Dead State Interviews

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Written by BuckGB on June 26th, 2012

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In your own words, could you describe the experience of playing Dead State?

Dead State is all about human survival and psychology in the wake of a global disaster. You need allies for security, but they also need food, and that can lead to morale issues. Your goal is to keep the shelter from falling apart, going out into the dead-filled streets and towns looking for food and other supplies, dealing with the much smarter and unpredictable humans, and trying to keep your shelter fence up while improving the conditions inside.

Allies bring issues to you, are assigned jobs, build items, upgrade the shelter and handle crises. On the area map, you can travel to known locations, find random encounters or events, and harvest wild sources of food. On the combat maps, you can explore in real time, find items and supplies, enter turn-based combat with humans or zombies, and sometimes meet other characters or groups.

Again in your own words, what were your visual and gameplay inspirations? It looks like there is some Fallout, some Jagged Alliance 2 but the art style, of course, has to be contemporary (or during-apocalyptic rather than post-apocalyptic). What would someone training for Dead State be best advised to (work out) with?

Definitely, we were inspired by Jagged Alliance and X-Com, and also Fallout, which was pretty much the game that directly got me into the industry I applied to Interplay directly after playing it. Our allies can die, same as the characters in any of those games.

I'd say we were also mildly influenced by the base-building in the old PlayStation game Suikoden, and some of the turn-based mechanics/balance of Final Fantasy Tactics. As far as the dialogue goes, I wanted to make sure that the characters were as strong as the dialogue that people associate me with for Bloodlines, but with a deeper morale and political aspect to the management of the many personalities in the shelter.

A lot of the visual design was taken from real world disasters. Hurricane Katrina has been a big one, mostly because it triggered a lot of memories for me for after Hurricane Andrew hit Miami in 1992. The destruction is expected in a natural disaster, but that's immediate.

Our game draws from the aftermath the loss of electricity, being able to go to the store for food, a lack of communication to the outside world, a loss of social support, and lawlessness. Our game takes that and applies it to the entire world if a disaster hits everywhere, you're on your own and nobody is coming to save you. What happens to people under that strain?

Jay: Voiced or unvoiced dialog?

Brian: Unvoiced. Aside from the time and effort involved, it would cost an additional $50,000 minimum to do the voices in a way that I wouldn't later regret. We can only do so many voices ourselves.

Jay: More on the dialog: It sounds like you are going to have a lot of characters, and you've mentioned branching dialog. So how do you juggle (canned) hand-written dialog with heavy player choice, and with complex AI and relationships? It seems the latter would lead to either a combinatorial explosion of variants of the former, or dialogs that are dry and generic.

Brian: No game is going to be completely reactive AI that generates new responses on the fly, but we're going to provide a lot of reactivity, lots of branching in character arcs, lots of dependencies on the situation and what other allies are there. We don't think every player is going to find every ally, nor are they going to have every ally alive for all possible scenarios. We have a lot of dependencies that roll a situation into the next ally on the list for example, if a character is targeting a certain personality type at the shelter for a conflict, if their primary (target) isn't there, they will go with the next best one. It's the same with allies imparting information if you've heard about a place from one of them, the other won't tell you. We have some random elements thrown in on quite a few dependencies too. It's a lot of scripting, but interaction is one of our key features.

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