Dead State - Design Update - Visual Design

Brian Mitsoda discusses the visual design of Dead State (aka Zombie RPG) at the official forums:

This week I thought I’d talk a bit about the visual design of our game. If you’ve seen the website, you’re seeing a concept preview of the way some of our GUIs are going to look. The style we’re going for is a collage of scavenged items – scraps of paper, battered notebooks, post-it notes, cork boards, and assorted bits of office detritus. When you flip through your collection of survivors, you’ll see taped photos of them on the pages with typed up notes on index cards. Combat portraits look like photos taken before the survivors left that morning.  Everything in the interface will look like some hurried attempt at cataloging the current events and resources of the survivors on whatever’s the player can scrounge up.

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.