Dead State - Postmortem @ Gamasutra

For a new company, Dead State was quite a challenge and has definitely shaped the way we structure, advertise, and consider future projects. The budget was the bare minimum needed and the game has thus far sold on the lower end of our projections; it’s difficult to justify making a sequel or another RPG in the near future considering the amount of time and team size needed to produce one that satisfies the expectations of hardcore fans and press.

Communication and tech issues were definitely a hindrance to getting the game finished in a more timely fashion. Press, for the most part, seemed to want to compare the features of the game to much higher-budget RPGs and strategy games, and dinged us for not having stylized/better graphics, not adding a cover mechanic or interrupts (basically not recreating XCOM’s most recent iteration from 2012) to combat, and not having even more frequent dialogue interaction and animation in the Shelter portion of the game.

The general “zombie fatigue” of the press definitely did not help get us much in the way of release coverage, and we found it fairly difficult to get attention by traditional press outlets, despite the focus of the game being anything but another zombie-killing game.

Despite the limitation of our budget and staff size/experience, our team managed to put out a game that has garnered a strong fan base and much in the way of consistent word-of-mouth sales. It’s done well enough to allow us to make future titles, which is a pretty big win in the indie game business side of making games. We’ve already got some pretty exciting (and very fun) projects in the works, and at the very least, Dead State has given us a solid foundation to launch into the next phase of DoubleBear’s development as an indie company.

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