Dead State - New Screens and Info on Pax Demo

Couchpotato

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DoubleBear Productions has a new post-funding update showing new screenshots, and giving out more information about the Pax Demo.

With PAX only a week away (we will actually be on the show floor showing the game at this time next week, whoa!), we thought we should show you a few more screens from the demo.

Here’s what we’re showing off in the demo:

-The first 2 days of the game (with an abbreviated intro to get into the action faster)
-First look at the starter allies
-Dialogue reactivity to decisions, ally deaths, and ally requests
-The shelter and the shelter’s job board for assigning ally tasks
-Group combat, several weapons and armor types, statuses, and healing
-Zombies grapple, bite, and can takedown humans
-Allies/enemies killed by zombies will come back as a zombie
-A more dangerous group of human enemies
-Daily Results screen
-The Area Map
-Several combat areas
-New music tracks and sounds

Played through completely, it takes roughly thirty minutes to finish the demo, with several factors that can change the experience for each player. We’ll be there to give a brief tutorial and answer questions along the way. The demo is based on our Alpha build, and as a work in progress, you can expect some changes from now until release.

We’ve got DoubleBear pins to trade for evacuation notices (look for our personnel handing them out on the show floor), shirts for sale (including Friggin’ Chikin shirts), and for the first 100 or so people that play the demo per day, a special piece of swag.
More information.
 
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Inventory screen is best, then comes the parking lot map. The rest is sub-par. Bad lighting inside, mediocre graphics. Unfortunate artist choice with the portraits they turned out ridiculously bad.

This whole game looks like an obligatory school project.
 
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Inventory screen is best, then comes the parking lot map. The rest is sub-par. Bad lighting inside, mediocre graphics. Unfortunate artist choice with the portraits they turned out ridiculously bad.

This whole game looks like an obligatory school project.

Personally I couldn't care less about lighting, mediocre graphics and ugly character portraits if the gameplay is great.
 
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"mercy" must be the poster with the least fitting username on the Watch :)
I hop they'll give a version of the demo to backers later, that would be neat. Is any Watcher going to PAX to check it out?
 
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Inventory screen is best, then comes the parking lot map. The rest is sub-par. Bad lighting inside, mediocre graphics. Unfortunate artist choice with the portraits they turned out ridiculously bad.

This whole game looks like an obligatory school project.
You're seriously criticizing a game that's being done by like 4 or 5 people, based on its graphics? This game is about gameplay and story. Portraits look good to me anyway, besides the odd white color fringe on the left side of the people's heads. Graphics are better than I'd expect, they look about on par with Wasteland 2.
 
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Regarding the lighting, I hadn't done the interior lighting pass when Brian took those pics. Plus he also didn't activate AA or AF. I'm going to give him a crash course on "what to do when taking screenshots for marketing" once I see him next week :p
 
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Hah, I noticed the lack of AA, thought it was odd for a "show off" screenshot... Great job though.
 
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Regarding the lighting, I hadn't done the interior lighting pass when Brian took those pics. Plus he also didn't activate AA or AF. I'm going to give him a crash course on "what to do when taking screenshots for marketing" once I see him next week :p

Haha, you do that.
Anyways cant wait to play this game !
 
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You're seriously criticizing a game that's being done by like 4 or 5 people, based on its graphics? This game is about gameplay and story. Portraits look good to me anyway, besides the odd white color fringe on the left side of the people's heads. Graphics are better than I'd expect, they look about on par with Wasteland 2.

Reads like criticism based on the provided material. And this material provides little information about the gameplay.

Take a look at the job board. What do you want to criticize but the look of it? It does not even give an idea of peculiar jobs people can take up.
 
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They did mention they will have the demo cleaned up and added to for the backers, eventually. Sucks that those who have paid have to wait longer then potential payers.
 
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Here's the clarification by Brian Mitsoda:
I just wanted to respond to everyone asking about why we're showing the demo at PAX and not releasing it to backers or pre-order folks right now. Just so everyone knows, it's more of a scheduling issue than anything else.

-There will be a video of the demo released after PAX
We don't have the time to put up a completely narrated thirty minute video right now, but we will put together a video of the demo after PAX. Most likely, there will be plenty of footage of the demo out there during and after PAX too. PAX prep is taking up a lot of our time right now - it was always our intention to do one public showing to do some publicity for the game, but just PAX because it's in Seattle and we don't have the time or budget to do more than one convention. We don't do press often, so this was the easiest way for us to do a lot of press at once.

-Releasing a demo as a consumer product requires a lot more work than showing it off ourselves

Showing off a demo and releasing a consumer version are two entirely different projects. When we show it off, we're there to guide players through the demo, answer questions, explain controls or systems, and take care of any technical issues if they arise. Releasing it to the public requires us to remove non-essential files from the build, add in more tutorial text, thoroughly test our release candidate, and finally, figure out a distribution method.

-We will eventually release the demo, though we wanted to add some more polish and features to it first

We've been talking internally about releasing the demo at some point, however, we would like to add in additional features and polish to release a expanded PAX demo that offers a more finalized version of the game. There are a few elements of the demo that we simplified to make it easier and faster to show, which we would prefer to add back in for a consumer version. We've also received a lot of team feedback that we would like to address to make the demo experience smoother, especially when we're not around to explain work in progress issues.

-We need to make time in our schedule to put out a demo release.

To release a consumer version of the demo, it needs to be treated like any release and that's going to require fitting the consumer demo into our schedule somewhere. It will need to be a separate branch of the build that contains just the parts of the game relating to the demo. That's something we have slotted closer to Beta on the schedule, but we'll need to determine the best time to get that done. I know everyone who backed it wants to play the demo, so please be patient with us. Getting the actual game out is our top priority, but we'll do what we can to get a demo out there for you.
 
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That's business. They have the backers' money so it is no longer interesting to them. They still have to get the money from potential backers so they must seduce them.
The way business work these days.
Potential buyers having a say in the game over backers is more concerning than wait time.

I suppose an uproar took place on their forum to decide them to set up a demo for the backers. Considering that this marketing initiative is meant for potential buyers, not backers, the absence of a demo for backers was a sound decision. Game is supposed to be released in December. Not so much time to wait if the game is to be be released in December. Now assembling a demo for backers might be a sign game wont be released in December.
 
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I would hope that most of the backers would prefer that they spend their time finishing the game, rather than making a demo for us. Definitely the case for me, anyway.
 
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True to me, too. As explained, the demo is basically for attracting public attention. I wouldn't mind if my humble money end up "kickstart"ing a small company Double Bear as well as Dead State.
 
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It might be. It is quite easy to claim after the fact.
But show casing a game in a convention is nothing new.
Showing casing a game before releasing a public demo is nothing new.

Spending time to write a paragraph (later to be erased) to explain that a demo would cost too much time to assemble and later tell it was always the plan to release a demo is in the best case a failure in communication.

Instead of writing that assembling a demo would take too much, simply writing that a demo would come later would have cleared the case beforehand.
 
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That's business. They have the backers' money so it is no longer interesting to them. They still have to get the money from potential backers so they must seduce them.
The way business work these days.
:rolleyes:
It might be. It is quite easy to claim after the fact.
Right, it "might be", but in fact it isn't. He's talking about a public forum, where you could look for yourself if you wanted. Instead of just showing up here shooting your mouth off about shit you know nothing about.
 
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Love the look so far and cant see what people are complaining about.
 
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Love the look so far and cant see what people are complaining about.

It needs a pass of grit and decals and smattering of little props, and maybe a bit of fiddling with the lighting, but it's on track.
 
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