a basically worthless accolade), but this felt a bit selfish and not a very good motivation for Hector. After shuffling things around we came up with the idea of saving this legendary (but recently deceased) ghost hunter’s soul before she became trapped forever. Beryl’s seen it all, and her world-weariness works as a contrast to Hector’s enthusiasm.
Louise - we needed someone who could actually move the plot along and help Hector in his quest by creating a device that would let him access the ghost dimension, and for gameplay reasons we wanted this to cost a tonne of money. The idea of Louise buying spare parts with the cash and then taking the company’s ghost storage (Apparition Containment Unit and Linen Laundering Tool, or ACULLT for short) so that she can rebuild it as an unstable portal just felt nice, and allowed us a slight nod to Ghostbusters (I know, ok. I know) with the ghost containment being a pivotal device.
So that’s our line-up of the heroic-ish staff of Ghoul-B-Gone. But we also needed a whole raft of crazy ghouls for you to fight!
The Poultrygeist was one of the very first ghost ideas, as well as a very strong pun name, I was in love with the idea of this wandering around bum-first, dragging its snapped neck behind it, and firing eggs at you.
When we were brainstorming things in an office that people would love to shoot, the Office AssistHaunt (less strong pun) was pretty high on that list. It was also the first enemy designed as a kind of mini-boss, which would take more of a beating than usual, and would have a few attack patterns based on the different shapes it could twist itself into.
That’s all for this update - Hope to see you again next week when I’ll be writing about what Hector’s Dead End Job actually is!
I would like to say that I searched high and low to find someone who could bring the vision to life, but it’s not true - at this point I didn’t really have a vision of what I thought the game should look like, and I also knew Joe from hanging out with mutual friends at a developer conference, and enjoyed his squishy deforming animation style, so I quickly got him on board.
He got to work finding references of brightly coloured cartoons and artwork, and bunging them together in to mood boards. You can see a progression in ideas from the flat colours in the first board, through much punchier contrast in the second, and on to the cartoon style we eventually found.
The final step for the main visuals was to make a mockup screenshot, so that we had something to aim towards as we put art in to the prototype, as we needed to get a feel for how the characters would sit in a typical level, how big they’d be, and how easy they would be to visually tell apart from the backgrounds.
This update’s already a lot of words and I haven’t even talked about the title sequence yet! Once we knew we were going for the 90’s cartoon look, I was dead set on having an animated intro sequence to the game, with a theme tune. For me, the bit above everything else that sticks in my head about cartoons like Animaniacs, Spongebob, Taz-Mania, and my all-time favourite Freakazoid, was the 30 second sequence and song that rapidly introduces you to all of the characters and the set up of the show.
I guess the last thing to talk about art-wise is the variety of art styles in the game. The cartoon references we’d picked used occasional cut aways to close ups with really gross amount of detail, or to live action segments and still, or just something weird to give it an extra surreal moment. To us, this meant we really had free reign to mix it up a bit depending on the context.
]
A few ideas came to mind. One was being a firefighter, spraying your hose and trying to rescue people from a building (the idea of rescuing people survived to Dead End Job, but ultimately fire and hoses seemed like a bit like one-note combat that would get repetitive quite quickly). Another was going in to messy hotel rooms and vacuuming up all of the rubbish (I’m pretty sure that a couple of games have since done this).
Unfortunately I found that it wasn’t very satisfying with lots of enemies on screen, as the tug-of-war kind of locked you in to fighting one enemy at a time, and the others would break you out of it. And after getting other people to play I realised that it was really hard to judge where the vacuum was, and what they could reach (a problem you don’t have with shooting - you can always see where your projectiles are going) so players were either getting frustrated because they were standing too far away, or because enemies were breaking out of the sides of the “funnel”.
Over the course of the development we’ve spent a lot of time taking the game to shows and events and then tweaking things. It’s really great seeing how people play and what the expect to happen, and then being able to adjust the game so it’s less frustrating. It’s helped the controls massively as we saw that some people just try to use one joystick to move and aim, whereas some people are very familiar with twin sticks.
Players helping us find what we'd done wrong
“One person,” you might be thinking, “one person made Dead End Job?” Blimey. Well, reader dear, I have been in the games industry for quite a while. I graduated university in 2000 and went straight in to my first games dev job, based off the back of a whole load of Half-Life and Counter-Strike (1.6 - old school!) levels I’d been making in my spare time, and sometimes instead of doing my actual university work.
Joe was the first, and is the lead artist. I knew early on that the art style would be key to the game’s vibe, and when I saw that his website had a banner image that was basically a little cartoon version of himself dancing away, butt naked, I had to get him on-board. Joe’s own art style is squishy and stretchy and brilliantly cartoony, and was a perfect fit for what I had in mind.
But that’s just the core team! There were so many other talented wonderful people involved as well. Will who did the audio (including singing the theme tune), Xalavier who wrote the script (including writing the theme tune), Korina who did the marketing (and was not involved in the theme tune), Steve who came up with the game’s ghostly logo, a handful of coders who each popped on to do little bits and bobs that I am not clever enough to write myself, and a bunch of artists who gave our milk cap collection the variety of styles it needed. 
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