Dead State Interview

IndieRPGs.com managed to catch up with DoubleBear’s Brian Mitsoda for a lengthy interview about Dead State, its recently launched Kickstarter campaign, the zombie apocalypse theme, and more. Here’s a taste:

You’ve spoken in interviews about some of the mechanics that will feature in combat: among them, the need to keep quiet to avoid attracting zombies, the need to stay out of zombies’ line of sight if they do show up, the need to deal with infections, and the fact that allies sometimes ignore your orders. On a more nuts-and-bolts level, however, how would you describe the combat system? Does it use action points? Initiative-based turn order? Are there targeted shots or manual weapon reloading?

Action points are for taking actions (weapons, thrown items, medical items, reload) and movement. Initiative is derived from the perception and then agility, with the player always having the advantage in a tie. There aren’t specific targeted shots, but there are special attacks and weapon modes that can be used to gain tactical advantage. Overall, we want to emphasize functionality over raw power/level advantage in combat. You can have a lot of points in a skill, but if you’re using a weapon purely to spam the basic attack, you’re probably not going to gain the upper hand. It takes delicate balance of squad weapons and armor to come out ahead.

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How many recruitable allies are you planning to have in the finished game?

Dozens. And each one is pretty complex from a scripting and dialogue node count. We’re pretty sure it will take multiple games of Dead State to find all the allies and explore all the different sides of them.

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The Kickstarter page says that $15 is (nearly half the launch price.) I’m concerned about the way some people will react to this. I recently put my own strategy RPG on Desura at a $24.99 price point; people visited the page and 1-bombed it en masse because it cost more than other indie games. What do you think of the increasing pressure people are putting on indie developers to release complex RPGs at a casual game price point?

To most people games is games. They have no idea that RPGs take more time than other types of games. All they see is (indie) and therefore assume it will be cheap. You see that on iPad games too where everyone gets angry at someone for charging over a $1 for their game. The best thing we can do as RPG developers is to try and explain that RPGs are not as simple to make as retro adventure game or top-down shooter and hope that they understand that if the market doesn’t support teams that make RPGs, there will be fewer available. No matter what, though, there are people who aren’t going to understand the difference. We get requests to offer up stuff at near cost because some people see Kickstarter as a store and not a fundraising site. Let’s just not start calling ourselves (triple-B) or something stupid like that to make a point.