deadland

**in development**

Genre: city builder, farming sim, RPG

Platform: PC

Players: 1

Engine: Unity

Release Date: TBD

Comp. Titles: Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, Verdant Skies

You died. Welcome!

deadland tells a tale of the afterlife, where existence is stagnant and joie de vivre is a distant memory. As a new resident, your task is to liven up the place! Build up deadland into a town full of interactable buildings and unique characters. Explore the secrets of deadland hiding beyond your town’s limits. Craft and farm to enrich your surroundings. Contend against the mysterious force that controls deadland and intends to fight back against your disruptions to keep it in its usual stasis.

The world is yours to create and customize in deadland!

Features:

· Build! Construct a creepy-cute town in the afterlife. Expand and customize as you collect materials and gain access to helpful Neighbors.

· Befriend! Turn skeletons into Neighbors by giving them their favorite gifts and building their favorite establishments.

· Bedazzle! Unlock a range of aesthetic themes for building, item, and clothing crafting and customizing. Themes include Dark Gothic, Confectionary Kingdom, Astral Aesthetic, and more!

· Base gameplay in a variety of ways! 3 modes of play—follow Emmy through the objective-based Story Mode, or create your own dead kid in Challenge Mode for non-narrative objectives or Sandbox Mode for freeform play.

· Battle (of wits)! Contend with Cardia, the ruler of deadland, who wants to undermine your efforts to make the afterlife fun by periodically messing with your town. Cardia interference can be left on for more challenging gameplay or toggled off for a more relaxing experience.

Gameplay:

· Gather materials to build structures and objects to place in town. Some you will need, like a Homestead for yourself, others add gameplay utility to make your town more functional to you and your Neighbors, and others still are just to add your personal aesthetic to the town.

· There’s only so much room to build up your town, and different buildings have different footprints, so plan accordingly!

· Explore different areas outside the bounds of your town to find new  and rare materials and other secrets about deadland.

· Each type of building serves its own purpose. Grow flowers in the Garden to give to your Neighbors,  buy and sell trinkets and treasures at the Secondhand Store,  and send letters to your Neighbors from the Post Office! Every building helps make your afterlife a little livelier!

· Interact with the local skeletons to help them remember who they used to be and restore their souls, turning them into Neighbors!

· Restoring the souls of the skeletons means they can help keep your town running by being assigned to buildings. Each Neighbor has their own favorite building, and they can confer extra benefits to the town when working in them.

· Befriend and romance Neighbors who have become a part of your town♥

Cast:

Emmy (Story Mode only)

Newly dead and ready to reshape deadland into something a little more exciting than the gray stretch of nothing that it is when she arrives.

Mortimer

A sardonic resident of deadland, one of the only ones who still retains his sense of self upon the player’s arrival in the game. Although he’s not optimistic about your chances of making a lasting difference in deadland, Mortimer is there to help you establish yourself and try to stave off the inevitable skelly-fication that all deadland residents eventually undergo after spending enough time in the afterlife.

Cardia

The mysterious entity made up of blood and sinew that controls deadland. While she’s mostly content to leave the residents of deadland alone, she doesn’t like change, so watch out for that.

Gourdon

He’s a talking scarecrow. Did he used to be a living person, too, or is he something else? Whomst can say. His greatest power is sass.

Skellies/Neighbors

deadland contains a number of skeletons who have forgotten who they once were. If only some kind soul would come by and build up a town for them to help them remember the things they like and their own distinct personalities. Once skeletons have been re-souled (meaning, regained enough of their personality through their interactions with the player), they’ll regain their true faces, names, and distinct personalities. They’ll also unlock the ability to help you in building and running your town. Before they’re re-souled, though, skellies are all physically identical, so you’ll have to take the time to get to know each one in your town in order to figure out the things they like (and be careful not to get them mixed up!)

Development:

· The Mortis team conceptualized deadland in 2019 and began working on it in 2020.  Our founding team (Jasmine & Eli) began this project with very little experience with coding, and although we knew our vision for this game was ambitious, we were confident that we could learn the tools of the trade and eventually create the kind of game we imagined.

· Currently (as of winter 2022), we are refining the programmatic systems and assets we created in 2021 and building up the actual Tutorial scenario to a playable state. We're still handling a lot of back-end systems that will need to be running smoothly in order to release a demo, but as things currently stand, we've made a ton of progress over the last year, and things are looking and feeling a lot more like a real video game :)

· As of now, we’ve implemented into our current build of the game:

• Walking and idle animation cycles for Emmy, Mortimer, skellies, and some Neighbors, as well as character portraits for all these folks.
• Player control for Emmy and camera control. NPCs also have a generic wander cycle and somewhat-operational in-game physics.
• A context-sensitive dialogue system.
• Fully-functional inventory, equipment, and wallet systems.
• A crafting system that allows the player to create new items from materials they can find in the game world, as well as learn new crafting recipes.
• A building system that allow players to construct new structures on buildable ground, as well as assign NPCs to work on construction sites while the player does more important things :)
• A relationship system that tracks which NPCs you've met, allows you to give gifts, and increases/decreases your relationship score with NPCs depending on in-game actions. It also keeps track of which Neighbors are still skellies.
• An in-game clock and calendar that tracks and displays deadland’s current time and date.
• Dyslexia-friendly font options in the Settings menu.
• More polished game art with better details, contrast, proportions, and (where necessary) animation cycles.

The Team:

· Eli is a digital artist who is creating concept art, character portraits, and the game logo for deadland, as well as Mortis Games’ logo, and working on the interior designs of the game’s buildings. Eli also contributes to high-level design and programming for the game along with Jasmine.

· Jasmine is an author who created the initial concept of the game, works with Eli to contribute high-level design elements, writes the game story, created the base character concepts, and is leading the programming effort for the game. Jasmine also creates a number of the game’s pixel art assets.

• Stacie is our project manager who keeps us on task! Thanks to their business acumen, our two other dweebs are able to work in a more structured manner and actually deliver the occasional update here!
  

Goals:

Because Mortis Games is working on this as a passion project currently, we are not holding ourselves to any strict deadlines yet. That said, we made a lot of progress in 2021, and here's what's on the horizon for 2022:

• Create and polish full-color character portraits for multiple characters in the game.
• Implement a fully-functional farming system to allow players to grow ghostly fruits and flowers.
• Write a complete Tutorial scenario to illustrate the general format of scenarios in Story Mode.
• Design multiple pixel art sprites for various buildings and aesthetic themes in the game.
• Build up and refine our existing assets and gameplay mechanics, such as the in-game crating, building, and relationship systems.
• Implement a game save/load system.

Final Vision:

· A fully-playable town builder/farming sim RPG with a rich story mode, goal-driven challenge mode, open sandbox mode, diverse cast of characters, customizable and explorable world, interactive set pieces,  stylish atmosphere, and high replayability value.

· Ultimately, we aim to create a game about using the agency and power you have, however limited it may be, to make your circumstances your own. Plus, cute goth aesthetics :)

Want to Support Us?

While we don’t have much to share in its current state and are still too far from a final product to make any promises regarding our output, we don’t feel comfortable asking for crowdfunding at this time.

However, you can follow our Twitter, @MortisGames, for announcements and updates along the way. If we ever open up for crowdfunding, we will definitely be announcing it there!