Concerns and Rumors

Hey Survivors,

We understand that there have been some concerns and rumors floating around regarding recent events at QI Games and the status of Dead Matter. My name is Nik and as the lead developer and representative of the team, I would like to take a moment to address these issues and provide clarity on our current situation.

We are aware of the various posts, videos, and leaks that have been circulating on social media, and while we understand the interest in the project, it is important to recognize that not all information being shared is accurate or fair.

OUR SIDE

We would like to address the various concerns and rumors that have recently been circulating. Our initial response even from our side feels inadequate in retrospect, especially as this concerns and rumors keep popping up.

Things went down the way that they did because we didn’t even know how to start addressing what had come up. We ended up leaving our backers and fans with very little to stand behind.

This time around, we’re grabbing the bull by the horns, and getting things addressed now, rather than later. There were some pretty serious things being said about us. We needed to take some time this month to put together a serious response to address the concerns and rumors that people have brought forward to us. Ultimately when people bring serious claims up against us, we need to address it with a serious response.

To that end, we have compiled the following points for clarification:

With regards to the recent vote of no confidence that was made public through a social media comment posted by our former Head of Studio, I would like to provide clarification. A vote of no confidence was indeed called for by one of our c-level executives. In this instance, it was our Chief Financial Officer. I would like to emphasize that this action was taken by the CFO and not by myself.
Contrary to statements made by Derek Czerkaski, our former Head of Studio, QIS did ultimately decide to end our professional relationship with him. This decision was based on a number of factors. While I would prefer to go into much more depth on this topic, I would rather demonstrate professionalism, respect, and restraint. In summary, things just didn’t work out. There were significant cultural differences as well as differences in leadership style. In retrospect I don’t believe that bringing our former Head of Studio was the correct move for the company with who we are as a team and where we were with the project.
With regards to the developers that we let go earlier this months, it’s because it was pretty clear that there were a lot of internal issues that had gone unnoticed by the enterprise leadership team. These issues were cultural, which lead to productivity issues which naturally evolved into financial issues. I decided that to protect the interests of our backers and the general interest of getting this game shipped onto Early Access that swift and decisive action was needed.
My primary focus was retaining individuals with the necessary skills and expertise to drive project success and make a tangible impact for our players.
Simply put, I needed to ensure that all of our staff need to be people that can get hands on with the project, get in editor, get under the hood, etc. Anything beyond that is something we’re no longer in a position to afford. I have to be extremely selective with who gets to have a seat at the company until we launch. We need to fill our ranks with developers that bring back the best value per dollar we invest into them.
In response to recent rumors and concerns regarding the absence of Discord/Dev Streams, I would like to provide clarity on the situation at QI at the start of last year. The company did infact experience a significant loss of its legacy team. We were left with only two staff members (myself included) that worked on the pre-0.7 overhaul version of the game.
In reference to recent rumors of myself failing to recruit most of our former team, I am pleased to report that this is not the case. Over the past four weeks, I have successfully onboarded 14 developers, 13 of whom are former members of our team, including 2 founding members of the company.
I invite anyone interested to verify this themselves by reviewing the updated roles for the team on our Discord server. You might see some familiar faces that you recognize.
I want to emphasize that these developers returned to QIS out of a deep sense of respect for our players, the community, and our shared vision for the project. Their commitment to the success of this project and the maturity and growth demonstrated by everyone involved has been immeasurable. To say the least, this is a team to say that I am truly proud to be a part of.

Early Access - SUMMER

We will be updating our exact release date in the near future as we need to collect our bearings and analyze our development velocity to give a definitive answer on our exact release date.

While our team is making rapid progress with onboarding new personnel who bring invaluable institutional knowledge and experience, we still have several key elements of play that need to be integrated into the game and iterated upon.

Our goal is to give our team greater control over the world, increase the efficiency of our world pipeline in order to support the bigger picture of Dead Matter is supposed to be.

We are fortunate to be using Unreal Engine 5, which will help us immensely in meeting these challenges. We must also work diligently and without haste to recover assets from our previous version and manage them effectively to maintain our standards of quality.

We’ll have more to reveal in the next blog post with regards to this.

In Conclusion

It's been a rough year. We have collectively learned a lot about what works and what doesn't. But we're not giving up. We've come back together as a team, matured by the past year, determined to make our vision for this game a reality before Early Access.

Dead Matter has had its vision refined with the support of our wonderful community. Despite the shadow of our shaky Closed Alpha launch and recent events. We're still here, not backing down, feeling confident in the action that was taken. We're fighting for what we believe in and what we know is right, what our backers and fans deserve.

Despite the challenges that we’ve experienced over the last year, our team, a true hybrid of the old and the new, has been hard at work on the next patch with their passion for the project reignited.

Development Update

While we wanted to wait for the release of the next patch to give a full development update that can truly inspire confidence, especially given the changes at the company over the last month we’d like to take this opportunity show off what we’ve been working on.

PASKO LAKE

Our world team has been working on updating the look and feel of the Pasko Lake area to serve as a style guide for other open world sections of our map.

For this region, we have created key pieces of art for players to better navigate the world. Such as the hiking trail markers, which will be colour coded and scattered alongside the paths in our world.

NEW CABINS

Dusty has been working on some new cabins to add some variety to the cabins that we’re currently recovering from 0.6, we’re super excited to get this deployed into the world once these buildings have received a gameplay pass.

Gate Resort

Ken and Dusty have done some awesome work on the Mountain Gate Resort which will be released in the next update. Keep in mind the lighting you see in-game will be different than what is shown in this post.

Better Mountains

Our worlds team have looked into bringing our mountains up to par with what you would expect for a game that takes place in Alberta, while we’re very limited on what we can do with the heightmap, his process and all of the documentation provided alongside it is invaluable to the team and we’ll be using a process like this to spruce our mountains up before we release into Early Access.

GAP CEMENT PLANT

Ken, Karan, Nomad and Patryk collaborated on a concrete plant in the game. You’ll be able to identify this building in the distance in the next patch with its windows, inspired heavily by the real life location.

Jobs & Missions

Nomad aims to bring some jobs to the game for the next patch. Our goal is to get these in as soon as possible even if they aren’t perfect, with the goal of gathering community feedback based on whatever sticks we’ve got in the ground for the system and the play related to it.

We want to make something meaningful of this before we launch into Early Access as we feel that this is one of the key systems to enable play in Dead Matter and a system that sets us apart from other survival games.

We want to get community feedback with regards this system and the quality of play, so we can make smarter choices on our side.

Grant created a system for an LCD/CRT display and shader, and a system for any programmer that partners up with Nomad to deploy a basic system to the game that will allow players to access computers and primarily to retrieve notes and other information that are related to a mission or simply the location you are currently in.

GAMEPLAY

Louis and Sascha has been working on a variety of systems to advance our gameplay for the next update, adding much needed interactivity to the world. Louis has also started fleshing out crafting recipes and other item-driven interactions which compliments the recent looting initiative.

CLOTHING RETARGETING

In addition to that, Grant has also set up a pipeline for migrating our legacy clothing over to our new Metahumans characters - while this is still a work in progress, these foundational moves will permit us to streamline our character art pipeline in the near future.

This also means we will no longer be moving forward with dropping all of the character art that was previously deployed in earlier versions of the game.

MOVING FORWARD

Despite the limited resources and time available to us, we are fully convinced that our highly skilled and experienced team is more than capable of successfully launching the game on Early Access. We believe that good decisions compound quickly.

We will keep you updated on our progress and would like to express our sincere gratitude for the support received from our backers. Your continued trust and belief in our project are greatly appreciated.

DEAD MATTER IS NOT DEAD