Deep Rock Galactic Survivors devs were scared the roguelike spin might not sell, but thankfully they have “one of the most active communities on the planet”

Deep Rock Galactic Survivor’s developers were quite nervous about putting a roguelike spin on the now-massive co-op shooter, but luckily for them, the drunken dwarves who spend their time mining on intergalactic rocks are a very active, dedicated bunch.

Deep Rock Galactic Survivor, as you might be able to tell from the name alone, is an auto-shooting top-down roguelike in the same vein as Vampire Survivors. The DRG-themed twist here is that you play as dwarves running across procgen caves, all while evading alien bugs and manually mining for more goodies.

“We were pretty scared,” game director Anders Leicht Rohde said in an interview with Edge Magazine’s latest issue, out now. “We saw this genre exploding. Some games passed through the sound barrier and succeeded – but it’s a steep decline from the top five.”

With Survivors-likes flooding online storefronts every day, Rohde wanted to act fast, so the game was actually announced just six months after developer Funday Games met with Ghost Ship Games’ founders. “[Ghost Ship Games] have one of the most active communities on the planet, and they craved a new game,” he explained. “We got a shit-ton of wishlists,” which apparently helped to calm everyone’s nerves about the crowded subgenre they were barging into.

Rohde’s definitely isn’t wrong, either. If you had any doubt about just how tuned in the DRG fanbase in, well, look no further than the $380,000 that Deep Rock Galactic fans raised in one day to crowdfund mugs that’ll cost around $85.

Vampire Survivors might be the subgenre lynchpin, but Deep Rock Galactic Survivors pulled inspiration from some other up-and-comers, too. “We broke them down into features. Like, ‘we want this feature from Soulstones Survivor, this feeling from Rogue: Genesia…’ It wasn’t only Vampire Survivors,” he continued. “There were four or five key reference games.”

Deep Rock Galactic Survivor is still in early access, but currently has three biomes and over 40 weapons.

A Deep Rock Galactic player became a real-life explosives miner as “a direct result” of the “silly little dwarf game,” and couldn’t be happier with her career