Death Inc. pre-alpha demo

[undercovergeek]

Been watching this for a while:-





Lavish-looking god-game/strategy with management bits, Death Inc, has risen from the tomb of development into the blazing purgatory of Kickstarter. Yes, these former Media Molecule, Lionhead, and Criterion chaps want your pounds and pence to make the Death business of 17th century plague-propagation into a living, unbreathing thing. I talked to founder and programmer Jonny Hopper to found out a bit more about who Ambient Studios are, and what they're up to.

You control Grim T. Livingstone, who is a reaper, and his story is that he's left the Ministry Of Mortality, which is this monolithic institution that controls death, and he's set up on his own. So he's trying to make a name for himself, and he stumbles across the plague. On each level you start with Grim, and, for example, a couple of infected peasants, and you control them using the mouse. You literally draw a path, and they get attracted to it, like a pheromone trail, and follow it. The basic infected peasant's goal is to get to people who aren't infected. So it's really easy to send people on a particular path, and so you draw and you can see them go and do it. We can add additional gestures to this system, so, as an example, if you draw a circle clockwise you attract your horde, and if you draw it anti-clockwise you scatter them. So if there are some archers on a wall and they are firing at a particular position you can scatter your people and stop them being killed too early. It provides a system which is really fluid without much complexity. We're still developing, as you can probably tell, but it certainly works and it is fun.

In terms of how the game works, you start in small villages, and then work up until you get to castles where they have cannons and boiling oil and everything. Perhaps finish by storming London itself.

Today they released a pre-alpha demo ill be having a squiz at later - the game looks great

http://www.ambientstudios.co.uk/deathinc/

[Huw the Poo]

Looks fairly promising.  Please post impressions, Geek.

[Tpek]

I'll try this out. Thanks for the heads-up!