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official twitter account of undead labs, developers of the state of decay franchise .
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moonrise will debut at pax prime in seattle later this month, where undead labs will be showcasing the title' s beta build .
undead labs on twitter :
a release date. first real look at gameplay. you know... stuff. …
is streaming about the new dlc independence day pack right now for state of decay 2. check it out on undead labs mixer or twitch !
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state of decay developers undead labs might be working on lifeline, the military - focused expansion to their zombie survival game, but that ...
undead labs’ zombie apocalypse simulator, state of decay 2, made a strong showing during e3 2017 as microsoft introduced a large new chunk of ...
state of decay developer undead labs has signed a deal to produced multiple games for the publisher over the next few years. it’s not clear yet ...
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state of decay 2 is a hard taskmaster. undead labs’ survival sequel lulls you into a false sense of security, holding back the zombie horde for ...
state of decay 2 developers undead labs are already calling time on the battle royale genre. though they' re making a survival game - the genre ...
state of decay 2 is an ambitious zombie basher, but does it have the performance to match? undead labs have taken the well - received original and ...
developers undead labs unveiled a new gameplay trailer for zombie - survival - brawler state of decay 2 at pax east in boston this week, and it looks ...
everyone has their own idea of how they' d survive. we thought it would be fun to build a game around that concept .
- - jeff strain, undead labs
strain said that development on moonrise began in 2013 shortly after state of decay was delivered to certification. during this year' s game developers conference, kabam approached undead labs about publishing .
the next game from state of decay developer undead labs is moonrise, a multiplayer monster collecting role - playing game for mobile devices being developed in collaboration with kabam, the companies announced today .
undead labs is a studio formed in 2009 and based in seattle, washington. the studio was with the vision of creating a zombie - themed massively multiplayer online game currently codenamed class 4 .
undead labs, the studio behind state of decay, have been tinkering away on a free - to - play rpg for a while. it’s called moonrise, and it wears ...
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the headline is just one of several catchphrase suggestions for undead labs’ upcoming moonrise. they could also go with “you simply must capture ‘em all” or “cram yer pockets with pure tiny monsters, aye? ”
the game you' ve all been waiting for. state of decay is an open - world zombie - survival game, developed at undead labs and produced for xbox 360 (via xbox ...
undead labs is on a mission to take gaming in bold new directions. we are the makers of the state of decay franchise, and have exciting plans for the future. read more about the lab here .
this marks the second publishing collaboration for undead labs, the first being a multi - year, multi - title agreement with microsoft studios made shortly after state of decay became the fastest selling xbox live arcade title in history .
strain also noted that, in addition to the advantage of having the microsoft studios team shepherding the project along, the xbox platform — both on xbox 360 and now on xbox one — offered undead labs some important technological benefits .
strain has been very positive about his company' s relationship with microsoft, and he told polygon that undead labs went with microsoft for the original state of decay and followed up with the long - term agreement for a number of reasons .
but the core of moonrise — like the future of state of decay — is
most definitively multiplayer .
he explained that undead labs is
in the business
of building online games that can be picked up and played anytime, anywhere, and wanted to create a new game that wasn' t cross - platform but
omni - platform .
undead labs wanted something players could take with them, eventually settling moonrise on the one device people always have with them — their phones .
in an effort to build to that goal, the staff at undead labs has opted to create a xbox live arcade title, state of decay. the arcade title will allow the team to focus on the core mechanics they hope to feature in the larger game .
the game, which is currently going by the codename
class3 ,
sounds an awful lot like an interactive take on
the walking dead .
undead labs is building an open - world game that, as they describe in a new blog post, will
empower you to try out your real - world zombie survival plan .
it' s early in the development and a lot of the ideas being thrown around are of the big picture variety, but there' s no denying the appeal in what undead labs is cooking up .
kidding! seriously, undead labs remains an independent studio, in full creative control of the games we make. that said, i wasn’t bsing when i said we are excited to work directly with microsoft on this project. over the past year we were approached by numerous publishers expressing an interest in partnering with undead labs. not surprisingly, many of them were mmo industry publishers who were drawn to the team’s track record in that industry, and while they were excited to work with our team, most of them wanted us to work on yet another world of warcraft clone .
the game is coming to xbox one and pc for $ 29. 99, and players who bought it before get a 33 - percent discount. returning players also get access to an exclusive character, which undead labs calls
the sword - wielding indian - american badass, gurubani .
this position is for full - time employment at the undead labs studio in seattle. (for more on our culture, be sure to check the jobs page .) if you think you have what it takes, send your resume and some code samples in c + + or c # to jobs @ undeadlabs. com .
as you fight the undead hordes you’ll find new survivors. your favorite characters from lifeline can now be unlocked in breakdown, including the previously unplayable kelly “sasquatch” eldridge .
state of decay: lifeline, the second expansion and the first story - based add - on for undead labs' hit xbox live arcade title, turns the tables on state of decay by putting the player on the military side of humanity' s efforts to repel the zombie threat. but as we saw during a demo of lifeline at pax east 2014, that doesn' t mean that the dlc will shy away from what made the original game so special: exploring the psychological effects of dealing with the undead .
lifeline is a single - player expansion; strain said last year that it wasn' t feasible to add a multiplayer component to state of decay. but as a result of the multi - year, multi - game agreement between undead labs and publisher microsoft studios that the companies announced in january, the state of decay brand is here to stay — and multiplayer action is the bedrock of its future .
undead labs, creators of the smash hit survival - fantasy game state of decay, is home to an elite team of programmers, artists, designers, musicians, and producers. above all else, we love games and we love to try new things. if you think you could help to create our unique brand of innovative games for gamers on all platforms, we want to hear from you .
my experience with our team and microsoft has been that it is built from very passionate, very smart people whose hearts are in the right place ,
said strain. he pointed out that state of decay was a risky proposition to invest in, partly because undead labs
did violate game dev 101
with several of its design choices, like the inclusion of permadeath in a role - playing game .
finally, when i had just parted ways with glu (after eleven years at the same office), i got a call from richard foge, the design director at undead labs. state of decay was shipping, and they had an opening for a designer to handle the expansions. he thought i should apply, and if i was a good fit for the team and the job, then i’d be in .
then i went to pax 2012, and stumbled into this tiny booth on the edge of microsoft territory, where this studio i’d never heard of called undead labs was demoing the exact game i wanted to make. i started talking to them excitedly about the potential of their state of decay franchise, and over the course of the next year, we had lunch several times, exchanged e - mails, and really got to know each other .
microsoft have gone on a spending spree, buying four studios and opening a new one of their own. during their e3 pressblast tonight, microsoft announced that they’ve picked up forza horizon developers playground games, hellblade developers ninja theory, state of decay developers undead labs, and we happy few developers compulsion games. they’ve also opened the initiative, a new studio in santa monica with a name like a faction of wwe heels. read the rest of this entry »
state of decay developers undead labs today announced a sequel to their community - building zombie apocalypse survival game, coming to windows 10 in 2017. the big feature for state of decay 2 [ official site ] is online co - op, letting up to four players join up to romp around the end of human civilisation. between this and dead rising 4’s announcement, it has been a good day for co - op zombiefun. have a look at sod2 :
in a post on the undead labs blog, studio founder jeff strain — a veteran programmer who worked on starcraft and diablo and co - founded guild wars studio arenanet — detailed the new game' s features. moonrise will feature 3d visuals and be multiplayer - focused, with real - time online play available between friends. players will collect magical creatures they can use in real - time strategic combat scenarios, as well as customize these creatures and their own created character .
state of decay didn’t impress me when i played it last september. originally released on the 360, undead labs’ debut is an open world survival game with a structure remarkably close to my ideal zombie game. it’s about scavenging, gathering survivors, barricading, running out of supplies, collecting vehicles and avoiding enormous hordes of the living dead. great ingredients that didn’t quite make for a fine banquet, but it’s a much better game now than it was a year ago .
if guttural howls from those strange, primitive hill people in console land are anything to go by, state of decay is apparently quite excellent. we at rps have been eagerly awaiting its arrival on pc while sipping fine scotch and inventing new classical instruments, and now it’s finally made the leap. kinda. the nicely freeform zombie sandbox is playable on our platform of choice right this very second, but you’ll have to contort your highly evolved digits around a controller in order to make with all the driving, surviving, and undead drop - kicking. it’s not all bad, though. undead labs actually wants your help coming up with a fitting keyboard - and - mouse control setup – among other things .
‘class3’ is the codename for the ambitious zombie - survival open world game currently under development at undead labs for release as an xbox live arcade title. ‘class4’ is the codename for the subsequent zombie - survival online world game that we will develop by building on the class3 platform. in other words, class3 runs on your xbox 360 and supports 1 - 2 players via xbox live or on the same screen, while class4 will provide a much larger server - hosted world for thousands of simultaneous players .
our open positions are listed below. unless otherwise stated, all positions are for full - time employment at the undead labs studio in downtown seattle. if one of them describes you, send us an email expressing your interest in joining us. if you know someone who works at the lab, please express your interest to that person directly. if we haven’t had the opportunity to meet you yet, please send us an email with links to your online portfolio and resume to jobs @ urltoken .
like every game we will ever make, moonrise is a gamer - focused game, meaning it' s developed for people like us —passionate gamers who expect our time and money to be treated with respect ,
strain added in his post .
it' s also fully an undead labs game in terms our complete commitment to the player community and long term support for the game. moonrise is as much our baby as state of decay, and babies needs lots of love and attention .
if you' ve been feeling some burnout from the zombie overload in pop culture of late, then you run the risk of missing out on some cool stuff .
the walking dead
tv series was great stuff and the just - released zombie map for
call of duty: black ops
features space monkeys, which is absolutely fine. now there' s news of an upcoming xbox live arcade title from undead labs that the developer hopes will put a whole new spin on zombie video gaming .
moonrise is of course very different from state of decay in many ways ,
strain wrote .
it' s bright and colorful, it' s fantastical, and it' s on mobile. but despite those notable differences, you' ll also find that it' s very much an undead labs game, with a focus on systems - driven content, sophisticated progression mechanics, and a few bold design choices — such as strategic real - time combat — we think will result in a fresh gameplay experience .
i’m almost done catching up on news i missed over the long holiday weekend and, aw, this last bit’s bad news. state of decay creators undead labs are planning to close their pocket monster battling game moonrise [ official site ] without ever officially launching it. moonrise launched on steam early access in may, selling $ 15 and $ 20 bundles of creatures and virtuacash and whatnot. it was supposed to turn free - to - play when it launched but, well, it won’t launch and they’ve pulled it from sale .
missions in lifeline will focus on picking up people trapped in danforth and bringing them back home so the military can extract them to safety via helicopter when the next resource drop comes around. as in state of decay, your outpost becomes more challenging to manage as its population grows. we watched undead labs founder jeff strain play a rescue mission in lifeline, and before he began, he scrolled through the game' s interface for building out your base. keeping the place sanitary is a key factor in maintaining morale, so strain constructed a latrine .
the long - term goal for this project is meant to culminate in
class4 ,
a massively multiplayer outing that brings the basic mechanical precepts established in
class3
into a much larger space and for considerably higher numbers of players. that' s going to happen much further down the line, after
class3
- - a full - blown game that will also serve as a testing ground - - has been put through its paces. for now, undead labs is partnered with microsoft on the xbox live arcade release and in concept at least it sounds freaking awesome .
when our adam asked “have you played… state of decay? ” he noted that the open - world zombie survive ’em up had become a lot better in the year since its release, thanks largely to its ‘breakdown’ dlc. what we here at rps have apparently neglected to mention so far is that developers undead labs are revamping state of decay for a prettied - up rerelease with its dlc bundled in as the year one survival edition. oh! well, they are. and now they’ve announced a release date. unfortunately, it won’t come as an upgrade, only sold separately .
their intention for the open - world game is to put just as much emphasis on the challenges of surviving in a post - apocalyptic, zombie - infested world as they will on actually bringing down the shambling hordes in open combat. food, water, shelter and ammo are listed as necessary resources to seek out and maintain. shelters will need to be built, but since location is also important you' ll need to explore the open environment, either on foot or in a vehicle. you can even bring a friend along, as undead labs plans for two - player cooperative play .
it makes sense when you consider undead labs' multiplayer ambitions for the state of decay series; in fact, when strain announced the formation of the studio in 2009, the title of the press release said the company was created to develop a
console - based zombie mmo .
asked about the xbox live compute cloud — the xbox one' s highly touted cloud - based computing technology — strain told us ,
the azure infrastructure is huge. the existing live infrastructure is really quite mature and robust. and those are all things that we' d love to take advantage of .
what we’ve found is that while some people really love moonrise, there were unfortunately many more people who played the game and then moved on after a few days. for a standalone, offline game that might be fine; but for an online game with significant server hosting costs and an expectation for ongoing development and new content, it can mean a game that not only doesn’t pay for it’s development costs, but might even cost money to operate. as you can imagine, that’s not something that makes sense for an independent studio like undead labs, nor for that matter would it be a good business decision even for a large publisher .
as you know, moonrise has been in beta on steam in the early access channel for the past few months. at the same time, the ios version of the game has been available in limited release, in countries including australia and canada. during this beta period we’ve been gathering data on how people play the game. the free - to - play model, and the mobile market, are new territory for undead labs, so we’ve been paying close attention to these numbers to make sure we’re making a game people are excited to play, and also a game that we can operate profitably and sustainably with the level of support you expect .
ah, there’s nothing like throwing a pipe bomb at a group of zombies, and having that pipe bomb freeze in mid - air right in front of your face and explode. state of decay 2 wasn’t good at many things, but it was good at being a buggy jankfest. now, a patch from developers undead labs includes fixes for the accidental facebomb, along with some more of the worst bugs, like disappearing health bars and doors that won’t stay open. the patch is 20 gb large, perhaps a testament to just how much of the zombie survival game was left unpolished when it released (for windows 10 only) last month. read the rest of this entry »
microsoft and undead labs announced that they were bringing an enhanced version the game to xbox one and pc last august, and now they' ve released additional details about what' s in the remastered version. the year - one edition combines the original release and its two previously released dlc packages, breakdown and lifeline. breakdown was the game' s sandbox mode, which stripped the story away from the original release and simply challenged players to stay alive as long as they could. breakdown moved the action into a new city, and let players experience the catastrophe from the perspective of a military unit. as they learned, superior firepower only means so much against such an unrelenting opponent .
watching the state of decay 2 [ official site ] trailer which came out of e3 it got me thinking about how focused the games industry is on the human undead. sure there are sometimes a few pets or whatnot which appear sometimes in a horror movie - ish way – this thing which was cute is now scary – but why aren’t people resurrecting dinosaurs? is this a comment on whether a t - rex has a soul ?
move through the world like a zombie - slaying badass. dive through windows, jump on cars, and take it to the living dead with baseball bats. hop in a truck and mow down some undead pedestrians. break into the local police station and clear out their arsenal or walk into the local grocery store to stock up on your favorite junk food. the world is your oyster…a shiny oyster that happens to be filled with zombies .
- - sets itself apart. we recently spoke with strain about how the team' s first onus (which recently found a publishing partner in microsoft game studios) stands out among a veritable field of undead offerings, and he explained succinctly ,
in a real zombie apocalypse, you wouldn' t just gather up the guns and go hunting zombies. you' d be trying to avoid them. you' d be trying to survive .
come the zombie apocalypse the jugglers are the first against the wall. what to do with an unemployed children’s entertainer is one of the tamer dilemmas thrown up in the three hours i spent with state of decay 2. but it’s indicative of undead lab’s slightly goofy take on zombie survival, one that has you desperately scavenging for supplies one second and weighing up the combat potential of a barista the next. i condensed all this, and the game’s other new features, into one convenient 20 minute walkthrough .
strain left ncsoft last summer to build a creative studio around the most talented – and zombie loving – developers in the industry, and to pioneer a new development model that will create a new breed of mmo built from the ground - up for console gamers .
“every time i see a good zombie movie with friends, we spend days debating our strategies for surviving the zombie apocalypse, ” said strain. “the police station, or the supermarket? garden rake, or staple gun? bach, or the white stripes? i’m a game developer, so i’d probably be useless for anything other than ghoul bait, but i’m excited to have the opportunity to build an mmoz that lets us put those strategies to the test and find out for sure. ”
strain’s experience and expertise as a game developer and business leader helped spawn the game industry’s most successful and influential mmos. in the mid - nineties while strain was at blizzard entertainment, he was a programmer for starcraft and diablo and created the starcraft campaign editor. in 1999 strain formed the initial team and kicked off development on the wildly successful mmo world of warcraft while taking on the roles of team lead and lead programmer on the project .
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in light of this, we won’t be commercially releasing moonrise. there are some fantastic elements to the game that we’re extremely proud of, and those might find their way into a future game someday, but for now we’re going to make some changes to the game that make it a blast to play for our existing players .
since we won’t have to worry about whether the game is profitable, we can just have some fun and open the floodgates. we’re updating the game with new solari, wildlands, dungeons, and clothing shops. we’re also increasing rewards in arena mode, making it easier to earn xp and hit upgrade and evolution milestones, increasing drop rates, decreasing leveling time, and generally making the game play faster and easier across the board. we’re also giving every player a free sunset pack containing 2, 000 gems, 10, 000 gold, two solari boosters, and a bunch of essences. detailed patch notes are here .
this update will be available on steam today, and for our ios players as soon as we clear certification with apple, usually in about 2–3 weeks. we’ll keep the servers running for the rest of the year, ending midnight, december 31 .
i want to personally thank every one of you who played moonrise, and in particular those of you jumped in on our steam and ul player forums and shared your feedback with us — both the praise, which makes us giddy like little kids, and also the criticism, which makes us learn and get better at our jobs. our future games will benefit tremendously from your feedback and support .
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the moonrise has transformed wild solari into savage lunari. only wardens like you are capable of protecting innocent people from the fierce lunari... are you up to the challenge ?
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we can’t talk about what we’re doing, so we’re talking about the people doing the work. if you’ve ever been to a show where we were demoing our games, you’ve probably talked to geoffrey, our lead designer for state of decay. check out the story of how he came to be here. — sanya
my first foray into game design was when i was seven years old, and i realized that all it took to make a board game was a pen and paper and a die. i used to draw out weird little games that were a cross between
, and they were terrible. it only took one playtest to make it obvious that they weren’t any good, and i had no idea what to do to fix them. so i stopped, and played with legos instead .
legos, though. those were amazing. my sister and i used to play together, though we had very different interests. she used them (at the age of five) to tell personal stories of loss and heartbreak, while i mostly wanted to build sci - fi military bases, and have them fight to the last man against ruthless invaders who left a trail of sword - impaled lego corpses in their wake .
we eventually compromised with natural disasters like floods and tornadoes, which satisfied my need for destruction, as well as her insatiable desire to care for sad refugees .
but this pattern of using our toys to tell our own stories persisted through a range of different interests. i used to watch transformers and g. i. joe on tv, but for the life of me, i couldn’t retain any of those scripted plotlines. i was much more interested in the persistent characters and stories i was creating myself, over the course of years, with my legos, my stuffed animals, and my (naturally sentient) hot wheels cars .
i’ve played video games for as long as i could remember. my dad was a game critic in the eighties, and so video games showed up randomly at our house by the truckload. my dad didn’t have time to play them all, so he subcontracted that work out to me. my job was to play every game that entered the house, evaluate them, come up with themed lists of games to demo for him, and then give him the raw material to write his articles with .
i couldn’t write like he could, but it was a transformative experience for me to play all those games, not just for fun (though many of them were), but to root out what could be said about them on an analytical level .
unfortunately, i never had the patience or temperament to learn to program (see: me quitting making board games as soon as it became hard). and as far as i knew at the time, that was the only way to get involved in video games. so when i graduated high school, i went on to film school, and started training to become a director and screenwriter .
but i noticed a difference between me and some of the other folks in the film department. you could sort of tell who was going to make it — the ones who imagined themselves making a movie, and then just went out and did it. the ones who didn’t need a class project to get them moving. the ones who would take a minor video assignment and turn it into a full - scale production, because they could, and because they loved it. they devoted every waking minute to their art, because it was both work and play for them .
meanwhile, i would just go home and stay up all night playing video games .
i played a couple of the most influential games of my life during this period. the original two
games did something that felt revolutionary to me — letting me make an extremely arbitrary character, sending me out into the deadly wasteland, and then giving me the agency to decide how i would affect the world, for good or evil .
the first time i won, and saw the final montage of the effects my choices had on future history, i was completely hooked. i made character after character, trying different strategies, and coming up with different motivations. “this woman hates mutants. ” “this guy is socially anxious, and avoids speaking to anyone. ”
i was telling my own stories again, just like i did with my legos — only this time, i had a world that was created by someone else, which would push back against me in surprising ways, and provide me with feedback for my decisions. once, i accepted a mission to assassinate someone at an orphanage (because i was “being evil” at the time), and when i did, a room full of children assaulted at me, and i had to mow them down. that playthrough stopped right then — i couldn’t continue because the story i was telling was too ugly. and i learned something about myself .
it was deus ex that clinched it for me. on my third playthrough [ spoilers — seriously, you should play this game if you haven’t already ], on a lark, i decided to stand my ground during the scene where the men in black are coming for my brother, and he is ordering me to flee. i assumed that the developers were using my brother’s voice to tell me what i had to do, so i didn’t expect to be able to survive. i saved my game, and prepared to meet my doom .
but with the right placement of mines and some luck, i actually did survive. and my brother lived. later, in the scene where i was supposed to find his body, there was someone else on the gurney. and his voice was now in my ear, over the radio, influencing my moral decisions, throughout the rest of a story that i thought i had already played to death, twice before .
a choice that i made had a ripple effect in this world. this was my story now, to a degree that it had never been before. there was something profound about that, and i wanted more of it. i wanted to be a part of making more of it .
when i was twenty - four, my dad asked me to represent him at a meeting with amaze entertainment, a video game developer in the seattle area that was courting him for some work. i ended up spending two days with them, telling them exactly how i would design the game they wanted to make .
back then, the game industry was the wild west. there weren’t any college programs, or other “official” ways to get into the game industry. owners of game companies had to be on the lookout for potential entry - level hires in all kinds of random places, and in this case, they decided to offer an entry - level position to me .
this blew my mind. i looked at all the time and effort i was putting into being a filmmaker, and suddenly, i did not give a crap about any of it. making games was what i wanted to do; it was obvious. and now i had a problem .
what worried me was that story i told at the very beginning: i quit making board games as soon as it became hard. making video games was my dream job, and now it was about to become hard. and i had never seen myself actually accomplish something difficult, ever in my life .
i was the sort of kid who coasted through school, did whatever caught his eye, but never got really devoted to any of it. that helped me on one level, because it meant i played a lot of video games. but it also meant i was lazy. a procrastinator. the kind of kid who cleaned his room once a year, when it finally got bad enough that it was an adventure instead of a chore. the kind who lost a scholarship because he was in a bad mood on finals week. the kind of kid you never want to give any serious responsibility to .
suddenly, for the first time in my life, i had this unbelievable opportunity that i was going to screw up. you’ve heard of impostor syndrome? holy crap, did i have impostor syndrome. i knew i didn’t deserve that job, and i knew that if anyone found out how lazy and procrastinating i really was, they would fire me immediately .
so i spent years pretending to be a really hard worker. it’s not a hard act to pull off — you just have to do an awful lot of work. i practically lived at the office, pouring everything i had into the games i was assigned to work on. at one point, i actually won a minor prize in an m & m’s sweepstakes because i was living entirely off the candy and ramen on the studio’s snack table .
i was made a lead designer fairly early in my career — and not because i was ready for it at all. it was more of a battlefield promotion in the midst of attrition. but i managed to hold onto it, partly through sheer luck — each of my own disasters was dwarfed by a larger disaster elsewhere in the company that made me seem tolerable by comparison .
what we did was mostly licensed work — low - budget games based on kids’ movies, and handheld spinoffs of other people’s franchises. but i genuinely
in 2011, i thought i was about to get my shot at doing something new. the industry was changing, the licensed work was running dry, and so amaze’s parent company sold it off to up - and - coming mobile giant glu .
we spent the first few months at glu pitching all our crazy original ideas, including this one i’d been nurturing for a while — a game about a community of survivors during a zombie apocalypse that was much more about the characters and the dynamic storytelling than it was about the danger and the violence .
in the end, i was assigned to other projects, and those original ideas went onto a back burner that was so far back, it was pretty much the fridge .
so that’s how i finally got the chance to do the work i’d been preparing for since i was seven years old. the state of decay franchise is poised to break new ground in the realm of video game storytelling, and through a series of incredibly improbable events, i’m actually a part of it, contributing the ideas and experiences that i’ve collected over the past thirty years to the ones that were already here, and the ones that came in after me .
there is one subplot here, though, that i skipped. when i landed my first job in the game industry, and suddenly went from procrastinating aspiring screenwriter to job - having career guy, one of the first things i did was propose to my girlfriend. now we’re married with four children, and my second daughter is the same age that i was when i started this whole journey thirty years ago .
when moonrise was canceled, her first response was, “but we worked so hard on it! ” as an early access player, she felt like she was part of the team. she would make suggestions all the time, and once even got a weapon idea into state of decay. (if you like the pirate cutlass, you have her to thank for it! )
i like to imagine that my job is giving her the same kind of opportunity that my dad’s job gave to me — a chance to see games not just as an idle pastime, but as an important art form that adults think deeply about, and devote their careers to .
she doesn’t actually have to be a game designer, of course. right now, she says she’s planning to be a farmer, so she can pet animals every day. but when i remember the transformations that i went through playing fallout and deus ex, i’m thrilled by the idea that the work we do here might one day affect some other young mind, and through them, continue pushing out the boundaries of what video games are capable of .
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lifeline casts the player as a member of greyhound one, a small platoon that' s attempting to maintain order in the overrun city of danforth. unlike in state of decay, you start out with plenty of rations and support from the larger military. but all of it dwindles over time in the face of the zombie outbreak: your supplies gradually deteriorate, and resupplies from your group' s commanders become more rare. that forces you and your comrades to head out of your base into town, in an attempt to rescue civilians and gather resources to fortify your defenses .
afterward, he went into danforth on a mission to rescue a man named dr. madison grant. lifeline includes some new vehicles and graphical improvements over the original game, and they were apparent in our demo. according to strain, lifeline brings a brand - new region with an area of 4 square kilometers into state of decay. he drove along a highway littered with zombies and abandoned vehicles to get to dr. grant, and then the two of them escaped the area together .
this isn' t an escort mission with a helpless person. the ai for grant wasn' t dumb: he followed strain' s character as strain switched cars, and dr. grant even managed to fight off some zombies while in the bed of a pickup truck strain was driving. once they made it back to the outpost, strain explained that other rescue missions will direct you to soldiers marooned in danforth; after all — as in state of decay — it' s possible for the player character to die, and once that happens, you' ll switch to controlling a different soldier. if all the soldiers bite the dust, it' s game over. that can also occur if you lose too many civilians to zombie attacks on your base .
we have long - term ambitions for the franchise ,
said strain in an interview following the demo, referring to the deal with microsoft .
wherever we take this, in terms of sequels, multiplayer will be built in from the beginning .
when you look at some of the things we want to do going forward, if you want to be on the console platform, it takes some different thinking about the console business model, about the live infrastructure and network infrastructure that traditionally you associate with the console experience ,
he said .
we' re going to have to have somebody who' s a partner working with us on the technology to make all that happen. and so working directly with microsoft is going to be a huge win going forward for that .
strain also praised microsoft' s recent announcement that microsoft studios chief phil spencer was being promoted to head of xbox .
phil' s a fan of the game, he' s a fan of the studio — he wears his state of decay t - shirt up on the stage at e3 — and he' s super excited about where we' re going. so we were very happy with it ,
said strain .
lifeline is the latest piece of that bright future for state of decay. the expansion is set for release this june; strain couldn' t confirm a price, but said it will likely be
pretty close
to the first add - on, breakdown, which costs $ 6. 99 .
fallout 76’s todd howard: no cross - console play because ‘sony is not as helpful as everyone would like. ’
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. we can' t help but sympathize with their worries - - in the past three years, we' ve crushed, shot, sliced, exploded and generally obliterated more virtual zombies than we could ever possibly hope to count throughout the fullness of time .
we wanted to build a game around the central question of' what would you do in the zombie apocalypse' ,
strain explained .
we' ve all had the experience of going to a great zombie movies, coming out with our friends and grabbing a beer and, you know, you sit around talk about what your personal strategy is. would you go to a helicopter, would you try to get on a boat, would you get in a car and try to drive to some remote farm somewhere - - everyone has their own idea of how they' d survive. we thought it would be fun to build a game around that concept .
players will carry out their strategies in a third - person, over the shoulder
fast - paced action
shooter, exploring locations scattered across the zombie - infested sandbox town of dunniway. while exploring, players will make decisions that affect how the zombocalypse evolves, all the time searching for a home base that they can fortify with resources scattered throughout the environment .
what makes this game really different is the focus not on combat with zombies, but surviving the zombie threat ,
strain said .
stealth, evasion, securing your resources, figuring out ways to distract the zombies so they don' t pile up on you, and moving through the world in a very kind of realistic way .
finding weapons is certainly a big part of it, but by weapons, we mean more than guns ,
strain added .
you live in this world that is filled with the clutter of 21st century civilization that' s now yours for the plucking. there' s all kinds of things that could be weapons: from the serious, like knives and crowbars, to the humorous, like golf clubs and baseball bats.
undead labs is an american seattle , washington-based game development studio , which was founded in 2009 by jeff strain , a former blizzard employee and one of the co-founders of arenanet . 
undead labs is an american seattle, washington-based game development studio, which was founded in 2009 by jeff strain, a former blizzard employee and one of the co-founders of arenanet.
undead labs is an american seattle, washington-based game development studio, which was founded in 2009 by jeff strain, a former blizzard employee and one of the co-founders of arenanet.