Ready at Dawn, developer behind The Order: 1886, is partnering with GameStop’s fledging publishing label GameTrust on a new, smaller-scale game.
Dubbed De-formers, the game is a multiplayer online and local multiplayer title for PC and consoles. The game is a change of pace for the developer, following Ready at Dawn's 2015 big-budget PlayStation 4 action game The Order, but creative director Ru Weerasuriya says the bright, playful De-formers still has the studio's DNA.
“It’s quite different in a lot of senses, but quite similar in other ways.” Weerasuriya said in a phone interview. De-formers actually stems from an idea by Ready at Dawn CTO Andrea Pessino, who wanted to work on something that implemented the soft body physics engine of The Order.
As it became clear that De-formers was a concept that the team wanted to continue to develop, Ready at Dawn staffed up the team for the game, at first planning to self-fund, but eventually partnering with GameStop’s new publishing label, GameTrust.
“It started off very organically, [in August 2014] before The Order was finished, but that was literally just the proof of concept,” Weerasuriya explained. “...We kind of like working on projects that excite us, and this one is one of them. I think that’s why we [switch genres so much]…as we were finishing The Order, we were already thinking of ideas we wanted to do.”
Even though De-formers is a smaller-scale game when compared to efforts like The Order, Weerasuriya said Ready at Dawn will also continue to work on larger projects.
Weerasuriya said for the past several years, the studio has what they call the “Incubation and Decompression Team,” which was a way for people in the studio to come up ideas and put them into production. “We will definitely want to do things on the side of tight experiences [like Deformers], but we’ll also keep on doing the other stuff that’s part of who we are.”
He said that with the GameTrust deal, Ready at Dawn will continue to own the De-formers IP, and also will be co-publishing the game.
De-formers doesn’t yet have a solid release date, but Weerasuriya is looking to launch it sometime this year on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.