Dead State - Early Access Update #3

DoubleBear Productions has news on Steam for Dead State about the games next Early Access update. It's a wall of text but at least the game is close to Beta now.

Update #3, Change Log, and Big News :D

Today, we’ve updated the First Seven Days build for the last time. Before you panic (man, I hope you kept reading), what we mean is future updates will open up the build beyond the first week. Internally, we have been working on creating content, implementing progression, and refining or fixing systems. The system changes are reflected in the 7 Days build. Some of you have written to us (or shouted at us in all caps) about why we limited the build to 7 Days and the simple answer for why we didn’t open it up more is this: You would hate us. A lot.

What I mean is that a lot of testing and polish goes into “final” content before it’s ready to be released to the general gaming public. With a big game like Dead State, this is especially true. While there seems to be this prevailing idea that developers create games pretty quickly and then piece them out or sit on finished work until they see fit to distribute it, the truth is that much of this content is constantly in flux between the original idea to a basic first pass on the design to a kind of okay but buggy version and finally to a state where it feels like it belongs in a game you would actually want to play. Some of the content in the Early Access build is still unpolished, but many of the levels, encounters, and game events that you will eventually experience can be in an entirely too early state to release to the public. For example, a map without enemies… or loot… or exits. Encounters that may be too hard for the first week, might be way too easy 30 days in. NPCs will die… and then show up alive again in places they weren’t supposed to. It’s like watching a rough cut of a movie – the pacing isn’t quite right, you can still see the wires in stunt shots, and instead of CGI, there’s a guy holding up a mark to show the actors where the dinosaur will eventually be.

While there’s still a lot of work to do and some of the future content will still be rough around the edges when the time limit is lifted, rather than focus on two separate builds, we’re going to focus all our attention on our Beta progression build for the next update. This means a lot of pieces are being assembled as a whole for the first time and there are likely to be mechanical problems. But, we’re going to be taking a lot of time to get as much of it right for the next update as possible (design has mostly been focused on this for the last few weeks). It’s been something we’ve been planning to do, but we wanted to make sure that we took care of system priorities before we tackled the bulk of progression testing.

But more on progression next time. For now, please check out the new features in the current update – we’ve added tweaks to statuses and armor, AC/Resistance info on the equipment screen, a whole lot more thrown weapons, and many bug fixes. We would appreciate any feedback you have on the build. If you still want more info, you can keep up with the latest from design in our Monday Design update series on the forums. We are also able to answer your questions right on the Steam forum. As always, thanks for your continued patience and support.

(On a more personal note, development during Beta implementation can be highly stressful for the devs and many of us are working 10+ hours a day to get Dead State in the best shape we can. We would greatly appreciate if some of you don’t read this and post “where’s the Beta?!” every day until we release it. We tend to not give dates on the off chance that something goes horribly wrong on the day of an update and we’re forced to push it back, which tends to ruffle a large constituency of our forum-going public. So, please, bear with us while we assemble this big ball of scripting logic that is progression testing. Thanks!)