Dead State Interview

No doubt inspired by the recent combat demo video, the editors at Rock, Paper, Shotgun have wrangled up a new interview with DoubleBear’s Brian Mitsoda about Dead State, their much anticipated, Kickstarter-funded, and zombie-infested RPG. As there’s a reasonable amount of ground covered throughout the Q&A, I’ll provide a couple of standout questions and their answers below:

RPS: You can almost imagine Dead State as a pure survival game, outside of a dialogue-driven RPG context, so what’s the importance of writing to the game? What sort of challenge does it present to make the writing actually matter?

Mitsoda: Well, it’s challenging. It’s the most challenging game I have worked on in terms of writing. You can’t tell who is going to be dead, or what they’re going to have. You can’t tell which allies they’re going to have, and so on. You have to have dialogue that supports that. We need a character there to present stuff and help you along, and to have dialogue which supports that no matter the situation. There’s the bigger picture of the story, which is (okay, here’s your daily survival stuff) and you tie that in with your morale system, and then you have to judge how characters moods react to that the food and luxury items they’ve had, for example.

We could have set the game up to have very limited dialogue and still had it be challenging and compelling, but one of the things I wanted to do was to give people real character, to give them believable human personalities, so that they have their flaws, have their moments where you are like (oh okay, that guy isn’t such a bad person,) or maybe (no, they really are an asshole!)

It’s one of those things where there’s a big balancing act, where you have those big enemy factions you are going to go up against on the one hand, and then you have much smaller things which will take up your time, like this character and that character who are squabbling, and you want to diffuse that without pissing either side off. It’s about being a leader, about being a person who is thrown together with people you don’t know but you need to depend on. That’s key for the dialogue I have been writing, so there’s a lot of reactivity, a lot of personal interaction with the characters, and that’s the stuff that is critical. Far more than setting up big enemy factions or epic drama, it’s about struggling to get by with your own crew. That’s why it’s important to the game.

…

RPS: So let’s talk a bit more about combat, which is what you’re now showing off. What’s going in there?

Mitsoda: We’re showing off one of the first areas in the game. I hesitate to call it a tutorial, but that’s sort of what it is. It’s one of the places you go to in your first day in the game. It’s the town of Leno, which is very close to Splendid. We have that bit of the town and we’re showing off the player character going through the town, and demonstrating how combat works. The game allows you to explore in real-time, and then if you get into combat it becomes turn-based. We have line of sight, so you don’t see your enemies unless you or enemies have direct line of sight. We think that plays up the horror aspect of the game because you’re out there exploring and suddenly something jumps out at you.

We’re showing off melee and ranged combat, and also noise: your weapons and actions make noise, so if you make a tonne of noise with a gun you will attract zombies or looters to your position. If you make enough noise you actually spawn zombies to the map. Of course there’s the inventory in there, the combat GUI, the combat and zombie AI. It’s not 100%, of course, but the looters and zombies will find you, no one is getting stuck on walls or anything like that!

Then there’s also some lock picking and bashing down doors and so on in there. You can see our various combat animations, and of course the map itself. Some of that stuff is temp, of course, but I have outlined a bit of what will change in the future. Overall this is a really large update as to where we are on the project. We generally don’t do probably as much publicity as a lot of other companies, but that’s partly because it falls to me, and I am stuck with ten tasks at once, so we wanted to do a major update and get everyone excited about the game again.