Hello survivors! That’s it, the last month before release! So let’s talk about… the end.
Someone died!
In “Dead In Vinland”, there is “Vinland”, but… there’s also “Dead“. You MAY lose some of your characters from time to time… So we made a special pop up for when that time comes (and it will 😉 ), with a bit of “fun” stuff.
First, a character can die if any of its state gauge reaches 100%: Fatigue, Depression, Sickness, Injury and Hunger. Depending on the cause of death, a little flavor text will be displayed, explaining what happened. They are quite generic in general, but we made some special cases:
- If the character dies from Sickness, we show the different Diseases he was suffering from, and there is a little flavor text for each.
- There are SOME hidden, special death causes… That will show a special text. Can’t spoil them, but we have a dozen right now.
At the end of this little paragraph, we also wrote a last goodbye sentence, which is special for each character. It’s mostly linked to their different beliefs, and add a little spice to make the whole text feel less generic.
After that, we have a little paragraph generated according to the different relations the character had with the others. It will display a generic reaction to his/her death. We currently don’t have special dialogs following a character’s death – it would be a nightmare to write right now, for several reasons – so this paragraph does the job. We may write some bonus dialogs like these after release, but as I said it’s not that easy, we have several constraints to overcome.
And lastly, we display some fun stats about the character. Mostly what he/she has been doing the whole time in the community. As you can see, Moira wasn’t of much help this time.
Remember: if one of the primary characters dies, it’s GAME OVER! It’s a constraint we were forced to have. But the secondary characters, that you can recruit, can die without causing the end of the game, so you’ll be able to sustain your lowest instincts 😉 That’s why you should keep in mind that Eirik and his family MUST stay alive, no matter what. For the others, well…
In terms of gameplay, it can lead to interesting choices, especially if you want to beat the IRON MAN mode… Maybe it can be wise to send your disposable characters facing the most dangerous situations… Even if they would bring less rewards.
It’s also interesting because you can recruit up to 6 more characters into your camp (besides the first 4), but there are a total of 10 recruitable characters scattered across the island! So losing one is not something that should instantly make you want to reload a previous save – unless you liked him/her very much ^^
Dynamic endings
Another topic for today, are how the endings are handled. There IS a TRUE END of the game, and some BAD ENDINGS, with nice looking animated sequences like the introduction. But we also wanted some dynamics in the endings. One thing that I loved in the first two Fallout games were the little “what happens after the end” parts, just some sentences telling the stories of people and places you met during the game, and changing considering the actions you made. It didn’t change the “big picture” end, but it was fun.
We added a little something of the same sort: each character has several ending stories that are showed or not depending on things you achieved or not. For now, we made a “basic” set of endings – about 3 per character – which are mostly related to the achievement of romances in the game – but that’s something we may expand in the future, if we write more storylines between characters.
I can’t show you a screenshot, it would spoil too much 😉 But I can show you another screen for the ending, we also made some detailed statistics for each character (because our game designer LOVES statistics ^^), with some rankings and all… We love this kind of things.
That’s it for today! We only have a few blogposts left before release on Steam! Happy surviving!
