This month’s progress has mostly involved our programming, design, and art staff plugging away at a few ongoing large-scale tasks. Dialogues for most of the allies have been finished up to first draft standards, which is a lot of writing! We’ve also been finishing up system revisions and GUIs, with most of the GUIs for the game existing in their final form now. Our programmers have continued to add more and more functionality to our combat, loot, and equipment systems and revised numerous tools to help us more quickly construct and implement items. As we get more attack and death animations in place (we just upgraded our model rigs to allow them more range of movement), combat will start looking a lot more like it will in the final game. All the Kickstarter items have been fully designed and balanced against our other weapons.

On the art side, the art team continues to construct our modular shops and city pieces. Now that the shelter assets are all finished, we’ve started working on the first few areas the player will visit in the game. The modular commercial district pieces are used to build the various towns, shopping areas, and rest stops found in the game. You can see a bit of some of the pieces in shot below:


All the sidewalks, roads, stores, awnings, and street props are individual parts, somewhat like a city toy box that allows us to rearrange them and easily construct them into new levels. Ease of assembly is pretty important because of the number of locations in our game. Interestingly enough, our art team has virtually visited Central Texas through Google maps to look for inspiration in constructing many of the town maps.

Additionally, we’ve hired on an assistant programmer to assist us with scheduling, conventions, testing, and managing Kickstarter. The producer’s job is to crack the whip and make sure we’re finishing our tasks on time. We’re hoping to bring on a few extra people to help out on other tasks in the near future.

As we go forward, many of the individual pieces we’ve built (dialogue, models, systems) are going to start coming together and allow for more functional builds that feel a lot more like the final game. If you can’t wait for the next update, remember to stop by our forums if you have questions. For those of you on the Radio, we’ve also got a new update for you today too. For those of you in the US, we wish you the best of luck scavenging yourself up some cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie filling this week. We’ll be back next month for another update on Dead State – thanks for your continued patience and support!​