Dead Island - Interview @ Vox Games

A lengthy interview for this game can be found at Vox Games.  It deals with the way they handled itemizatio,  the goals the team set for itself, the challenges the team faced during development (also revealing some scrapped narrative ideas in the process),  the chances of seeing a sequel to the title and more. Here's an excerpt about the goals:

"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. Another thing that doesn’t make sense: being afraid of a beachPart 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’.