Alex Seropian, former CEO of Bungie and current CEO of Look North World, announced his company is launching Drifters in his team’s first game on Roblox.
Seropian said Look North World, which was previously focused only on Fortnite games, is targeting the game at a growing 18-and-over demographic on Roblox. The early access free-to-play game is a unique extraction combat game where your nightmares come to life. Your job is to shoot them and escape them by extracting from the world.
Seropian, who headed the Bungie team that was acquired by Microsoft and launched the original Halo, made news when he launched Look North World in 2023 as a user-generated content (UGC) game studio focused on Fortnite. He was drawn to the lower risks and the higher focus on experimentation.
His shift to Roblox is sure to draw attention to the platform, which now has 123 million daily active users. Fortnite is smaller, in the tens of millions of daily active users.
With Drifters, Seropian said he wanted to bring the craft of a seasoned triple-A team to Roblox. The focuse is on a richly imagined world, high-fidelity characters, deep gameplay systems, and meticulously tuned gunplay and movement, all built around the platform’s social, co-op spirit.
The game details
The game is set in the nightmare-infested town of Paleview. The game is a unique take on extraction where your nightmares come to life. You fight them alongside your friends in a player-versus-player co-op experience. Up to four people can fight in a squad, and there are three squads, or up to 12 people, in a match.
In the lore, the government initiates an experiment in the 1990s aimed at capturing the energy produced when people have nightmares. This goes horribly wrong, and the town is moved into a dreamscape and it is infested with nightmare creatures. As a Drifter, you work for a government contracting agency set up to stop the nightmares from escaping into the real world. You can cross into the plane of the dreamscape and fight the nightmares.
Every defeated nightmare yields essence that helps players rise through their company’s ranks, unlocking deeper missions and richer rewards, giving friends reasons to keep coming back and new challenges to grow into. You have to secure loot to upgrade your character. The game is set in a dream-like 1990s world.
Seropian said he considered Roblox when he talked with Jim Greer, a Roblox senior director for game solutions, in February. They talked and Greer invited Look North World to join Roblox’s incubator, which helps game devs use the newest tech on its platform. That was just eight months ago, and now the team has its first game.
With Fortnite, Seropian was familiar with the Unreal game engine and knew that the platform had triple-A roots.
“Everyone at Epic knows what a triple-A game is, and it felt natural for me. I played Fortnite. Roblox is different. I didn’t grow up playing Roblox. My kids grew up playing Roblox,” Seropian said.
But Greer told him that Roblox really wanted to have devs that could make games for older audiences. His team pitched the game, which was inspired by ARC Raiders and other extraction titles, and joined the incubator.
“The whole thing takes place within the other side of the dreamscape,” Seropian said. “It’s all in a nightmare. This whole universe was made possible because the government was running these experiments that, of course, went horribly wrong. There are odd, creepy things that happen in this world that don’t necessarily happen in the real world.”
He said there are some dark parts with flashlights and jump scares, but there’s also giant big boss fights and it has a deep and sophisticated build system. There are lots of materials, things to craft and player progression.
“That conversation with Jim made me feel like he gave me permission to make a game for me, and that’s we approached the design of it,” Seropian said.
Lots of weapons
Of course, adult players like their weapons. The weapons in this game are modern, with a full weapon stack with things like tunable recoil and projectile weapons with predict physics. The array of guns include automatic assault rifles, SMGs,, battle rifles, heavy single-shot weapons and more. There are perhaps 15 weapons to unlock, with the first five or so skinnable. Players can spend real money (Robux currency) on cosmetic items and more.
A deployment can take around 10 minutes or so. The map is a large open world map that is split into districts that cover a town. At the outset, there are four districts, and a total of 12 have been designed so far.
“We will be releasing districts as we go, and the whole map is four kilometers by 1.5 kilometers,” he said.
The typical deployment is based on contracts, where you can reap rewards if you fulfill your contract hunting monsters. You can loot by extracting the monsters’ DNA package after you shoot them.
Why try something new
I asked Seropian why he’s willing to try new things.
“I’m happy you asked that question, Dean, because I’ve asked myself that question. I’m not going to say I’m a silly person because I don’t think I’m a silly person. But I definitely don’t like the predictability of things. I very much like to explore the unknown,” he said.
He recalled once that when he was young, his mother was a sculptor. He would sit with her while she was sculpting and she would give him some clay.
“I would basically just copy what she was doing because I was a kid, I was little, and at one point, she looked at what I made, which was a copy of some things that she was making, and she said, ‘Oh, that’s very nice. Why don’t you try do something original?'” he said. “She said it in the most loving and motivating kind of way. And I think that’s always just stuck with me. It’s like if you want to do something interesting or get noticed, you have to do something different.”
A speedy path to launch
After perhaps five months of development with a team of five people, the game is ready. And that part surprised Seropian, who wasn’t at first familiar with Roblox’s tools.
“It’s a pretty good toolset. I’ve been building on Unreal games for 20 years. It has a very sophisticated tool chain with Unreal,” he said.
Seropian found that Roblox also has a sophisticated tool chain and it enables fast development. It leverages AI for testing and other development tasks. Contractors helped fill the gaps with art, characters, monsters and more. Seropian said the company continues to work on Fortnite games at the same time.
Seropian is glad to have access to more players. But he also concluded that Roblox is a good platform upon which he can build a business where it’s possible to survive and thrive.
“Roblox doesn’t make games that compete with the developers, and they’re entirely focused on building a platform that enables us to build businesses,” Seropian said. “So that’s a huge difference between Roblox and UEFN” (Unreal Editor for Fortnite).
He noted that Roblox’s audience is aging up, and it wants to retain those older players rather than see them graduate to another platform. Seropian said he loves how engaged the player base is on Roblox.
“The composition of the audience is leaning a little bit more towards the kinds of games that we want to make,” he said.
He also liked the features on Roblox, like the fluidity of animation, which enables the company to come up with something that doesn’t look like a typical Roblox game.
“It’s definitely a win for us, but I’m pretty sure it’s win-win for both of us because we’re building something that hopefully is a good example of what the engine can do,” he said.
Look North World is funding the title, but it’s getting a lot of support in the incubation program.
AI development
As far as AI goes, Seropian believes that AI is automating tasks, allowing for faster iteration that becomes a great unlock for game developers. The team uses it less for asset creation, as that is still done by hand. AI helps a team explore an “idea space” faster, though the team handles a lot of its own concepts. The collection of image references is something AI can do, and it gets rid of some the tedious tax.
“It’s incredible, and you can apply that across pretty much everything you’re doing in production, and it will compress things that used to add days or weeks for tasks on the calendar. Now you don’t even need to add that part to the to the production process anymore because it’s basically instant,” he said.
Roblox announced at its Roblox Developer Conference some things like web-based mobile games and stand-alone games that can be played offline or on other platforms. Seropian said he appreciated Roblox as a platform that combines a game engine, discovery and delivery. He noted that when you deploy a game on Steam, you have to run your own backend servers and data stores and set up your own customer acquisition program and funnels. Those turn into hard costs for the game, where as when you release on Roblox, the costs are near zero.
He remembered that on other platforms, you could be charged for server costs by another division of the company, and that’s not the case with Roblox.