Dead State - Odds & Ends Update

The latest Monday Design Update from Brian Mitsoda was released this week, and they also posted new information about a new team member to help Q&A.

When is Dead State being released?

Fall 2014.

Very obviously from the demo, we're still in production, but are quickly implementing the last bits into the game internally and will be polishing up the game as much as is possible. We want to release the best game possible and will postpone release to crush critical bugs and finish major polish tasks, but at a certain point, we need to release the game. We will, however, continue to support Dead State with content and fixes/polish after its release for a good long time. We have no plans to dump the game on Steam as-is.

Why don't your game's graphics look as good as ?

We chose to make our graphics functional over detailed because it's a big game with lots of locations, items, and characters. To make it easier on ourselves, we went with a low-poly approach because with so many assets, we needed to turn them out at a higher rate. Doing detailed graphics takes a lot more time and requires a bigger team to divide tasks between. Given our budget ($300,000) and scope, I'm pretty impressed with what the art team has managed to do given the time, size, and budget of the game.

Why aren't there more NPCs out in the world?

They are coming. They're easy to add and many are written, we've just got bigger priorities right now. Some of them are out there, they just aren't working as designed at the moment and are being fixed (this goes for bugged ally conversations as well). We'll be adding more NPCs, ally/enemy bark triggers, and events out into the world. Remember that many of the events in the game are spread out over the course of months. We're quickly approaching something like 15,000 lines of dialogue in the game (not counting all the other text) – there's an insane amount of dialogue in this game and we're adding little bits here and there all the time.

I have feedback, but I decided to post it on a random game forum. Does that help?

Not at all. If you really want to help us out, make sure you give us your feedback on our official forums or Steam forums. We really do want to make the game better and address the biggest issues you have with it, but we can only do that if you leave us your feedback.

The February Early Access release was too limited and rough. Is it better?

Yes, I would say so and so would many of the beta reviewers on Steam and our Kickstarter backers. We've added a lot more content and features that the original Early Access version was missing. But don't take our word for it – if you downloaded the 7 Days version, you now have the Beta version. Or wait a few more weeks for the final release. But if you really want the game to get better, play through the beta and leave us your feedback.

And the new team member named Chase.

Hi everyone!  I wanted to briefly introduce you to a new member of our team: Chase.  He'll be assisting Jake with responding to, reproducing, and tracking bugs you guys bring in, performing speed progression runs, and other QA tasks. Chase is another Seattle-area local and he comes to us with plenty of previous testing experience under his belt, so he'll be a great help to the DoubleBear team!   You'll start seeing him around more once next week rolls around. Please give him a warm welcome,