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Dead By Daylight

Dead By Daylight

Professional Unreal Horror Behaviour
Table of Contents
DEATH IS NOT AN ESCAPE

The Project
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Released in 2016 by Behaviour Interactive, Dead by Daylight is an asymmetrical multiplayer horror game with hide-and-seek mechanics featuring beloved Horror franchises such as Hellraiser, Halloween, and Child’s Play.

It’s one of the top 25~ most played games on steam and releases a new Chapter every 3 months!

I joined the project in 2022 as a Tools Developer, and have had the opportunity to be a part of some incredible releases, such as D&D (Vecna), All Things Wicker (Original IP), and many more!

Tools used
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Game Engine: Unreal Engine
Tools Development: C# (Framework 4.7.2 && .NET 6-8) and C++ (UE editor tools)
GPR/Perf tests: Custom wrapper for Gauntlet, tests written in Blueprints.

Communication: Microsoft Teams

My part
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During my time as a Tools Developer on Dead By Daylight I’ve had numerous responsibilities:

  • Develop in-editor and stand-alone tooling to support the development of the game
  • Release deployment pipeline management (Jenkins build jobs, Steam/Platform deployments)
  • Gameplay and Systems debugging and triage for the Automated Testing initiative
  • Maintain and architect systems for testing and validating gameplay systems to reduce release bugs, and catch issues early in the development cycle
  • Implementing and maintaining our Data Asset Validators alongside the Rendering team.

My primary responsibilities currently are maintaining our Gauntlet infra and tests, as well as our Gameplay Room tests.

Learned experiences
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Dead By Daylight has been an incredible learning experience for me, being my first professional game project.
Behaviour Interactive provided me with Unreal Engine Gameplay programmer training early on when I joined, and that experience has been invaluable.
Having worked on Automated Testing, Build & Release pipelines, and tooling has given me the opportunity to work closely with numerous teams such as Gameplay, Systems, and Rendering. As a result, I’ve had the opportunity to experience game development through the lense of many different roles.

A few of the things that I’ve learned during my time on DBD:

  • How to maintain and deploy a long-running Live Service title with a regular release schedule
  • Collaborations in Mid-Large scale game development teams of over 300 people
  • How automated testing is handled in video games, specifically Live Service titles
  • How to build AAA quality evergreen titles in Unreal Engine, and proper organization and architecture of gameplay systems and DLC
  • Triage, debugging and resolving Gameplay/Systems issues in a timely fashion before it hits release