Dead State - Interview @ GameBanshee

GameBanshee has a great interview with Brian Mitsoda on Dead State, covering their inspiration, the mechanics, combat and more.  There are too many good potential quotes, so here's an early one:

GB: An atmosphere of stress and survival can be set up in many ways. How important is it to you to add actual gameplay mechanics to immerse the players rather than just writing and visuals?

Brian: The stress and survival aspects were what we designed the game around - if we couldn't get that right, we wouldn't have committed to the project. We started conceiving the game around the hunt for resources such as food, and then thought about the shelter management, then worked on morale and NPC moods and the different ways it could affect AI, such as panic. We looked at what games did wrong with their food systems and adjusted it so that the food, the morale, fuel, are all similar to a kind of currency - I don't think it will take players a long time to grasp how it works. Once we were sure the mechanics wouldn't be frustrating or potentially game-breaking 90% of the time, we began fleshing out the secondary systems and started thinking about characters and game events. The story only reinforces the situation, and provides some characters that react to the player's success at keeping them alive. If we're successful, the player's stress will come from their story and combat decisions - we need food, we need to go scavenging, but if someone dies on the run, morale will drop and it's already low, that kind of thing.