During PAX East 2022, the Grounded development team from Obsidian Studios hosted a live panel where they showed off some major features coming to the game in the next update. 0.13: The Bugs Strike Back, brings new base defense gameplay to Grounded. The premiere activity in the update is MIX.R, a new type of structure that can be found scattered around the yard that players will need to defend from multiple waves of aggressive insects. This tower defense-inspired activity is a highly strategic challenge that demands a lot of efficient building and insect knowledge. Complimenting MIX.R is the new Faction Wave system where hordes of insects will occasionally assault your bases depending on how much chaos you’ve caused in their nests and home environments.
As Grounded nears its 1.0 launch later this year, it's finally time for the bugs to start fighting back against the backyard colonizers. Update 0.13 will put your construction and survival skills to the ultimate test.
After the panel, I sat down with game director Adam Brennecke and lead animator Zach Spurlock to talk about the update, what they’ve learned through the Early Access process, and the huge impact that the community has had on development. Update 0.13 grew out of the community’s love for base building, which isn’t something the dev team had anticipated at first, according to Brennecke.
“Before we released, all of our bases were fairly small,” Brennecke explains. “Even in the first month, some of the players built these amazing looking, super fancy bases. Bounce pad elevators and stuff like that blew my mind, we started thinking we need to invest more in our base building.” Over time, that has evolved into high-rise mushroom bases, suspended walkways, and now, base defense activities. Watching how the community has used the available tools in creative ways has been a huge inspiration “We just never even thought that stuff would be possible,” Brennecke says. “That’s been really powerful and has shaped a lot of our decision making about how we approach different things.”
0.13 won’t be the final update before launch, though the team isn’t quite sure how many more we’ll see before 1.0. “There’s a couple things that we still want testing on before our final release,” Brennecke says. “There’s features we definitely want to get more feedback on, but 1.0 is definitely this year.” While some releases are relatively set, like this year’s launch, a lot of Grounded’s development needed to stay flexible in order to take in and design around feedback from the community.
This collaborative process between Obsidian and Grounded players has been a dream come true for the dev team. Brennecke never wants to go back to a traditional release model. “If I had the chance, I would choose Early Access for everything,” he says.
“For a designer, or a developer, or even an animator, being able to iterate is the most powerful thing in game development, and getting player feedback is super important in that process,” Brennecke says. In a traditional development structure, all the feedback gets taken in post-launch and filtered into a sequel, which usually takes many years to develop. Early Access allowed the Grounded team not only to iterate in real time, but also to take on feedback and implement it in each new update. “It shows us where you need to focus,” Spurlock says. “When we see the public saying ‘that needs fixing or that needs improvement’, we see all of that stuff and you can see what players are energized with.”
Analyzing player feedback is what has allowed the team to shift focus when necessary and put their energy into building the things that players care about, like base building. Brennecke says he meets with community manager Aarik Dorobiala and head of QA Adam Taylor for an hour every week to go through all the feedback on social media. “We pour through all that and see what’s bubbling to the top,” he says. Often feedback leads to bug fixes and issues getting addressed, but it can also lead to new features and gameplay systems. “The super powerful thing about Grounded is that everyone can be a designer,” he says. “Anyone can participate in that discussion and give cool ideas.”
The dev teams’ openness to collaborating with players seems to have had a knock-on effect, leading to a more positive and patient community. The downside of the Early Access model is that iteration can actually take longer, since everything that gets added to the game needs a certain level of polish in order to be shipped to players in an update. Even still, new features don’t always work as intended right away. It takes a certain level of understanding and mutual respect between the developers and the community to be successful with an Early Access project. “It’s tough as a developer sometimes,” Brennecke says. “As a director I want to be like ‘I know you guys want to polish this, but it’s okay sometimes to ship something at alpha quality. Let’s get the feedback on it before we do our final polish.” Spurlock adds, “I think a lot of our fans have been understanding about any weird stuff or bugs that show up because it’s not a full game yet.”
The 1.0 launch is quickly approaching, and while there’s a certain sense of finality to it, Grounded is by no means finished. “Our launch is the game that we’re proud of,” Brennecke explains. “The yard’s fully finished, the story’s fully finished, but we still want to make Grounded the best game.” Brennecke says the team is looking forward to feedback about the story and ending before the team creates the next roadmap for the future. He’s hopeful that Grounded has a long future ahead of it. “As long as [studio head of Obsidian Entertainment Feargus Urquhart] lets me work on Grounded, I’m gonna be working on Grounded.” Obsidian is known for supporting its games and communities long-term, as it has with the Pillars of Eternity series, and now that the studio has been acquired by Microsoft, Brennecke feels like his team has even more support to continue on.
“If we show that we’re committed and passionate about continuing to make the game, even past the launch date, the fans and the community super appreciate that. They appreciate our dedication to make the best games possible. It’s something that we strongly believe in at Obsidian and we’re gonna continue to do that with all our products, and Xbox will allow us to do that too.”