Screwfly Studios' sci-fi horror roguelike set in the world of Deadnaut is finally here! Prepare for an unnerving and tense journey to the edges of the galaxy in search of the source of Rip space.
As the Handler, you'll control a single Deadnaut, a treasure hunter navigating hazardous settlements, drifting derelicts, and confronting mysterious creatures, haywire security systems, and dangerous fanatics.
🌌 FAST ROGUELIKE GAMEPLAY Guide your Deadnaut through procedurally generated missions, from floating cryoships and freighters to abandoned settlements, equipping them with a wide array of weapons, upgrades and gear. Fight when you can, run when you must.
🤖 TRUST ISSUES Keep your Deadnaut loyal or force compliance. Pay them off or turn them into a mindless space golem if necessary, but remember: everything comes at a price.
💥 FIVE DISTINCT SUITS AND PLAYSTYLES Select from five suits, each with dozens of unique skills and abilities. Customise your Deadnaut with weapons, sensors, shields, cloaks and hack tools. Choose from the heavy-duty Labour suit, the ghostly Sensor suit, or the gravity-bending Energy suit, or other playstyles to match your preferences.
🛠️ TACTICS, UPGRADES, AND CUSTOMISATION Develop your Deadnaut and maximise their potential by discovering powerful combinations and synergies among 180+ upgrades. Tailor your armour and damage to face the challenges that await you in the twisted depths of the Rip.
🚀 THE HUNT IS ON Stay one step ahead of the Benefactors, an enigmatic enemy in relentless pursuit, determined to stop you from reaching the Rip's source. Armed with advanced tech, weapons and cunning, you'll need to keep your wits about you to evade their grasp.
🎮 CREATE YOUR OWN DEADNAUT Get started with a premade Deadnaut or create your own unique character. Adjust their stats and even import your own photo to truly make your Deadnaut your own.
Will you reveal the source of Rip space, or keep the knowledge for yourself? The choice is yours in Deadnaut: Signal Lost.
Our first priority is to catch any bugs and make sure it's stable and running well. We'll also be tweaking balance, difficulty options and making quality of life changes.
We have a lot of additional content we want to add to the game too. These will likely be free updates, so stay tuned for more information.
How can I get help with the game?
There's an in-game manual, descriptive tooltips and helpful pop-ups. You can also head over to our Discord server and ask for advice.
Try the Deadnaut: Signal Lost tech demo now!
We're very close to launching Deadnaut: Signal Lost but we need your help.
We've prepared a technical demo of the first few levels of the game and we'd love to get it running on a wider range of systems. This will give you a taste of the game and help us catch any obvious bugs that have eluded us so far. It's a win-win.
Grab the demo at our freshly launched Discord server.
(Check the #general channel topic for links to the tech demo)
FAQ
How long until the game comes out?
If the tech demo goes smoothly, our plan is to turn that into a larger demo and then release the game around the same time.
Will the demo be available on Steam?
Yes, absolutely.
I don't use Discord, can I still try the tech demo?
You sure can. Email us at support@screwflystudios.com and I'll send you a link.
Announcing Deadnaut: Signal Lost!
The cosmos is tearing itself apart. Wrecks of long-dead starships are full of horrible, interdimensional creatures. The dead roam surfaces of moons, and you're being hunted by technically advanced soldiers.
Welcome to Signal Lost, Screwfly Studios' return to Deadnaut's grim and ruthless future.
While Deadnaut: Signal Lost is situated in the same universe as the original and features similar, mission-based gameplay in procedurally-generated locations, it is not a direct sequel.
You play the role of a remote handler who controls the action "at a distance" via a physical console, however, Signal Lost is focused on a single Deadnaut, rather than a squad.
The action is more intimate and tactical, and you can develop your Deadnaut with numerous suit upgrades and abilities. Furthermore, the gameplay is turn-based, not real-time, which helps focus the action.
Zafehouse Diaries is back! But, before we start our journey into a new, zombie-encrusted narrative, we need your help to test the technical aspects of the game.
Update: With the game coming soon to Steam, we've removed the tech demo. A massive thank you to everyone who helped us out! Original post follows.
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Special demo builds of Zafehouse Diaries 2 for Windows and Mac have been made available (download links provided below), so we can make sure the game runs correctly on as many systems as possible.
As such, we're focusing on feedback regarding problems with graphics, audio, input and anything else related to actually running the game.
If you do hit something, we'd also appreciate a run-down of your computer's specifications, e.g. CPU, video card, amount of RAM, operating system and version (including service packs) and display resolution.
Please note the tech demo isn't representative of the final release (we're still adding a few bits and pieces) and comes with the following restrictions:
The game will end after 3 days of in-game time.
Limited to 3 survivors (custom or random).
Only the tutorial scenario, "Safe As Houses", is available.
Please post any feedback in this thread. If possible, let us know any information you feel is relevant (graphics drivers, hardware configuration, distribution etc.).
If you'd like to contact us directly, email logan@screwflystudios.com for technical queries, and contact@screwflystudios.com with general questions.
As Zafehouse Diaries 2 draws closer, we have more to share from behind the development curtain! For this update, we'll take a peek at ZD2's customisation tools, which allow players to add their own content to the game.
Customisation has been a major component of all Screwfly titles and Zafehouse Diaries 2 is no exception! Just like the original, you'll be able to make your own survivors, items and occupations and we've made it easier than ever to get your content into the game.
Build a better survivor
While our other games, Fear Equation and Deadnaut, allow you to create your own characters and import photos, it was Zafehouse Diaries that started it all and the sequel will continue the trend.
Character customisation in Zafehouse Diaries 2 is very similar to the first game, with two exceptions.
Firstly, if you don't want the game to randomly assign prejudices to your custom survivors, you're free to select your own. This means you can create specific rivalries between characters.
Secondly, creating custom groups of survivors has been greatly streamlined (see "Group Dynamics" below).
Of course, all the usual options are there -- age, gender, occupation, education and so forth -- meaning you can tailor your team to your exact specifications.
Group dynamics
Zafehouse is a game about a group of people trying to survive a zombie apocalypse, so if you're creating your own survivors, you should be able to customise how they're grouped together as well.
The original Zafehouse wasn't very flexible in this regard and addressing this was a big priority for the sequel.
As such, Zafehouse Diaries 2 features a dedicated group editor so you can assign one or more survivors together.
You can fill all five spots, or leave a couple open to randomisation -- the choice is yours.
This makes it incredibly easy to share survivors amongst a variety of groups and selecting your team at the start of a scenario takes just a few clicks.
Post-apocalyptic job hunting
A survivor's abilities and skills are defined mostly by their occupation and so Zafehouse Diaries 2 comes out of the box with an occupation editor.
To get you started quickly, you can clone another occupation and make a few tweaks... or change it completely.
Once you've designed an occupation, it will become available in the survivor editor, ready to be assigned to custom characters.
Learn the craft
Finally, you'll be able to make your own items, based on templates to get you up and running with minimum fuss.
As with occupations, you can change one property, or all of them, depending on how deep you want to go.
There's no limit to the type of items you can make, be it a Swiss Army Knife or a Long-Range Shotgun -- it's totally up to you.
You can even add a custom image and sound effects to your items. The images will appear in the diary when the item is discovered and trigger their sound effects when used.
Welcome back to Zafehouse Diaries 2!After a brief hiatus we're back with more insights into the upcoming sequel. This time around we take a look at the new scenarios you'll have to tackle.
The original Zafehouse came with three scenarios: No Survivors, Roadkill and Deadline (in order of increasing difficulty).
For Zafehouse Diaries 2, we're adding several new challenges, as well as comprehensive options to tweak each game to match your preferred style of play.
Fresh meat Zafehouse Diaries 2 comes with a number of unique scenarios, each with their own objectives, enemies and even orders.
For example, one might require you to patch up the power grid before making your stand, while another will task you with gathering the right assortment of survivors... who might not exactly get along.
Whatever your goal, you'll have a variety of approaches available to you. Will hit-and-run breaches be the most efficient, or should you defend your safehouse while steadily gathering supplies?
Old favourites Seasoned Zafehouse players will recognise a few of the sequel's scenarios, including Roadkill and Deadline. While these modes follow the narratives of the first game, they pack enough changes and new twists to keep even the best undead survivalist busy.
Once you start tailoring things with custom content and under-the-hood options (see below), you'll find these classic scenarios unfolding in suprising ways that simply weren't possible in the original.
Play your way Zafehouse Diaries has always been a challenging game and while it's great to pit yourself against each scenario at its intended difficulty level, we know how useful and fun it can be to go behind the scenes and tweak things to better suit your playstyle.
So, once you've selected a scenario, you'll have the option to change loads of individual settings, including zombie combat strength, the impact of hunger and fatigue and supply quantities. You can even disable prejudices entirely.
This screen will also allow you to select a group containing up to five custom survivors. How do you create custom survivors? That's a story for next time... and they're just the tip of the iceberg.
Inside Zafehouse Diaries 2: Breaching and investigation
Dilemmas were the focus last time we looked at Zafehouse Diaries 2. For this update, we'll show you how the sequel handles missions to other locations.
Missions There are two missions in ZD2: breaching and investigating. In ZD1, these were both handled under the hood - you just select your group, give them items, then send them to the location.
In ZD2, you can customise your approach. When you breach, you can choose which entrances your survivors will use to enter the location. Make sure you send them into rooms with as fewer zombies as possible, otherwise they'll lose momentum and flee.
Investigation is now far more important and useful. You'll not only see how many zombies are around a location, but you can see how many zombies are inside, and exactly which rooms they're in. It's not easy though - to get a good look at a location, you'll need to take a few risks.
Risk management In ZD1, breaching could often result in instant death. While that is still absolutely true in ZD2, you can now determine how much risk you want your survivors to take.
For example, if you aren't sure how many zombies are inside a location, then you can either go back and investigate further, or cautiously try and breach - if it looks too dangerous, then your survivors might flee, rather than stay and fight.
But remember: go too cautiously, and you might waste precious hours. There are no easy answers.
Smart defaults While many players requested more control over missions and combat, we know that some of you may not want to worry about these extra options. Never fear: you can still play the game the same way you did in ZD1 and let the game figure out the details.
Last week, we looked at relationships. This week, we'll take a look at one of the most fundamental features in Zafehouse Diaries: dilemmas.
In the original game, dilemmas added drama to your story. Some were minor - do you trade your medicine for food? - while others could result in sacrificing one of your survivors.
In Zafehouse Diaries 2, we've made dilemmas more interesting, fun and varied.
More dilemmas: There are many more dilemmas in ZD2 - deal with the mob, the military, experimenting scientists and more
Varied outcomes: Dilemmas can have positive, neutral or negative outcomes, depending on your choices
Smarter options: Sometimes more than two options will be available, giving you greater control over how you respond
More predictable: Clearly see which options are supported by your survivors
Finally, dilemmas aren't just about making the best decision in the moment. A dilemma only appears because your survivors can't agree on what to do - and when you make a decision, not everyone may not like it.
If survivors feel like the world is against them - that their opinions aren't being heard - they'll become demotivated. On the other hand, agreeing with a survivor can help spur them.
Always remember that dilemmas have many layers and the obvious answer may not be the best.
