Dead Island: The Reckoning

While an early iteration of Dead Island did feature a narrative about a lost family fending off zombies, it was dropped in favor of focusing on four unrelated protagonists, each with a separate backstory and each contributing to the overall game in separate ways. This transition from one story to four coincided with the decision to add four-player co-op to the final product, which in turn coincided with the acquisition of the Dead Island IP by publisher Deep Silver, who went on to work with Techland to finish the game.

While it’s arguable whether the dropped sentimental story would have been a harm or hindrance to the final product, it illustrates the admirable fact that Techland was willing to murder its babies in order to make the best game they could, despite having little idea what they were doing.

"There was no one to come and point their finger saying: ‘This is how it’s done,’" says Pawlaczyk. "[All] we had were lectures, books, snippets of postmortems of other projects, other games themselves and a team of people ready to face any challenge."

The challenge, in this case, being to create an open-world, co-op, zombie apocalypse game with more weapons than some MMOs, a strong central narrative, four main characters and a world built from the ground up to encourage exploration. That would also have scripted levels. And be scary. In the daylight.

"I love working with Techland," says Orkin. "They're extremely talented and they have no fear when it comes to pushing the boundaries of story and gameplay. Dead Island was an extremely ambitious and very risky game for them to develop."

Some developers would cry themselves to sleep facing such a challenge, but Techland dove into it with an admirable zeal, methodically laying out the challenges and then addressing them one-by-one.

The Addressing

"We set several goals for ourselves at the beginning of the production that became the main challenges for the Level Design department," says Pawlaczyk.

The goals, he shared with Vox Games, were as follows:

Dead Island:

will feature open locations that the player will be free to explore

will feature maps that are not generic or repetitive

will astonish with its visuals, number of models and details not repel with a "flat and angular grayness"

will maintain the atmosphere of danger while featuring an open-game mechanics and a resort island environments

will be as fun to play for a single player as it will be for a four-player coop party

The last item on the list proved to be the one of the most complicated to address. Pawlaczyk says the Techland team wanted the game to be just as fun for one player as for four, which involved careful management of weapons, enemies, objects and even story.

Part of the problem was the zombies themselves. Not only were they, in Pawlaczyk’s words "unruly," with behavior and performance difficult to predict from a level design perspective, but a zombie encounter that may be challenging for a single player could be too easy – or worse, boring – for a co-op party.

One solution was to carefully manage the number and types of zombies on the map. Another was to give a co-op party ways to play that differentiated their experience from that of the single players’.

"At a fairly late stage of development we introduced 'heavy objects' to the game, such as canisters or crates, that supported the co-op experience," says Pawlaczyk. "One of the players was carrying the objects while the others protected them. In a single-player game the objects could be thrown into the enemies faces and topple them.

"[In] this way we managed to create two fine, though completely different, types of mechanics in one game: the single-player mode that gave the player a chance to experience the atmosphere of terror, get to know the plot, learn to conserve the weapons, ammunition and health; and the co-op mode that enabled the players to get all the fun of group mayhem and hunting down the ‘defenseless’ zombies."

The leveling

While zombies, objects and story could be relatively easily manipulated to help Techland address many of the challenges they faced in developing Dead Island, one thing over which they had no control whatsoever was the limitations of the hardware that would be running their game. In spite of the the team's desire and ability to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles with innovative solutions, there was simply nothing they could do about the number of operations a given Xbox could perform at any given time.

Yet they were set on creating an open-world zombie game that would:

Feature maps that are not generic or repetitive.

Astonish with its visuals.

Maintain the atmosphere of danger while featuring an open-game mechanics and a resort island environment

Something would have to give.

Pawlaczyk admits that Dead Island development hit some roadblocks thrown up by modern consoles, particulary in the area of graphics. He says the team intentionally reduced the game’s draw distance, sacrificing some of the scenic views in order to preserve each individual environment’s lushness. They also constructed the geometry of the world in such a way that objects behind another object (such as a building behind a mountain), were not rendered until the player could actually see them, reducing the load on the precious system memory and processing power.

Another example is the on again / off again nature of Dead Island’s open world setting. The game, set on the island of Banoi and the surrounding areas, is actually not one open-world environment but several, strung together and broken up by smaller levels which Techland calls "mission" levels.

"The ‘mission’ levels were different from all other levels," says Pawlaczyk. "By design they were meant to be scripted, linear levels that delivered to the players a different type of fun. They were created to be a kind of break from traversing the large sandboxes."

In practice, this means that players will occasionally venture into a police station or other structure more resembling a classic, linear game level than the modern open-world environments that form the backbone of Dead Island. Techland cleverly packed each mission level with encounters and scares, or used them as safe houses or opportunities for fetch quests or other missions. Partly to reduce the demands of the game on current console tech, but also to create a sense of terror by taking recognizable settings and twisting them in the direction of horror.

The weaponing

In Dead Island you can take simple weapons like machetes and baseball bats and turn them into items of extraordinary death-dealing with just a few simple household objects and a set of blueprints. Pawlaczyk says the option to develop and modify weapons was designed to reward players with extra bad-assery for exploring the game’s nooks and crannies, and to motivate players to explore even further.

"We tried to design the levels and place blueprints in them in a way that allowed the players to quickly build a new gadget and easily find a place to use it," he says. "The location of the blueprints was also meaningful. Most of them, depending on the level of their complexity and power appeared later on in the story progress."

There is also a completely undocumented Easter egg that rewards players for collecting rare colored skulls with blueprints for extremely powerful weapons.

Pawlaczyk calls these "developer weapons" and says their inclusion was something of a lark:

"We built logic around how to unlock [developer weapons] and hid them within the levels. Very few [people] knew about these blueprints to the extent that we purposely gave no instructions in any guides on how to find them.

"It was a nice surprise to see how quickly fan videos appeared on YouTube showing the [colored] skulls. We hope the players had a lot of fun finding them!"

Dead Island’s massive weapon selection and customization, while adding buckets of fun for players and explorers, also created unexpected challenges for the development team. From a technological perspective, the traditional way of handling weapons was to build them in to each level, effectively "holding" the weapons within the design of the level itself. But for Dead Island, the traditional method just wouldn’t cut it. There were too many weapons.

"Maintaining the balance and diversity of the weapons was close to impossible," says Pawlaczyk. "Especially when the players returned from the Slums to Resort to find planks and sticks while being equipped with machetes and guns."

The solution was to create a separate subsystem devoted specifically to keeping track of and storing weapons in designated containers like filing cabinets or storage lockers.

"The system ... would draw items from a lot depending on the player’s level, story progression and player’s actions," says Pawlaczyk. "[This] relieved the workload of the level designers who from then on only had to make sure that the placement of the containers in the levels was believable."

Finding a chest filled with weapons and ammunition, for example, in a room where unarmed survivors are hiding from the zombie horde, begging you to save them would, while technically possible, break the realism of the game from a player perspective.

Similarly, Pawlaczyk says that another of the technological enhancements to Techland’s custom Chrome engine allowed the level designers to simply copy and paste level elements to create larger environments, which made the designers workload a lot lighter but had the unintended consequence of creating oddly anachronistic elements in the final levels."

"It might result in things as ridiculous as the memorable repeatable quest with a woman dying of thirst and asking for water while there was a can of coke standing right next to her. This was an example of unconsciously randomized selection that spawned the beverage.

"Fortunately, we managed to fix this small problem in a patch."