Kickstarter Feature: Dead State

I've got a soft spot for all the Black Isle alums.  They've made some of the most memorable gaming experiences I've had, and they promote a number of the concepts of an ideal game that I hold dear: open sandbox worlds, game-play over graphics, role-playing, and intriguing themes.  This week's Kickstarter Feature is no exception -- a kitschy little survival horror RPG called Dead State.

It's a turn-based isometric RPG where you navigate -- and survive -- a zombie apocalypse.  Of course, this isn't with a single superhuman player, but with a large and variable team of survivors who are very, very human.

It's also one of the better values on Kickstarter.  You get the full product for $15, and instead of trying to sell you additional items up-front, stretch goals enable things that would normally be relegated to DLC status.  It's also had a significant amount of work done on it already, meaning it won't have the same extremely long development cycle that other titles have had.  This is a game that was in production as an indie title long before Double Fine showed that Kickstarter could be used as a de-facto game publisher.  I've been following it for a few years now, and progress has been slow specifically because the developers have had to have day jobs.  They can focus on making this game if you throw your money at them.

And, should you not be convinced quite yet, check out this Dead State interview at RPGCodex.

If you don't have the time to read the full interview, here's a quick set of quotes that summarizes much of the article:
"...we really did want to make a solid tactical RPG where character interaction and exploration were key features. There are other games that feature those aspects as well, but none really so far that's combined them like we aim to with Dead State..  You will need skill or people of the appropriate skill level to make certain changes to the shelter. And every upgrade takes time, materials, and sometimes special materials that must be found in the world (nothing crazy, like you will need to find A packet of seeds to start a garden upgrade). You’ll need to assign allies to jobs to get anything built, so you’ll have to keep a couple back at the shelter to work on creating items, repairing the wall, modifying the shelter, guard duty, etc.

...As far as systems go, even before we got a full-time team involved, we'd nailed down our key systems, and had started keeping a close eye on any other elements that might complicate those systems. Feature creep is the killer of many a project, both big and small, and keeping a vigilant eye out for it and shutting extraneous or overly complicated system elements down before any serious time was devoted to them has helped us rein in our resource use considerably."