Dead State
What We're Up To + Official Wiki Announcement
First, DoubleBear is pleased to endorse Gamepedia.com’s Dead State wiki as our official wiki for the project. The wiki has existed for a while as an unofficial resource, maintained by our most active community members - it just seemed like the logical step to make the whole thing official! If you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend you visit it and consider becoming a contributor. Please spread the word to other members of the gaming community who either already love Dead State or are curious to learn more about it. Right now, there’s still a lot of content on there waiting to be fleshed out, so this is the best time to get involved and really help expand the Dead State wiki. If you’re looking for more ways to help us out in addition to playing the Early Access build and providing feedback, this is a great option! I hope this wiki proves useful to everyone, and I look forward to seeing it grow and develop!
For those who are curious what we've been up to since Update #1 - we're finishing up Systems beta, and while it may be anywhere from a couple of weeks to a month before you see our next update, it'll be a HUGE one. You'll be getting character creation, combat barks, experience progression, and more content. As always, we'll need your help and feedback to improve and tweak these systems and your bug reports to make sure we don't miss anything in the final game! In the meantime, we appreciate your patience and love seeing all the screenshots, videos, and more coming out of the community. It just makes us that much more excited and motivated to get the updates - and then the final game - out sooner!
Yours,
The DB Team
Early Access Update #1
Welcome to the very first update of Dead State’s Early Access! In this update, we have a healthy mix of stability improvements and content additions. We’re happy to report that many crash and soft lock issues in the previous build have been eliminated. Check out the changelog below to find out more specifics about the contents of this update.
Update #1 Changelog
- Added random encounter functionality and ten random encounter maps
- Added harvesting and harvesting locations on the area map
- Added fishing locations on the map (fishing pole item is not in current build, but we’ll see about patching that in soon)
- Added ally inventory management on shelter storage screen
- Added healing over time for characters inside shelter
- Added a button on the job board to pass time
- Added GUI for choosing # of parts that are assigned towards repairing fence, and made them be used immediately, and refunds parts if everyone is removed from task
- Fixed a crash that reported “none of the directions match”
- Fixed a soft lock happening during zombie movement
- Fixed a soft lock that occurred when loading a save from the main menu
- Fixed an issue where a zombie’s turn would be skipped
- Fixed an issue where zombies would get up after knocking someone down, move to another square, and then feast on empty square
- Fixed an issue where zombies wandered a bit before moving to enemy
- Fixed a soft lock occurring in the code related to allies following player
- Fixed noise so that it degrades over time more appropriately
- Fixed a bug where fence repair progress was lost if you left the shelter after assigning a job and returned before the job was completed
- Corrected spelling of Abilene on area map
- Fixed issue where knockback after knockdown caused zombies to feast on an empty square
- Fixed an issue where bodies T-posed upon returning to a visited place
- Fixed a soft lock where console reported “teleporters graph has too few nodes”
- Fixed problems with drag & drop functionality on inventory screens
- Fixed issue where hitting Esc. while in inventory screen took you to menu instead of exiting GUI
- Fixed a crash bug that occurred when attempting to quick save in shelter inventory
- Fixed a soft lock occurring when stunned / downed enemy was surrounded
- Fixed a bug where reloading a save incremented the counter on # of visits to an area
- Fixed a crash where reloading a save after dying from exhaustion crashed the game
- Fixed a bug where morale-reducing items are automatically stocked
- Fixed some blocking issues
- Fixed a bug where medical items (gauze, painkillers) could be equipped directly rather than loaded in satchel
- Other small fixes here and there
We will be updating the Known Issues list here on Steam and on our forums as soon as we can with more detailed info about the bugs we’re aware of so far that aren’t yet fixed in the Steam build. We hope you enjoy the new update, and as always, please continue to share your feedback and bug reports with us either here or on our dedicated forums. We have a special bug-reporting subforum available where you can provide your quicksave files and screenshots, which goes far in helping us track down and squash those more elusive bugs. Speaking of which, we want to say a big ol’ “THANK YOU” to everyone who helped us track down issues before now and reported reproduction steps to us on Steam EA discussion boards and on our forums. We’re also particularly grateful to our mods, Caidoz and DrunkZombie, who have worked tirelessly to answer questions, track down and report bugs, and help compile all the bugs being reported by the rest of the community. I don’t know what we’d do without them!
Have fun, and thanks for playing Dead State’s Early Access!
Upcoming Updates
We hope to expand the demo features over time, and we’re working on a few key additions to help flesh out the Early Access build. Here’s a list of some of the features we are finishing and testing for an upcoming update:
Soft Lock/Crash Issues – We’ve been tracking down crashes happening during combat.
Save/Load Issues – We’ve been looking for ways save/load breaks the game and patching them.
Save on Menu – We will be adding a “Save” option on the menu.
Random Encounters – Random Encounter groups and maps will be added to the build.
Harvesting – Harvest areas will be added, found based on Survival skill.
And to be added in future updates:
Character Creation – We will be adding a basic character creation system to the build.
Goals – Achieving goals will give the player skill points.
Barks – Combat/Ambient barks added to make the NPCs seem more alive.
Loot Highlighting – We will add in a system to better highlight loot containers.
Roof Issues – We will fix issues with sight/targeting enemies hidden by roofs.
AI Improvements – Better AI, less chance to “cheat” or “trick” AI in battles.
Due to circumstances beyond our control, some of these updates may be slightly delayed. Three members of our team are in the Ukraine – if you’re not familiar with what’s happening there, please read up on the latest news. In the short-term, their schedules have been impacted by the events unfolding there right now, so please be patient with us. They are still working on the game, but sometimes they have bigger concerns to attend to. We have a pretty small team for an RPG (about 12 people!) so we definitely feel it any time a team member has to take time off for personal reasons.
If you have feedback or need help with the game, please feel free to stop by our forums and ask us there. We appreciate your thoughts and participation and we look forward to bringing you more updates and news about the final release in the future.
Update On Early Access Build
Unfortunately, this build probably won’t get up in time to be put up tonight.
But here’s the thing – we could have put the build up last week or even today. The reason we held off was to polish our work as much as possible and make the EA build feel like a complete game. Yes, it’s still an Early Access game, but we didn’t think crashes or other major progression issues would make for a good experience for our backers and everyone else who bought the game early.
The first time we delayed the EA build was for save/load functionality, which needed extensive testing since there is a time component to our game and many variables to track. This week’s work has improved the game even more, and closed out a ton of bugs and playability issues. As of right now, most of us are working on a few hours of sleep a night. We’ve been playtesting the game and fixing issues as they occur, getting our codes generated and ready to be sent out, and making sure we have our forums and testing info ready to go.
Tomorrow, the game will be released. In the meantime, stop by our forums if you’re new to the game and need answers or check out the manual we posted here:
http://www.deadstate.doublebearproductions.com/demo/manual.pdf
One more night, guys – that’s it.
Always remember – no one wants the game out more than us.
About the upcoming Early Access demo release
Many of you have astutely noticed that Dead State: The First Seven Days, our Early Access demo of Dead State, is slated to be released tomorrow. Right now, this is still our plan, although we may be forced to delay a day or two if any unforeseen obstacles arise. Either way, we want to clarify how we anticipate the launch process will work in advance of the demo release.
We have a large backlog of backers and pre-purchasers who are our first priority for generating and sending keys. We're going to do this as fast as we can, but we cannot guarantee everyone will get their copy right away tomorrow (especially since it can take up to a day to receive approval for a new batch of keys to be generated through Steamworks). Since this is our studio's first time ever releasing a game on Steam and generating/distributing keys, the process could be a little rocky. We really appreciate you all bearing with us while we get everything sorted out, and you give us through Friday to get keys out to everyone. If by Friday you still don't have a key and you haven't heard an update from us about our progress, then feel free to reach out to us here on the Steam group discussion board here or our own forums.
We will shortly post the Early Access version of the game manual in both places so you can begin reading up on the gameplay in advance. We hope you'll all take the time to read through it or reference it as you play - we do not currently have tutorial text in-game, so the manual is invaluable to learning about all the features and functionality of the demo.
We will also have Bug Reporting and Feedback threads on both forums, with a sticky note describing known issues. As this is an unfinished product in a roughly pre-beta state, there are a number of quirks and small bugs and also a few missing features. You should look over the sticky note before reporting a bug. You may also post your thoughts and suggestions about the demo in that forum, but we ask that you try to keep it all in one post and edit that post when you come up with more ideas - this way it's easier for us to navigate through and track everyone's feedback.
Thanks for your patience and support over the next couple of days while we work to get the demo into your hands!