The $500 Kickstarter Designs

We finally knocked out the two new design features from the $500 Kickstarter backers. Here’s what we have so far.

Boss Fights

Community feature #1 is the addition of Boss Fights. We already have plans to expand some of the scavenging mechanics but we hope that boss fights will be a uniquely horrible experience. Normally when you are short on food, you go scavenging. Well now there will always be the chance of a boss fight occurring when you venture into the wild. We were given free reign as to what exactly the bosses would be and how the mechanics would work (thankfully.) Right now the plan is to prototype 2 kinds of boss fights that would happen during scavenging and another rare event that would happen on the road.

We put a lot of thought into what would make the best boss fights that would most align with the nostalgic elements of our game, the lore of the world we have built and the mechanics that would play the best.

Not to give away all the surprises; here is some concept art for the possible enemies that you might encounter.

We decided to go with infected animals because we felt it made the most sense. Originally we (and our $500 supporter) were thinking about bosses like the tank from Left 4 Dead or some sort of giant zombie squid. We ended up turning down those ideas because they didn’t match our lore. Although we can be goofy at times we wanted to avoid the “super” zombies from left 4 dead (not to mention any legal issues with directly ripping them off.) And although I think making a giant zombie squid sounds totally fun… our “virus” doesn’t really mutate the host into monsters, like it would in Resident Evil.

I’ll let you figure out the rest when you play the game.

Car Upgrades

Community feature #2 is car upgrades. Or to be more specific; the car as a character. This feature is still very new and very likely to grow and change as we playtest it. The current plan is to give your car a health bar alongside your party, representing it’s condition. You can fix it with scrap you find on abandoned cars and possibly get upgrades from wrecks, encounters and towns. The upgrades will probably be slight performance tweaks like better mileage, fewer breakdowns, better fuel efficiency and other stuff. If we can, we want to find a way for you to be able to “own” your car.

So there you have it. Thanks to our backers for their ideas and we will continue to work with them to get these features to be a totally awesome fit for the game. We still have plenty of new features and improvements planned ourselves but those can wait for another blog post. And as always, feel free to share ideas, we are always open to them (and have implemented good ones in the past.)

Cheers.