One of the co-creators of Risk of Rain is now working on Deadlock

Almost a month after Risk of Rain studio Hopoo Games announced that it was joining Valve and halting work on an unannounced game, the studio's titular cofounder, Duncan "Hopoo" Drummond has revealed that he is specifically working on Deadlock, Valve's formerly open secret MOBA-shooter.

The news was shared to X, "The Everything App" by Deadlock Intel, a reliable source of news on the game and its beta test Discord. Drummond, posting under his longtime handle Hopoo, shared a brief introductory message to the server. "I'll be around so no need to cram it all now," Drummond wrote. "Any fixes I do today most likely won't make it to today's build, just to set expectations."

Drummond and Paul Morse co-created the popular Risk of Rain series of roguelikes, with ownership of the series and stewardship of Risk of Rain 2 recently passing to the game's publisher, Gearbox, to mixed results. On September 3, Hopoo Games announced that most of the team had joined Valve, including Drummond and Morse, with the studio going dark and development halting on an unannounced game codenamed "Snail."

It's unknown at this point if Morse and the rest of Hopoo are also working on Deadlock, or if they're taking on other projects at the famously opaque developer. Court documents show that Valve consisted of 336 employees in 2021, with more than half of them (181) focused on active game development. Counter-Strike 2 and Deadlock are the most actively-supported of the studio's games these days, but you have to imagine the team behind 2020's single player Half-Life: Alyx is working on something else⁠—that is if it isn't already DOA, far from an impossibility given the studio's history.

As PCG staff writer Harvey Randall pointed out when Hopoo first went public with the news, it's hard not to see the parallels with Firewatch creator Campo Santo, which was hired on by Valve in 2018. Campo Santo's anticipated follow-up game, In the Valley of the Gods, looks to be on indefinite hold, while at least some of those developers wound up working on Half-Life: Alyx. Part of me mourns the loss of distinctive, successful independent studios like Hopoo or Campo Santo, the promise of more games from them overtaken by the same vague hope for more output from the infamous "when it's done (it will never be done)" -loving Valve we've had since 2007.

At the same time, Hopoo's demonstrated expertise with third person shooters and itemized progression from Risk of Rain are a perfect fit for Deadlock, similar to how Campo Santo's affinity for first person exploration and storytelling no doubt helped make Half-Life: Alyx into a great game. At the end of the day, if you got a job offer to work at Valve, wouldn't you take it?