Dead State Kickstarter Project Update #9, $197,000 and Counting

A ninth update is available on the Dead State Kickstarter page, with this entry sharing a piece of fiction to give us a better understanding of the game's tone. It's followed up by a few paragraphs outlining DoubleBear's focus on story and the collection of data while we're roaming the world:
One of the biggest components of Dead State is the writing. With dozens of characters, item descriptions, and loads of game text, there's a lot to experience. We've got over 10,000 lines of branching dialogue to give you some perspective, the average screenplay contains about 1000 lines of linear story. For our dialogue, we need to create reactivity for relationships with other allies, the character's respect for the player, character mood, concerns for events happening in and out of the shelter, and personal requests. As you can imagine, this takes a bit of scripting and time to write, rewrite, and implement and every ally in the shelter has dozens of nodes of reactivity, including some random events.

Another (optional) component of our game involves collecting data. Out in the world you'll find phones, USBs, hard drives, and other devices that contain information on them. These will unlock blogs, emails, news reports, and even confidential information that will shed some light on what happened to the rest of the world before the game started. Some of this data is unlocked bit by bit, each segment revealing more of a person or group's complete story. All told, there is almost an entire novel's worth of stories and fiction in the game.

And speaking of books, if you haven't upgraded to any of the tiers that included The Making of Dead State book, you're missing out on development insights, concept art, interviews with the team, and a whole lot of fiction and game-related writing that didn't make the cut for Dead State. It's a professionally edited book with a lot of detail no pamphlets here. So, if you want even more writing, character details, and developer notes, upgrade your tier to secure your copy of The Making of Dead State.