Interview: Dead Years

Last year at PAX, we gave you a look at Dead Years, a post-apocalyptic action RPG from the two-person Studio ZeroByte. This year, we caught up with developers Nataliya and Philip to get even more insight into the tough and volatile world of indie game development.

TSSZ: Incredibly, it’s already been a year since we’ve talked! How has Dead Years changed since we’ve seen it last?

Nataliya: It’s changed a lot. We had this gigantic production spike as far as level design and team development goes. As some people know, an important part of Dead Years is the team of human and dog, so we’ve been working really hard on developing this connection they have, both story-wise and on the technical side – survival skills and helping them interact.

TSSZ: In terms of trying to build this open world, that can be a big challenge for triple-A studios, let alone a team of two! From both of your perspectives, how do you go about bringing that world to life while maintaining a practical scope of development?

Philip: We’re a very small studio, but we think it’s possible to make a pretty great and big game by ourselves! We work a lot, and we know everything about the game – all the different parts, we know them well. We’re trying to have about 20-25 hours of gameplay. It’s possible to make! It’s lot of work and long nights with very little sleep, but it’s possible.

Nataliya: I think the way we found to develop this big, open world is to release it in a more episodic format. So, instead of making people wait a long time for the big, gigantic game to come out, we’ll just develop a certain part of the game and release it one part at a time. This part that we’re showing here at PAX is almost ready!

TSSZ: As you alluded to, the dog companion is obviously a big focus of the game. How do you differentiate how your dog works from other games like Fallout 4, which feature that mechanic as well?

Nataliya: The most important thing to understand is that the dog is not just a simple companion. It’s a main character. It’s there at the beginning of the story, which is set very far in the past. You’ve had a relationship with it since it was a puppy, so there’s an emotional aspect to it. The dog is also very developed technically, so it has its own ability tree and set of skill points. As it levels up, it can learn new skills. The human can not only interact with the dog in an emotional way, but can also teach it to hunt, track scents and NPCs, and interact with other animals. So, it’s a very important character and part of the storyline.

TSSZ: From a technical perspective, how did creating the dog character and balancing that differ from creating the human character?

Philip: I would say that was pretty much the hardest thing to do in the game. The dog is a companion, but we want him to be good. You have to handle things like pathfinding. You have to handle how the dog reacts. When you run away, does he follow you, or does he stay? We did a bunch of stances – a more passive stance, and a more aggressive stance – you can tell him how you want him to behave. I would say that developing the dog is a great challenge, but it’s the center of the game so we put a lot of time into that! We want to make sure that when the player enters dog mode, you’re able to do what the dog does. You’re able to track targets, run quickly, dodge enemies, and crawl into small spaces.

TSSZ: Another big component of these kinds of games is the narrative. Given that you’re now episodic, can you talk about how you go about developing a narrative to keep players engaged across episodes?

Nataliya: It’s going to be hard. I think the main thing we’re trying to develop is the in-game team relationship, and it’s a big part of the story – how they try to survive in an almost-empty world. The story takes place a very long time after the apocalypse. It’s not right after the apocalypse – it’s years after. There’s almost no humans left. Maybe even some of the zombies are dead because they haven’t been fed for a while! It has a very “new world” feel. In the story, we’re trying to explore how the team will support each other in discovering whether it’s possible to build a new world or whether they should go somewhere and hide. Does a new world exist already, or are we the last survivors? That’s the basis of the story.

Also, something else that’s important is that it’s not a linear story. We have important flashbacks in the story that are playable. So when you flash back, you play it in order to to better understand the dog, which will be a puppy, and the relationship that you have with it. It makes you connect more with it, the world, and what the world has become.

TSSZ: Going along with that, when you start to chop that experience into episodes, how does that impact your ability to tell a cohesive story in terms of individual episodes and an overarching saga?

Nataliya: We really want to make sure that each episode is, in some way, independent. You’ll have a full experience in the first one. There will be multiple endings, so every time you play it, you can restart and do different things each time. You’re not going to be stuck with cliffhangers where you’re like, “Oh my God! Where does it go from here?”

TSSZ: When you try to build this atmospheric world, what goes into crafting that distinctive look and feel that the game has?

Philip: Actually, it was very important for us to have a very high level of immersion. For example, there’s fog in the game, and you’ll learn why the fog is always there, and why it changes color over the course of a day. You’ll have a feeling that you’re stuck in there since you can’t see very far away, so this will make you go slower. You have to be careful! It was inspired by old games like Silent Hill.

For the visual style, we really wanted to give the feeling that there’s destruction everywhere. What we’re showing here is the Old Town, where the destruction was the worst because there were a lot of people, but you’ll be able to explore the suburbs, farmlands, highways, and those kinds of things. We really tried to craft the feeling of you being alone and the only friend you have is your dog.

TSSZ: It sounds like the game world is pretty complex – you’re going a lot of places and doing a lot of things. What sort of challenges or limitations did you run into as you started to put this together?

Philip: The technical limitations were basically how many objects you can put in a single zone. This was a pretty hard challenge. We wanted to make sure we could have hoards of zombies and have you explore many buildings. The size of the game is pretty big, but the engine that we use, Unity, is helping us a lot with that.

TSSZ: You’re tackling a lot here! For both of you, what motivates you to keep plugging away at this?

Philip: We’re building the game that we want to play. This is a game that we haven’t seen on the market before, but the chemistry between you and the dog is something we really wanted to see. This is what keeps us going. We’re building a game for the player, but also for us! We want to bring something fresh that people will remember. There are a lot of these games, but we want this one to be as immersive as possible.

Nataliya: That’s the thing about being a very small team. We have to motivate each other all the time. It can be very difficult when you have a big project, but what really keeps me going is that we’re determined to stay positive. We like the game, we like playing it, and we stay positive because there’s only two of us. It gives us the freedom to do whatever we want! We can wake up in the morning and say, “Oh! It was be so fun to add this feature!” and nobody can stop us. It gives you the feeling that you can really create something, and we’re very happy with it.

Dead Years will enter Steam Early Access by the end of the summer. The first episode will launch on Windows, OS X, and Linux by the end of the year with console ports planned for next year.