State of Decay 2 wove its complex character system into the game to paint a picture of society in which everyone had a role to play. A strange result from the system would shatter the illusion of a handcrafted game. 'You can imagine a person who is a contradiction, but when a player knows they are being randomly generated it looks like a mistake,' said Geoffrey Card, Design Director at Undead Labs. A survivor couldn't be lazy and energetic at the same time. Undead Labs devs honed their procedural system to ensure character attributes cohered.

This amalgam of broad strokes hinted at surprisingly authentic backgrounds all unique and emergent. Every survivor was constructed from exhaustive and painstakingly-researched elements: procedurally assigned names, genders, cultural backgrounds, and traits. While gameplay hinged on systems, players needed to feel a human touch. Character attributes had to be carefully balanced. State of Decay 2 was based on systems and not hand-crafted narratives. They're emergent interaction,' said Holt. 'Our experiences are not scripted, they're not bespoke authored. A zombie apocalypse filled with characters is one thing-a zombie apocalypse filled with people plucked from players' real-world experience is another thing entirely. Players ran into characters who could be their real-world neighbors while avoiding the lumbering undead. 'We tried to be really sensitive to the representation challenge and portray characters that are believable, relatable, and have authentic experience to share,' said Philip Holt, Chief of Staff at Undead Labs. Undead Labs sought to populate State of Decay with an accurate portrait of America, so they built diversity into development. 'We wanted to make games that really represented people who lived in this country.' - Grace Chien, Senior Producer, Undead Labs Scanning actual, breathing humans made the characters feel more authentic than ones constructed from an artist's imagination. Their ability to quickly scan real people meant that a more diverse slice of humanity could fend off the undead hordes. The team kept their camera array busy, capturing over 300 people to build out a roster of zombie-fighting citizens. What used to take artists a week to model now took a day.

The new system streamlined the character art pipeline. Using a technology called photogrammetry, the team captured real human faces from dozens of angles with a state-of-the-art camera array and translated the images into 3D models. For State of Decay 2, the team wanted to create more realistic characters, which meant getting more detail. The characters were an amalgamation of artistic references-not based on any one person-so they remained fairly generic and middle of the road. Casting humanityĭuring the development of the original State of Decay, Undead Labs' artists designed and modeled the last humans on Earth by hand. It took smart use of technology, and a lot of guts. They cast a wide demographic net and captured the biggest slice of humankind they could to populate their world. Undead Labs wanted that cast of characters to represent every facet of humanity so that anyone who played the game would feel represented and empowered. Players can take any scrappy survivor they come across and have them lead civilization's rebuild. Any character can be the hero in State of Decay 2.

Undead labs state of decay 2 mods