Introducing "deadland"!

One day in 2019, I went to my friend Eli saying, "There's a game I want to play and it doesn't exist!" The game I had in my head was, in so many words, "Goth Stardew Valley".

From there, Eli and I started playing around with the concept of "deadland", a farming sim RPG that was also part city builder--or, rather, village builder, since I envisioned a game that had city building elements but operated on a much smaller, more personal scale. We imagined a game that focused on controlling your surroundings in a bad situation (in this case, your player character being dead) that also had just a touch of creepiness to the aesthetic.

We poked around with this idea for a while, trying out different game engines and art styles, before picking up Unity in 2020 and landing on Final Fantasy Tactics-style isometric pixel art as the ideal style for our game. Since then, we've been plugging away at trying to turn our vision into a real, playable game.

There are a couple of obstacles to our goal, of course. For one, we're a two-person team trying to create a full farming sim RPG experience. We're imagining a lot of content--from a full story mode to various skins for game buildings and objects to explorable environments--and there are only so many hours in the day for us to work on creating it. For another, neither of us were very experienced with coding going into the project. So, we're learning along the way.

Now, several months into our efforts to build the game while learning Unity, C#, and pixel art along the way, we feel we finally have enough scraped together to start sharing with the world. Welcome to deadland!

About deadland

deadland is a single player farming sim RPG/city builder developed in Unity with PC in mind. In deadland, you control a newly-dead individual who has arrived in the afterlife to find it BOR-ING. Turns out being dead is kind of a drag. But it doesn't have to be! Using crafting and building mechanics, your player character can customize deadland into a town of their own, making space for other dead souls and creating a community with them. Check out our project page for deadland for the full write-up of planned game features.

Current Goals

Our big goal for now is to get a working, playable demo of the story mode's Tutorial level, which introduces the world, characters like Emmy, Mortimer, and Gourdon, and basic gameplay mechanics such as building a homestead for Emmy and re-souling the local skeletons. In order to create this demo, we need to hammer out a LOT of programming and structure in order to get every game mechanic to function as intended. The good news is, once we accomplish that, we'll have the groundwork set to expand gameplay and work in more assets, characters, and scenarios.

Our Progress So Far

The current state of deadland's build is thus:

Messy, yes? All those tools scattered around were for testing the equip/unequip system (it works now! Yay!), and some of the decorations and tiles you see are far from finalized assets. However, when I boot up this scene in Unity, there are a few distinctly gameplay-like elements that do currently work more or less as they're expected to in a final version of the game:

• The player character (Emmy) can move with WASD and arrow key inputs, including an animation cycle and collision with solid objects in the environment.
• NPCs (such as Mortimer, whose feet are visible at the top of the screenshot there) wander the environment on their own accord, also with animation cycles. The exception is Gourdon, who is a scarecrow and thusly cannot walk.
• NPCs can also be spoken to and provide context-sensitive dialogue. See that lamp there? Mortimer and Gourdon say something different depending on if the lamp is on or off. Oh, speaking of...
• The lamp can be turned on and off! Other objects in the environment have special interactions, too, such as that pile of bones.
• Items in the environment, such as those tools or sticks visible in the screenshot, can be picked up. Tools and outfits can be equipped into the equipment bar visible on the right-hand side of the UI. Items can also be removed from inventory (but not picked back up a second time as of this moment).
• That clock in the top left of the UI? Not just for show--it tells in-game time, both digitally and with the sunrise-to-nighttime clock. The time shown there is also tracked programmatically.
• That book in the lower left-hand corner of the screen is also part of the UI. Clicking on it opens up your game menu, which has multiple tabs that connect a number of submenus to each other, including inventory, crafting, building, relationships, settings, and more.
• Too zoomed in? You can scroll the mouse wheel to zoom the camera out further. Oh, speaking of the camera, it also follows Emmy as she moves.

There are a number of other elements of the game that are currently operational, such as the main menu screen, but the bulk of playable content is in the scene you see screenshotted above. However, beyond that, we're working on other game assets such as building sprites, character dialogue portraits, lists of in-game items, and more. Once more of the programmatic structure of the game starts coming to fruition, we'll be able to implement more of these assets into our build until we finally have enough to show off as a demo.

Timelines

So far, we're doing this on our own time as a pandemic project. No money's changing hands to get this work done, and we aren't beholden to any bosses/investors/etc., so our timelines are entirely self-set and pretty relaxed. Plus, learning how to create games in Unity as we go makes it really challenging to predict how long any task will take us, so we don't currently have a projected launch date for the game or even the demo. But we can say this:

For the month of May, we're aiming to finish implementing the game's crafting and building systems. A very sloppy building system is currently in the game, but we're working to refine that and institute a crafting system that operates on a similar system. The crafting and building systems are each about 50% completed as of this writing, so with luck it shouldn't be too much of a reach to finish them before the month is out, but these are so far some of the most programmatically complex systems in our build and proving to be a real pain when it comes to introducing bugs and performance issues into the game. But once we're done with that (again, hopefully before the month is out), we'll move on to developing the relationship system for NPCs.

And that's about where we're at with the current state of deadland. We hope to keep posting developer diaries here and continue to update our Twitter page with smaller updates as we continue making progress. See you then!

~Jasmine, creator of deadland