The multiplayer combat foot racing game "DeathSprint 66" looks pretty cool. Niche multiplayer games were great, but not enough people played them to keep the servers running. Knockout City, for example, was shut down after only a few years of service. Rumbleverse lasted only six months. [At the Game Developers Conference last month, Andrew Willans, director of DeathSprint 66, told me he was confident that playtesters were finding the game "overwhelmingly fresh." That freshness, he believes, is due in part to the size of the project: it is a medium-sized game by a medium-sized team and will be "conscientiously priced."

"That (under $70) price point is ...... I think we can be a little more creative," Whelans says.

"If you have a more limited budget and a more limited time frame than Triple-A, I think that scale is more innovative. It's not indie, it's not triple-A, it's somewhere in between. When you look at the indie market, there are always innovations being pushed out there that are really exciting and that you don't see as much in the big Triple-A productions. And I think there's this nice middle ground where we're trying to get to as a studio.

Sumo Newcastle, the developer of DeathSprint 66, consists of about 80 developers, but only about half of them are working on DeathSprint. The other developers are working on other games that have not yet been announced.

The concept for Deathsprint 66 has been around for several years, but "serious" development began less than a year ago, with a release date set for sometime in 2024. During that short development period, the design was refined and simplified. At one point, guns were included, but now the studio is "concentrating solely on the fun and feeling of the flow state when running," says Willans.

The advantage of smaller teams and smaller projects is that younger team members have more input, meaning their feedback does not have to go through a long chain of command, and everyone can see results much faster than on a big-budget project, Willans says.

"We have a lot of people on our team who are fairly inexperienced in the industry," he says. And this kind of game gives them a sense of buy-in and ownership in being part of something they're going to see in a year or two." When it's over, I'm exhausted and so is my team. I feel like it all comes down to that moment, and if it doesn't work out, then it's a big deal.

Whelans previously worked at Ubisoft, and some of the big games he has contributed to are The Division and Watch Dogs. However, the Ubisoft project he is most proud of is Grow Home, a highly acclaimed physical climbing game created by a small team at Ubisoft Reflections.

"In the beginning, there were only about six or seven people working on 'Grow Home,' and the budget was tiny," he said. And it was kind of a small game that could be done. The more we could do that, the better we would be."

Whelans noted that in addition to producing great games on their own, small teams sometimes come up with innovative ideas that later result in triple-A blockbusters. like the Grow Home team, the DeathSprint team is part of a much larger organization part of Sumo Newcastle: Sumo Newcastle is one of the larger developer groups of Sumo Digital, a subsidiary of Tencent.

One would hope that being part of a giant corporation would protect game developers from the need to keep hitting home runs to be safe, especially these days, but that doesn't always seem to be the case. Sony's acquisition of Bungie did not protect the developers of Destiny 2 from layoffs. Whelans believes that being part of a large organization gives him some leeway, if not the freedom to act with total disregard for commercial success.

"I think security allows you to take calculated risks.

"DeathSprint 66" will be released this year, and according to Whelans, the plan is to release it as a complete package that includes everything needed for "sensible progression that keeps players engaged" at a "sensible price." No gameplay footage has been released yet, but I saw some clips at GDC and wrote about them here.

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