Doublebear Productions Interview
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While shooting zombies is all well and fun, the concept of focusing on the survival, long term aspect of such a catastrophe seems to elicit far more response with the gaming public, or at least certainly with the PC crowd. Is this happy coincidence on your part, or did you look around for a concept that you felt hadn't been explored yet, then work from there?
I'm going to admit something here cities are hard. When you do an RPG, there's an expectation that you're going to have this world full of people just standing around outside waiting for someone in full-plate who would be dying to help them find their hat. Soon, you realize that all of these sons and daughters of generic NPC models need to have something to say or a quest to give and before you know it, you're doing NPC schedules and frivolous shops and houses full of people that don't add anything to the narrative whatsoever.
So, to make my team's life easier, I chose a setting in which all those generic NPCs were dead and the cities were empty. You can still enter stores and houses, but now instead of having to fetch Beebo the Apple-Miser's favorite apple-picking pants from the tailor, you can just walk into his house, shoot him in his rotting head, and take his stuff. The population of quirky rapscallions suffers a bit, but it saves some dialogue trees.
Aside from allowing us ample time to invest in writing the survivors and focusing on their complex personalities, we also picked the zombie genre because it's modern day (underserved by most RPGs), we're fans of the genre, and there has never been a single-player zombie RPG. Additionally, Hurricane Andrew (which hit Miami in 1992) is a major disaster that affected me personally, and I wanted to use some of the frustrations and observations of that experience to enhance the believability of our game's crisis and characters.
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You've stated that the zombie RPG will focus more on the human aspect of a zombie apocalypse. Do you think that the recent dearth of post-apocalyptic games are ignoring this very important concept? How much do you think it defines and shapes the genre, rather than just being an interesting idea?
In a sense, our game is a lot different than post-apocalyptic games in that ours is set as the apocalypse is happening, rather than in a world that is rebuilding itself out of the ashes. We'd be wasting the setting if we didn't emphasize the connection to the real world and weren't focusing on normal people struggling (or failing) to adapt to the changes.
I think the appeal of the genre and the game comes from speculating on what you would do in that situation. The game needs to be fun, as far as mechanics go, but the characters and the events need to feel as close to a realistic simulation as possible. If we didn't address the societal breakdown and survivor mentality aspects, we'd just be doing a generic RPG with zombie apocalypse decorations.
