Dead State Design Update

Now with a name to the title, Brian Mitsoda continues to keep us up to date on Dead State’s design, this time discussing the game’s visuals and GUI.

One of the challenges of GUI design is not to just make it functional and easy to comprehend, but to make it fit the setting. This is pretty easy when you’re doing high-tech, because it can look clean and glowing without anyone batting an eye. In fantasy, you get the scroll or woodcut theme kind of a standard now. In modern day stuff, you’ll get a phone or blackberry interface and it works just fine. For our world, with phones and power being gone, we wanted the visuals to fit the theme of people living moment to moment without being able to rely on their technology. Everything has a hasty, worn look to it, as if it’s been shuffled about by clammy hands too many times to count. You’ll be seeing some more of this design reflected in future screenshots, so keep checking the boards for site updates.

As for the look of the game, some people have equated it to The Sims. This is a GOOD thing, as far as I’m concerned, because The Sims is only a few years old, played by millions, and done by a much larger, better-funded team than us. If it makes people think of a highly-successful and beloved game series, thus making it more approachable for new players, by all means, compare it to that game! The truth is, we wanted to make it as realistic as our poly-budgets would allow, because going cartoony or too stylized would undermine the real world feel of the game for us. Oscar (our Lead Artist) worked hard to find a style that would both balance the needs of the game (potentially having quite a few zombies on the screen at once) with a style that captured the feeling of everyday objects without quickly breaking the poly budget. I think he did a great job of balancing these things and he’s always tweaking stuff to look better. So, if you’re wondering why we look like a game that cost about $50 million in 2004 dollars, we’ll take it as a huge compliment that our art looks expensive. We’ve got some great artists working on the title, and hopefully they’ll jump on to explain the process a little more to everyone with technical questions.