Dead State Combat Demo Coming Soon

A quick post by Brian Mitsoda over on the official Dead State forums alerts us to the fact that the team is putting the final touches on the promised combat demo for the zombie survival RPG, and that it should be ready for our hard drives within the next couple of weeks.  Sounds like it will be packing plenty of good stuff:

Hey everyone,

We’ve mostly been updating on the Radio lately, so I just wanted to jump on and mention what we’re working on. You may have heard the “combat demo” mentioned here as something we will be showing off. We’re wrapping up some improvements to it and doing some playtesting to get it feeling as much like the final game as possible. I’m hoping to have the final video down either by the end of next week and released shortly after that. Everything we will be showing is very obviously a work in progress, but it’s pretty exciting that a lot of the basics are all working and functioning to design specs now.

Here’s what we’re planning on showing (everything here is functional right now):

-The town of Llano, which is one of the first areas you hit in the game.
-Melee and Ranged combat.
-Fighting against zombies and human enemies
-Line of Sight (only see enemies that you or an ally can see)
-Noise (combat generates noise, enemies respond to noise)
-Inventory, switching to new items
-Looting corpses and containers
-Combat/zombie AI
-Lockpicking and bashing doors
-Combat animations
-Transitioning from real time exploration to turn-based combat and back
-Give an idea of what we’re working on for future combat build updates.

Combat plays out pretty much how we promised right now – it’s a mix of Fallout and X-Com. Every day has been bringing huge improvements, which is in no small part due to the skills of our programmers. I’m really excited about showing it off, I just want it to be as polished as we can get it in the next few days. Based on the team’s feedback, we’ve already got some great ideas on how to further improve it in future builds. As a designer, you always want to hold onto something until it’s 100% just right, but at some point you have to get over that feeling of incompleteness and show your work.

Sorry about the wait! It is coming…