Undead Labs

using our brains to save yours

The Big Picture

by Sanya

As I hinted in the last newsletter, we’ve been working out (in partnership with our publisher) what we can say and when. The first teaser dropped last night on the publisher’s official State of Decay Instagram. Between now and PAX East, we’re going to be showing you a regular glimpse of concept art, followed by a post either here on or on the official State of Decay game website with the big picture, and maybe a little detail explaining what we had in mind when we did it.

I hope it helps tide you over while we finish working on the systems and gameplay, and that you enjoy this look into what we were thinking when we began the build.

Today’s Big Picture is…

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Get Your Head In The Game

by Matt Heiniger

Matt Heiniger is one of our Tech Artists, and he’s here today to walk us through some really kick-ass tech we’re using right now. If you’ve followed us on Instagram, you’ve seen some of the images. Next week we’ll be posting a contest where people in Seattle for PAX West can enter and win the chance to be scanned into our world. Meanwhile, check out this fascinating technology. — Sanya

One of the biggest compliments we get on State of Decay is the diversity of the cast. It features characters with a wide variety of ages, ethnicities, abilities, and sexual preferences. This is no accident. State of Decay is first and foremost designed to simulate the survival fantasy for everyday people. Sure, the game features lots of Zeds that are terrifying, gooey, exciting, and just plain fun. But it’s really a game about people.

We want you to live out your own personal survival fantasy. Part of that is giving you a character that is relatable to you. But by “you”, we mean all of you, not just those of you who are muscular, dark haired white dudes that look like you were ripped from a Calvin Klein advertisement.

But in order to pull this off, we need to make a lot of characters.  More specifically, a lot of faces. But here’s the thing: Making human faces is hard. Like, really hard. As social creatures, our brains are hard-wired to analyze tiny details of human faces in micro seconds in order to assess another human’s intent. Because of this function of our brains, any unrealistic feature of a digital face just looks wrong. The viewer may not even be aware of why it looks wrong, just that it does. This phenomenon is known as the uncanny valley. Historically, this has been a concern within the film industry. But as video games continue to increase in fidelity, we too are entering the uncanny valley. As such, we must put an increasing focus on getting facial features just right. Either that, or go highly stylized. But that’s a whole different direction.

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Quest-Quest: The Quest for the Best Quest System Ever

By Ian Adams, Age 32

Hello again, folks, this is Ian Adams, Content Designer and Writer on Moonrise. I’ve already introduced myself in a previous article, so today I’ll just give you a fun fact: I can say “toy boat” ten or more times in a row, quickly. I can do any other tongue twister as well, but that’s the one I’m proudest of. I challenge all of you to do it even four times. If you can, maybe Sanya will give you a prize. I don’t know, I didn’t ask her about this.*

DangerWhen discussing story, we’ve mentioned “quests” off-handedly a few times, but we haven’t really gone into detail on what that means. By the time this article is over, we will no longer live in a universe where that is true. We’ll talk about quests, what they have to do with story, how we make them, what our goals are and other things that I’m going to leave out of this list. To find out what they are, keep reading!

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