Dead State Design Update

For this week's design update on the official Dead State forums, DoubleBear's Brian Mitsoda addresses the many questions they get about the ZRPG's release date. In short, it'll be released when it's ready:
1. Games (especially with a small team and limited funding) take a long time to make. Especially RPGs.

2. Not everything that goes into a game can be shown off in pictures and video. Posting Nick's code or my design mockups or a door Oscar just modeled isn't going to really excite you much. You want to see what looks like a game, and not everything we're working on is exciting. Believe it or not, many studios spend godawful amounts of time on work that will be mostly thrown out so that they have a facade that looks good for demos but isn't really a real game.

3. We keep the updates going so people don't freak out if we suddenly stop posting. Sometimes we show off stuff that will appeal to casual fans, sometimes there is stuff for regulars here.

4. The game is done when we're finished. We could cut a bunch of features and narrow the scope of the design, but why? This is DoubleBear's first game and we want you to impressed enough to buy other games from us. If we released it early for the sake of releasing it, chances are people would be posting, "when is this game going to be fixed?" which is much worse than "when is it going to be released?"

5. There are a lot of other games to play. Go play something else until we come out. It's a great way to pass the time. You can't even play every good game that comes out anymore - it's an awesome time to be a gamer.

6. While we're going to take our time, if we take too much time, our enthusiasm and profits will wane, therefore it's not going to take ten years or anything silly like that. It's being worked on as fast as a very small team can reasonably make a pretty big game.