Dead Island Post-mortem Interview

Vox Games is offering an article-style post-mortem interview with Techland’s developer senior level designer Piotr Pawlaczyk and writer Haris Orkin about their open-world FPS/RPG hybrid Dead Island. It’s a fairly long read that tackles the challenges the team faced during development (also revealing some scrapped narrative ideas in the process), the goals the team set for itself, the way they handled itemization, the chances of seeing a sequel to the title and more. Here’s a lengthy snip:

“We set several goals for ourselves at the beginning of the production that became the main challenges for the Level Design department,” says Pawlaczyk.

The goals, he shared with Vox Games, were as follows:

Dead Island:

will feature open locations that the player will be free to explore
will feature maps that are not generic or repetitive
will astonish with its visuals, number of models and details not repel with a “flat and angular grayness”
will maintain the atmosphere of danger while featuring an open-game mechanics and a resort island environments
will be as fun to play for a single player as it will be for a four-player coop party

The last item on the list proved to be the one of the most complicated to address. Pawlaczyk says the Techland team wanted the game to be just as fun for one player as for four, which involved careful management of weapons, enemies, objects and even story.

Part of the problem was the zombies themselves. Not only were they, in Pawlaczyk’s words “unruly,” with behavior and performance difficult to predict from a level design perspective, but a zombie encounter that may be challenging for a single player could be too easy or worse, boring for a co-op party.

One solution was to carefully manage the number and types of zombies on the map. Another was to give a co-op party ways to play that differentiated their experience from that of the single players’.

“At a fairly late stage of development we introduced ‘heavy objects’ to the game, such as canisters or crates, that supported the co-op experience,” says Pawlaczyk. “One of the players was carrying the objects while the others protected them. In a single-player game the objects could be thrown into the enemies faces and topple them.

“[In] this way we managed to create two fine, though completely different, types of mechanics in one game: the single-player mode that gave the player a chance to experience the atmosphere of terror, get to know the plot, learn to conserve the weapons, ammunition and health; and the co-op mode that enabled the players to get all the fun of group mayhem and hunting down the ‘˜defenseless’ zombies.”