Hello survivors! We continue our series of interviews of team members! Today, we’re going to introduce the one who takes care of the social media and the website, and who makes sure the game is known by everyone! This is Bruno, Community Manager for Dead In Vinland!

Who are you?

CCCP: Tell us your name, your age, and your role at CCCP for Dead In Vinland?

Bruno: I’m Bruno Laverny, I’m 26, and I am Community Manager for Dead In Vinland.

CCCP: What did you do before?

Bruno: I have quite the unusual history. I passed my bachelor’s degree and my master’s degree in English, and then I became an English teacher for French students. After that, I wanted to make a career change, so I went back to University and I passed a master’s degree in Communication. For my studies, I got to work on the communication of Pankapu (by Too Kind Studio). Now, I’ve been working for almost a year at CCCP on Dead In Vinland.

Your role for Dead In Vinland

CCCP: Tell us more about your role in the game.

Bruno: Well, I tweet cute penguin gifs and I see what happens!

More seriously, as I work on the game’s communication, I don’t directly work on Dead In Vinland. My role consists in getting the game known to the public, planning our presence on social media, the website, but also on the different gaming events (Paris Games Week, Gamescom…). If the players have any suggestion/feedback about the game, I tell the developers about them. I also work a lot with Jacques and Manon to create the visual assets for the game’s marketing: screenshots, videos, posters… Finally, we write the website’s blogposts with Matthieu every week! All in all, I’m the connection between our developers in the cave and the outside world!

Bruno works on Dead In Vinland’s website

CCCP: What’s your typical working day at the moment?

Bruno: As we’re getting close to the release of the game, I have different tasks every day! Lately, I’ve been planning the game’s release, with the Steam page, our launch plan, but I still have to take care of the social media so our players can be informed of the latest infos about the game. I’ve been working with Matthieu to decide what we can talk about, and what we can’t talk about yet… Finally, I’ve been busy on something quite nice for Dead In Vinland, you’ll find out about it very soon…

CCCP: Your favorite mechanics in Dead In Vinland?

Bruno: The dialogue choices that have influences on the relationship between the characters. I love RPGs and visual novels in general, so this question of “relationship” is important to me, it gives the game and the characters some real depth! I can’t really talk about it that much, but you’ll see that some of the consequences of this system are… interesting, to say the least!

Dialogues choices in Dead In Vinland

CCCP: Your favorite character? Why?

Bruno: Gudrun ! I mean, her dialogues are just so good. She may be pretty useless during the combats, but… Who wouldn’t want a grumpy grandma on their camp?

As a gamer

CCCP: Your favorite game?

Bruno: That’s a hard one. I’d say I loved a lot Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations, because some scenes really touched me. I consider this episode as the pinnacle of the series.

Trials and Tribulations is considered as the best episode of the Ace Attorney series

CCCP: What have you been playing lately?

Bruno: I’ve been playing several games lately, but mostly Yooka-Laylee and Lost Sphear! I also recently finished Celeste, but only the A-side. The B-side levels are so hard…

In the office

CCCP: Describe your co-workers with 3 words.

Bruno: Passionate – Friendly – Talented

CCCP: Any good anecdote from within the walls of CCCP?

Bruno: There are so many of them! As a CM, I have to talk about Manon’s sweater. Before the Christmas holidays, I took a photo of Manon, one of our artists, who had her “ugly christmas sweater” on her that day. That sweater had a lot of success on Twitter, and even today, I still can’t figure out the reasons. Christmas’ magic.

Matthieu and Bruno work together to prepare the communication plan

CCCP: Your favorite object at work?

Bruno: My owl notebook! I’ve had it since Gamescom 2017, and I always carry it around with me. I take all of my notes in it, my tasks… And, there’s an owl on the cover.

CCCP: Any advice for those who want to become a Community Manager like you?

Bruno: Be calm and organized. As a Community Manager, you’ll talk with people coming from many different places: players, journalists, developers, streamers… Every person you’ll contact is different, and you’ll have to adapt. For instance, if a player isn’t happy with the game, you can’t just go and fight him, but you need to calm things down in order to solve the issue. You’re going to be organizing your work a lot. You’re probably going to be alone to do this, as it’s very different from the game’s production.

Finally, be curious. You need to know all about the latest infos on video games, journalism, and social media, as Community Management is constantly changing. You also need to be brave. Try new things!

The post Developers In Vinland #4 – Bruno appeared first on Dead in Vinland.

Hello survivors!! So, we have realized something. Do you remember when we told you about the recruitment system in Dead In Vinland? Yeah that was a LONG time ago, and at that time, we had only shown the 4 main characters (Eirik, Blodeuwedd, Kari and Moira). Since that post, we’ve shown 9 recrutable characters! This is why we thought that today was the right time to talk about the Kick!

How to kick a character

We’ve all been there. At first, you meet someone on an unknown island. And you think “Yes, one more person in my camp, I’ll have a true castle in just two days thanks to the additional workforce!”

…

Two weeks later, there’s no castle. Your new guest doesn’t do much for the camp, they drink all the water and eat all the food, and you can’t stand them singing for you all day long. So, you have two choices:

• You could try and poison them in their sleep, but that’s not really nice, because deep down inside you kinda like them. Probably.
• Or you can kick them from the camp. Finally, you can tell them goodbye.

So, when you’ve finally taken your decision, we implemented a nice button in the character’s sheet:

See that small icon? This is how you tell someone to leave in the game.

The negociation

But let’s not be insensitive. Dead In Vinland is a management game at its core, but centered around the characters, and their feelings. So when you press that nasty button, it will launch a negotiation phase with the character, where he or she will plead their cases so that you keep them in your camp. Leaving them alone on this island with thugs around every corner would mean a certain death, obviously.

Every character in the game will have a different reaction towards your decision of kicking them. Some won’t care at all, some will try to negociate, and some will be just totally devastated.

There are a few surprises in these dialogs, sometimes you could even take some benefit of trying to kick someone out of the camp… Sure, they WILL hate you, but if they work extra hard to stay…

After this negotiation phase, you will always have the choice to keep a character in the camp, or to really kick him or her. Just remember that kicking a character from the camp is definitive, you won’t be able to recruit him or her again later.

It’s not a decision to take lightly, but, as there are more recruitable characters scattered on the island than the max characters you can recruit on your camp, it’s also a viable solution. You’ll miss the little stories of that particular character, but you’ll have a new one to interact with.

Right now, we have 10 recruitable characters for 6 available spots when your shelter is upgraded to the max, and the cool thing is that with this new primary/secondary characters system, we can add new secondary characters “easily” (that’s still a ton of work…) in potential DLCs.

In Dead In Bermuda, you had 8 fixed characters from the beginning, no more no less. It had one big advantage: unless some characters died, we knew which characters were in the camp from the start, so it was easier to write dialogs and make their relationships slowly evolve.

In Dead In Vinland, you start with 4, and recruit 6 other characters over the course of the game. It has many advantages, like making the difficulty curve of managing things smoothier, it’s more dynamic, the player has good choices to make, and the replayability will be better. The big drawback is that we had to write maaaaaaany more dialogs to cover the whole game, since we don’t know when and who has been recruited in the camp… But we’re crazy, we like when it hurts (…).

That’s all for today! What will you do? We are impatients to see if some characters are often kicked out of the camp, and for which reasons Some are more or less likeable, and useful considering your situation (if you already have a healer, why bother having a second? But what if the healer gets real sick? And this character, he starts to act fishy… But he is very skilled, so we need him… URGH, it’s hard to be the chief!)

The post Dead In Development #26 – Kick from the camp appeared first on Dead in Vinland.

Hello survivors! That’s it! We can finally announce the official release date of Dead In Vinland! We’re very proud to say that Dead In Vinland will be available on April 12th 2018! You can already wishlist it on Steam!

Release Date

Wow, it’s been a long time coming! We’ve been working on Dead In Vinland since August 2016. And now, we’re almost finished with the game! We were able to implement everything we wanted to:

• Combat System
• Weather System
• Recruitable Characters
• Dialogue Choices
• Non linear Quest System
• A LOT more content than in Dead In Bermuda

Oh, and we should show you the nice small trailer we made for the occasion

Don’t forget to wishlist the game on Steam!

What now?

We have still some weeks before the game’s release, so we are going to launch a series of events in anticipation of the release of Dead In Vinland:

• The last blogposts! (Yep, we still have some things we haven’t shown yet!)
• A series of livestream events by our publisher Playdius. Because they don’t want to wait until April 12th to play the game. Lucky them.
• Interviews of our 3 leads: Matthieu, Jacques, and Thomas. Or, as I like to call them, the Big Three!

• A series of videos with a making-of Dead In Vinland! If you want to see our own camp and how we survive everyday.
• The last logbooks! There may be some unexpected surprises.

One last important info!

We have opened this week a Discorrd server so we can talk together about our games (Dead In Bermuda, Dead In Vinland, and other upcoming games… ;)) Come and join us!

So yeah, we are not done yet with the game, and we plan to support it even after the release thanks to balancing patches, and we would love to make some additional content… But we’re not there yet! Happy surviving!

The post Dead In Development #27 – Release date!! appeared first on Dead in Vinland.

Hello survivors! So, as we have announced in our latest blogpost, we are going to introduce our “Big Three”. This means: Jacques, our Art Director, Thomas, our Lead Developer, and Matthieu, the lead Game Designer (and our boss!). Today, we are talking to the one who created the art direction of Dead In Vinland. Meet, Jacques ! (or, Mr Jack, as we like to call him!)

Rumor has it Jacques can draw even with his helmet

Who are you?

CCCP: Tell us your name, your age, and your role at CCCP for Dead In Vinland?

Jacques: I’m Jacques, I’m 28, and I’m the Art Director of Dead In Vinland.

CCCP: What did you do before?

Jacques: I started with “classical” trainings because I didn’t know it was possible to study video games in France, and even less that it could be a realistic career choice. I ended up finding out about “Supinfogame” and I branched to “Game Art”. Looking back, it was one of the best decisions of my life ?

Your role for Dead In Vinland

CCCP: Tell us more about your role in the game.

Jacques: At first, I put images where there were only words or intentions: character conceptions, the first backgrounds, UIs… Then, I had to make some choices (Art Direction, animation technique, etc.) to be able to make the whole graphical content of the game with a reduced team. I produced many different things (but that’s what I love in this job): characters’ animations, backgrounds, UIs, icons, FX, cinematics, communication assets…

Unfortunately, Jacques never brings the cat at work.

CCCP: What’s your typical working day at the moment?

Jacques: We’re almost finished with the project, so I produce the myriads of necessary assets  for the release of the game for the store: achievements, banners, videos, Steam Cards… It’s quite repetitive, but very interesting as I discover how a Steam page is made behind the scenes.

CCCP: Your favorite mechanics in Dead In Vinland?

Jacques: The tribute! The character that creates this system and his dialogues literally cracked me up. For the player, it also represents important milestones in the story and memorable moments of tension.

The Tribute system in Dead In Vinland!

CCCP: Your favorite character? Why?

Jacques: I like Eustache. He’s inspired of a real-life man who had many roles (monk, noble, pirate) and I think his character design reflects his personality of womanizer/crook…

Eustache, the Black monk

As a gamer

CCCP: Your favorite game?

Jacques: I obviously have many favourite games. However, the first that hypnotized me while I was still very young is “Medievil” on Playstation 1. I was begging the person that played to move forward in the story, even though he was done playing. I was blown away by the “Timburtonesque” world, fun and grim, the many secrets in the game and the splendid OST. Also, the hero is a skeleton in an armour…

Medievil was released in 1998 on Playstation

CCCP: What have you been playing lately?

Jacques: Lately, I’ve been mostly playing three games.

• Into The Breach (like everyone else, I gave in)
• Dead In Vinland (for obvious reasons :p)
• Leage of Legends (to give some “GREAT SHOTCALLING” to my mates. They’ll know I’m talking about them)

In the office

CCCP: Describe your co-workers with 3 words.

Jacques: Ambitious (or reckless??) – Entertaining – Eggplant

CCCP: Any good anecdote from within the walls of CCCP?

Jacques: The Gamescom and its many anecdotes will forever be a strong moment for Dead In Vinland. I was particularly surprised (and moved) to see the live reactions from fans of Dead In Bermuda and new players when they were testing “Dead In Vinland”.

Jacques’ desk. You can see on it Vinland Saga by Makoto Yukimura is one of Jacques’ references for Dead In Vinland

CCCP: Your favorite object at work?

Jacques: My desk is cluttered with many statuettes/books/comic books/board games… A certain (small) slanderous co-worker pretends I’m ready for the next yard sale with such a booth.

CCCP: Any advice for those who want to become an Art Director like you?

Jacques: I think the easiest thing is to be naturally passionate by what we do. If you like games and you’ve already thought about doing some by yourself or create some characters/worlds, that’s already a good thing. After that, it’s all about training and never giving up.

The post Developers In Vinland #5 – Jacques appeared first on Dead in Vinland.

Hello survivors ! So, that’s it. The 10^th recruitable character in Dead In Vinland. We are very happy (and a little sad) to finally be able to show you the last playable character of the game. Meet Parvaneh, the Royal Dancer!

Parvaneh… Oh, Parvaneh… I had a hard time at first figuring out how I should write her. Her past is filled with secrets, so we can’t tell much without spoiling some of her intrigues… Even if there is a lot to say.

She starts the game alongside Yaghoub, who insists on recruiting them both, or nothing. But she doesn’t seem to like him very much… What is the exact relationship between our two Persian characters?

At first, it was one of the hardest character to figure out how to write. As the sexy girl of the group, I surely didn’t want to make her sound too stereotypical… I thought of writing her as a confident, flirty woman with experience, but it didn’t quite fit well (and that role was already devoted to Moira, the “Depraved Aunt”). I noticed that It’s not that easy to write amazingly beautiful women without sounding fake and lame. So I searched for inspiration from people that I met in real life over the years, character traits that I noticed, things they would say – and not say… Parvaneh is a little patchwork of these people’s personalities.

I took a bit of inspiration too from the character of Inara Serra in the TV show Firefly (2002). Besides being one of the most beautiful women on earth (and in space!), I liked how strong, independant and determined she was in the show.

Moneca Baccarin as Inara Serra in Firefly

We can’t say much about her past without spoiling a lot of the mysteries surrounding her, but we can say that she used to be a royal dancer. That’s not the most useful kind of skills in a survival situation… But who knows…

She definitively has some woman child moments, but not only. She certainly isn’t perfect either, she can be manipulative sometimes, and… you’ll see

That’s the last character that I have written lines for, and I can assure you, after struggling a bit in the beggining to find her true personality, she was the character I had the most fun writing! I am totally impatient to see how people will react to her, as she can be full of surprises… I am sure she will be the kind of character people tend to absolutely love… or hate

Phew that’s all for today, and now you know all the recruitable characters in Dead In Vinland! We can’t wait to see which ones you’re going to choose We hope you’ll like them! Or maybe you’ll hate some of them, but for the good reasons, who knows? Dead In Vinland will be available on April 12th 2018 on PC and Mac! Happy surviving!

The post Dead In Development #28 – Parvaneh appeared first on Dead in Vinland.

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The post Logbook – Day 15 appeared first on Dead in Vinland.

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!

The post Dead In Development #29 – Death & The End appeared first on Dead in Vinland.

Hello survivors! Only 2 interviews to go! And today, we’re very happy to introduce you to our favorite rune-carving shaman: Thomas, lead developer on Dead In Vinland! If you guys encounter any bug in the game, this is probably his fault, but he’ll say it’s not.

Guess which one is Thomas!

Who are you?

CCCP: Tell us your name, your age, and your role at CCCP for Dead In Vinland?

Thomas: I’m Thomas, 29 (30 in July OMG this is so close!) and I’m the lead developer on Dead in Vinland.

CCCP: What did you do before?

Thomas: I first tried attending an engineering preparatory school, but it didn’t really fit me so I dropped after the 1^st year and forked to a “DUT informatique” (2 years diploma in IT), which taught me the basics of generic programming: algorithm, software, web, database… I didn’t want to end my studies right away, and I was already interested in games dev (that’s what made me follow the IT path in the first place) but the possibilities in France were close to non-existent in that domain, so I jumped on a plane and went to Middlesbrough, UK, to get a BSc in Computer Games Programming.

Once this was all done, I came back to France, worked on a personal project for about 5 months to start my portfolio, and then landed a job in a tiny (we were 3!) company making (mostly) mobile games with Unity. Fun fact: my very first task was to make a full chess game for mobile… where 3 players compete! 2.5 years later the company closed, and I spent a full year looking for a job (Unity wasn’t as well-known back then…) before landing my current position at CCCP.

Your role for Dead In Vinland

CCCP: Tell us more about your role in the game.

Thomas: Since Dead In Vinland is a follow up game, the very first tasks were to plan with the Game Designer everything that we wanted to improve upon the first game and think about what these improvements would require: a couple more features, some fixes or a complete scrap/rewriting of the system. Spoiler alert: it was often all of them, for various reasons (the system had too many changes/I didn’t like how it was done/the art structure was too different…) Then, time for action: I had to actually implement all of this in the game!

Later on, when I received some backup in programming (Raoul, and another Thomas for a few months) I had to divert a part of my efforts to a higher level, managing the team of 3 that we became so that we don’t waste our time hindering each other.

Since we’re a small studio and don’t have specific people to do everything, I also had to take care of some non-programming stuff like dealing with some external partners: localization, sound design…

A horn is hiding on this picture

CCCP: What’s your typical working day at the moment?

Thomas: Currently, as we’re closing to the release and most all of the features are finished, the typical workday alternates mostly between testing, bug fixing (who am I kidding, there are NO bugs!) and polishing the game.

CCCP: Your favorite mechanics in Dead In Vinland?

Thomas: One of my favourite mechanics is actually a simple/small one: the parallax effect (3D movement) of the camera. I really like how it makes the game stand out and gives it a unique feeling, despite being only made of 2D planes/sprites. It requires a pretty tedious setup once the scenes become more complex, but I really think it’s worth the trouble.

What a great Parallax!

CCCP: Your favorite character? Why?

Thomas: My favourite character is Gudrun, the Volva. I just can’t get enough on how she is (or acts!) all crazy, constantly playing on her venerable age when she feels like disturbing her conversation partner.

Gudrun, the Völva

As a gamer

CCCP: Your favorite game?

Thomas: Even if I don’t play it anymore, it wouldn’t be right if I didn’t say DotA 2. I can’t lie about it, my Steam “time played” counter is like a brand!

DotA 2: Thomas’ favourite game!

CCCP: What have you been playing lately?

Thomas: Into The Breach when alone, Divinity: Original Sin 2 coop with my girlfriend, and Rocket League with my friends (>What a save! >What a save! >Okay.)

In the office

CCCP: Describe your co-workers with 3 words.

Thomas: Drink – Drank – Drunk

CCCP: Any good anecdote from within the walls of CCCP?

Thomas: There are so many it’s quite hard to choose from (cf. the 3 words ^_^). But yeah one of the best ones was back at the Paris Games Week 2017, where we were presenting DiV. There was a small (it always starts that way!) party organized by pals of the Made In France area after closing time and, well… we didn’t want to stay small! So after it was over (and we were getting warmed up), we wandered a bit disappointed and, oh miracle! Managed to crash in a (really) big party (no names, we weren’t exactly… invited! Ssssshhh!) that was finally up to our expectations. We had a greaaaaaaat time, even if the morning after was a bit of a hassle ; we were still there and ready to show you the game though, because we love you guys <3

He drinks his morning “coffee” like a true – beardless and very small – viking!

CCCP: Your favorite object at work?

Thomas: I love my Viking drinking horn! We got those for the Gamescom 2017, as a gimmick all of the DiV developers had. I really like how it looks, and it immediately makes any beverage better (of course we also used them properly, they’re not limited to being gimmicky!)

CCCP: Any advice for those who want to become an Programmer like you?

Thomas: If you are lucky/dedicated enough to have access to a “Game Dev“ specific course, all the better, but keep in mind that it’s definitely not the only path to become a games programmer. As far as studies are concerned, you can definitely score a position even if you come from a “generic” programmer path, as long as you show enough dedication with some nice side projects. If you have nothing to show, nobody will watch, so make an online portfolio and fill it a little bit; make games (they don’t need to be finished!) on your own, with friends, heck even with strangers during game jams!

The post Developers In Vinland #6 – Thomas appeared first on Dead in Vinland.

Helloooo everyone! As you may know, there was only ONE person left that we hadn’t interviewed yet. The “final boss”, or “the-one-who-created-all-this-and-now-because-of-him-we-are-in-this-together”. Let me introduce Matthieu Richez, our boss and the Lead Game Designer of Dead In Vinland.

Matthieu and his daughter. Arent’ they cute together?

Who are you?

CCCP: Tell us your name, your age, and your role at CCCP for Dead In Vinland?

Matthieu: Matt, 36 years old. I’m the eldest member of those whippersnappers… I’m the boss of CCCP, and on Dead In Vinland, I am the Lead Game Designer.

CCCP: What did you do before?

Matthieu: Before CCCP… That was 13 years ago I did some IT studies, and then a master’s degree in production management and game design at Supinfogame – Rubika. I finally created the company just after I finished my studies.

Your role for Dead In Vinland

CCCP: Tell us more about your role in the game.

Matthieu: I’m the one behind the game’s concept. I wrote the different systems on paper, described the characters, the objects, etc… Then I managed the team and oversaw how the different elements that I had designed were going to be implemented in the game. And well, I wrote almost all the game’s dialogues, and made sure to give a personality to each character, and implemented all those things in the game’s engine.

If it were not for Coke, we’re not sure Matthieu would have survived so far.

CCCP: What’s your typical working day at the moment?

Matthieu: Haha… We only have one week left before we send the game to the press, so my days lately have been pretty simple: from 7 to 1pm, I play the game, and I write a billion things to fix, and during the day I fix them. We make a new build at 6pm, and on and on…

I’m at the balancing phase, and it’s long, sooooooo long, for a game with as much content as ours.

CCCP: Your favorite mechanics in Dead In Vinland?

Matthieu: I really like the new camp stations that we made, especially the pens. Taking care of those silly animals, is so cute. (That’s the subject of our next blogpost… *Wink wink*)

What is this new feature?

CCCP: Your favorite character? Why?

Matthieu: Overall, an author loves all of their characters, otherwise, that’s disappointing ^^. But, I find myself still laughing at some of Gudrun’s dialogues, so I think she’s good I loved to write Parvaneh too, I’m looking forward to hearing the “pro” and “anti” Parvaneh x) It’s a divisive character I think, and that’s what is funny.

How will the players react to Parvaneh?

As a gamer

CCCP: Your favorite game?

Matthieu: I’ll say without hesitation Crusader Kings 2, by Paradox. I could talk about it for hours (with a nice beer, of course)! Plotting to murder your incapable and sickly son so that his brother will have the kingdom, that’s what really matters.

Crusader Kings 2 is Matthieu’s favourite game!

CCCP: What have you been playing lately?

Matthieu: Lately, I’ve only been playing Dead In Vinland But before that, I took a break and played Into The Breach and Slay the Spire. Oh, I also took an hour to try Ash of Gods: Redemption this weekend.

In the office

CCCP: Describe your co-workers with 3 words.

Matthieu: Comfortable – Spacious – Bright

CCCP: Any good anecdote from within the walls of CCCP?

Matthieu: I remember that when we started the project we thought we could make the game with only 3 people… Then, we added an artist, “temporarily” (she ended up making all the environments and the outside objects of the game x)), and the more time passed, the more people we added. For a few months, there were a dozen people on the project…

“That was not so easy after all.”

CCCP: Any particular habit at work?

Matthieu: I can’t work without 2 things to give me the strength I need to finish the game: a fresh can of Coke and a picture of my daughter (who was born during the game’s development ^^).

CCCP: Any advice for those who want to become a Game Designer like you?

Matthieu: Personal work. In our jobs, we are lucky to be able to work from everywhere, with only an internet connexion and a good computer. We work in creation jobs, so “only” doing the school course is not enough. And you have to cling to it, life is not a sprint, it’s a long marathon filled with banana skins, so you need to get up on your feet and carry on.

The post Developers In Vinland #7 – Matthieu appeared first on Dead in Vinland.

Hello survivors! Only 2 weeks before release… AAAAAAAAAAAAAH *panic mode off* Okay, everything’s gonna be alright… In the meantime, we still have a few things to show you ^^ Today, let’s talk about sheep!

Look at this cute little guy! Awwwww… The evil – and starving – survivor could butcher right away this poor little dude. But the clever – and still starving – survivor could see it as an opportunity!

Sheep are really cool, in fact they provide meat, of course, but also wool and milk!

And since in Dead In Vinland we play a family who wants to settle for good on the island, it’s only natural to at some point go away from the hunting/harvesting type of life to a more structured one. So we introduced a few more advanced camp stations that you can build, one of them being the Pens.

It’s a very costly station to make, so it’s definitively not something you’ll build right away, but you should not wait for too long before building it. Indeed, hunting and harvesting can quickly yield less and less resources, since you slowly deplete the natural resources with the attrition system we implemented.

Fully upgraded, you can have up to 6 little sheep that you’ll have to tend to daily. It’s a totally new camp station, and a really advanced one with its own mechanics, that are more complicated than just “go fetch some wood”, the sheep have their own little simulation system that lives on its own.

SO! A lot is happening. First, you see that there is a slot for each little sheep. You can store a captured wild one in one of the slots, that’s the only mean to start your little sheep family.

Speaking of family, having 2 adults – and consenting – pets in good health gives you a chance to have a new baby sheep in the morning! Awwwwww!

Sheep have 3 stages of evolution: young, adult and old. Adult sheep can breed, old sheep start to lose health daily, and young sheep have nothing special besides being cute.

Each day, the animal’s stats will change depending on a number of factors. Their health will increase if they are fed and if you tend to them. Their milk and wool gauge will also increase.

When these gauges reach 80%, a character can work on the pens to milk and shear the sheep, gaining the associated resources.

But beware: if you don’t milk your sheep when the gauge reaches 100%, it will start to lose health every day!

And of course, when health reaches 0, the poor little animal will die. *sob*

It can be a good a idea to use one last option before that… And butcher the cute little thing to get some precious meat. You DON’T HAVE TO if you don’t want to…

You can also turn milk into cheese, which is nonperishable in the game, so rather useful.

That’s it for this rather advanced camp station! We are rather happy with how it turns out in the game, having its own little independant system and all. We may want to make a pet management game next time ^^ Happy surviving!

The post Dead In Development #30 – Sheep sheep! appeared first on Dead in Vinland.

Hello survivors! We’re so CLOSE from release! Next weeeeeeeeeeek AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! Okay, breathe… And today is a sad day, because it’s the day of our LAST Dead In Development post… *sniff* At least we managed to keep publishing them until the end, that’s a first achievement So today, we’re going to talk about the last new feature of Dead In Vinland: the Garden!

Right from the start when we brainstormed about the concept of DiV, we quickly thought about allowing the player to grow some plants and breed animals.

The garden is very interesting system-wise, because it’s a different kind of approach than most of the other camp stations. In general, you send your characters doing some actions, and you get an immediate result. But with the garden, the beneficial effects are delayed in time: you’ll first have to prepare the ground, plant seeds, and wait for them to fully grow before getting anything useful for your survivors.

It’s interesting, because it gives a new layer of pacing in the game, and you’ll have to plan a few days ahead what you will really need.

So how does it work?

As for the pens, we created a very complete screen with all the plants growing simulation informations that you need to know.

You can craft 3 parcels in which you can grow different things:

• Some hemp, useful to craft Ropes.
• Wheat, which serves 2 purposes: feeding your sheep, and brewing beer.
• Vegetables, that you can eat raw but also use in the Cooking Pot to make advanced meals.

But before that, you have to plow the parcels. When the ground is ready, you can exchange 10 Seeds to plant Hemp, Wheat or Vegetables in one parcel.

When the seeds are planted, the plants will grow automatically each day. Their growth’s speed depends on their humidity level: each plant has a “favored” humidity level, and the farther the humidity of the plant from the perfect level, the slower it grows.

You can water plants with your non-potable water stocks… Or just wait for rain.

Each weather has a different effect on the garden’s parcels humidity levels.

When the growth of the plant reaches a minimum of 80%, you can start harvesting them by placing a character on the action slot. But beware, the benefits will drastically change depending on the growth! Harvesting too early or too late will lower the resources gained from it, so you’ll have to plan a little, and adapt to the changing weather.

The garden is a rather advanced camp station, but maybe you have noticed that it interacts with many other stations: getting a steady supply of Hemp is VERY important because ropes are scarce, and your herbalist could deplete in the long run. If you craft the pens, your sheep will need Wheat to be fed, and the Garden is a sure way to get plenty of those. And of course, you can eat vegetables, which can come in large numbers once you have 3 parcels running. It’s also very important for a large community of 8 or 10 people, you’ll want to have many ways to get large amount of food quickly.

So, that’s it! Now, you know all about Dead In Vinland!… Or do you? Even though we talked about the “main” features of the game, there are still many surprises left that you’ll find out by playing the game next week!

We’re very happy to finally release our beloved survival game about a Vikings family on an unknwon island. If you want to get the game, you have three options:

• Add the game to your wishlist
• Preorder on GoG
• Preorder on Origin

And don’t forget to join our Discord server! We plan to support the game post release, so there will certainly be other blogposts! Happy surviving and see you next week (April 12th) for the game’s release!

The post Dead In Development #31 – the Garden of Vinland appeared first on Dead in Vinland.

Hello survivors! That’s it, we’ve released the game! HAAAAAAAAAAA! And now: TIME FOR SOME PATCH!

(If you’ve missed it, you can get it on Steam, GoG, and Origin!)

It’s been only a few days since release, but we’ve already done 2 quick patches to correct some urgent things. But now that the game is in a state that we are happy with, we’ll start working on some bigger free patches.

We want to let you know what to expect.

The next step for us, and the topic of the 1.1 patch, is all about quality of life improvements. A number of good ideas have popped in the forums, ideas that for the most part we had towards the end of the development, but couldn’t implement in time. As you may have seen, the game is HUGE for a small team like us, so it was already a big challenge to release the game in time (but we did it!)

So, let’s get to the point! I’ll detail here some of the big and small features we’ll be working on:

Speed up the game!

• We’ll increase the max range in the speed-up options. We’ll see how high we can go without breaking the game, but with that you won’t need a “cheat engine” anymore to speed up things, hopefully
• Skip mode for dialogs: we’ll add an option to speed dialogs REALLY FAST. Activable at any time.
• Instant text display: we’ll add a checkbox in the options menu.

Quality of life with food/drinks

• We’ll add a little shortcut to give erveryone who is Dehydrated a set amount of water ration.
• We’ll modify how the right-click works with food and rations, to enable players to magnetic drag “stacks” of food/water, and distribute them directly without having to go back to the item bar.

Safety check when boiling water

• You won’t lose your fire anymore due to frenzy click on the boiling button

Level ups v2

• We’ll re-roll duplicates traits, so that you’ll have 5 different traits on any level up.
• We’ll force 1 battle trait and 1 management trait in the list. The other 3 will still be random.
• We’ll add an option to re-roll the list, in exchange of a negative trait for the character.

Character management in the camp

• We’ll find a way to let you see in one glimpse which character is the best suited for a skill. We have several ideas for that.
• Send everyone to shelter shortcut: we already have an undocumented shortcut. We’ll make an option page with documentation for all keyboard shortcuts.
• Save deployment presets, and load them at anytime.
• Add a character quickly to a slot with a key press.

Inventory filters

• You’ll be able to filter your inventory, showing you how many food, resources, healing items you have in stock.

Post battle XP

• We’ll see if we can do it without breaking the balancing of the game

Animosity gauge feedback (When you don’t give your tribute to Elof)

• For now the animosity level is hidden. We may add a feedback on its increase/decrease to give players a better understanding of what is happening.

RNG (random number generator)

• This one is tricky, because we can assure you that there is no “bug” or “hidden agenda” in the random number generator. It’s pure random, like dice throws: each throw is completely independent. Let’s take the example of rolling a 6-sided die and trying to get a result between 2 and 6 (only 1 is a fail). This has 5/6 chances of happening, which is roughly 83%. Now, if we roll this die several times, you’ll see that it can definitely happen that you fail your roll more than once in a row, even several times (or even the opposite, never fail!).
• But we understand it can be frustrating to some people who are not accustomed to pen & paper RPGs… We’ll try to find some ways to have IN SOME CASES a random number which would take into account the “statistical chances”.
• In any case, we’ll be very cautious with meddling with the pure random generator we have now, because it could break apart MANY things. Right now, the game is intentionnaly focused on buffing/debuffing during battles, and having bad series of events giving you some difficulty spikes from time to time. We think that when you are accustomed to the game, it gives you some real fun having to deal with strokes of bad fortune. And even more sense of accomplishment when you succeed to overcome them.

So that’s it, we’ll be focused on that for the coming days/weeks. I don’t have any ETA for the patch right now, we still have to see at which pace we can advance.

But what I can say, it’s that we WANT to continue working on the game as long as we can with patches like this one. We won’t be able to do EVERYTHING, but we want to give Dead In Vinland the love it deserves. We also want to produce new content, both free and paid, but that is another story ^^

We also want to thank all of you for supporting us by getting the game! And you seem to be enjoying it, which is really cool for us! We hope you’ll like what we’re going to do for the next updates of Dead In Vinland!

If you liked the game, don’t hesitate to write a review on Steam. And, if you need some advice, or just want to talk to us or other players, please join our Discord server!

The post Post Natal #1 – Patch 1.1 roadmap appeared first on Dead in Vinland.

Hello survivors!

We’re pretty excited to finally give you this big fat free 1.1 patch! We’ve been working hard on it since release, and we think we have addressed most of the common gripes people had with the game.

For the occasion, we made a little video to demonstrate the new features of the 1.1 version. Matt’s english is not… very good… but bear with him ^^ We’ll get better if we do that regularly.

But enough blabbering, here is the full patch note:

PATCH NOTES

Speed up options

We greatly raised the max speed of all the ingame animations, and added more options, so that you can really speed up the game as fast as possible.
You can modify these values in a dedicated tab in the options menu, and find your perfect setting.

Skip Mode

We reworked our fast-forward mode into a real skip mode that you can activate/de-activate when you want. Just press the button or right-click anywhere.
It will temporaliry set all the speed up options to the max.

Skip Mode for dialogs

We added the skip mode for the dialogs, so now you can really speed up those you’ve already seen.

Instant text display for dialogs

We added an option to enable instant text display in dialogs. It speeds up Skip Mode even further.

New RNG modes

We added 2 new optional RNG modes:

• A “Statistical” RNG, as we call it, that completely reworks how the success chances for skillchecks, to hit chances, etc… are computed. In short, you now are certain to get a result that will be near the statistical expectation. (i.e. : 80% chances will give you a good result 8 times on 10)
• A gaussian mode for all the random throws concerning “ranges” (like damages, states increases/decreases, items scavenged…). It will basically make that you’ll get more often average values than extreme ones. For example, on a 2 – 4 DMG roll, you’ll roll much more 3’s, and sometimes 2’s or 4’s.

These 2 options can be enabled independantly. You can change them on the new game and load game screens.

Give same water ration to everyone

We added a little shortcut to give everyone the same water ration, and to clear the rations set to everyone.

Distribute food and water rations with right-click

We changed how the right-click works: it now magnetic drags food or water rations in the night phase, and if you left-click a character, the item will be kept in the magnetic drag. In short, you’ll be able to distribute a lot more easily stacks of items, without having to drag n drop them from the bottom bar.

Safety check when boiling water

You won’t be able to lose your fire anymore if you try to boil water and you don’t have enough Fire Intensity.

Level Ups reworked

– The system now automatically re-rolls duplicates traits.
– You’ll automatically get 1 Battle Trait and 1 Non Battle Trait. The 3 other Traits are still randomized.
– You’ll now be able to re-roll the Trait list! You can do it 5 times each level-up, and you’ll get a temporary bad trait as a tradeoff (for now, it gives -20% General XP. Cumulative)

Side bar sorting options

We added the possibility to sort your characters by state or skill in the sidebar. It will enable you to quickly see who is the most tired, or who is the best craftman in the camp

Inventory filters

We added some filters in the inventory, now you can filter by basic resources, food, healing items…

Items overview bar

You can now flag up to 12 items that you want to show in the overview bar, on top of the screen. With that, you can track the current stock of critical resources, and customize it the way you like!

Animosity gauge feedback

We now show the gauge progression of the Animosity Level of Björn when the value changes. You’ll now see the direct impact of giving Elof more or less resources, and if you are near of the “point of no return”…

Post battle XP

Characters now gain a bit of XP when they participate (and survive) a battle.

Tavern: auto-switch to Relax Mode

If you don’t have enough beers, the Tavern will automatically revert to Relax Mode.

Keyboard shortcuts

We added the list of all keyboard and mouse shortcuts in the option menu. You will see there that you can send all characters to shelter with pressing DELETE key, or that you can select a character just by pressing its number on your keyboard.

Saves no longer destroyed

The saves are no longer destroyed on game over now, even on True Viking, meaning that you can get the “bad” ending and still reload to try and get the “good” ending

Loki’s trade revamped

Loki was completely reworked. He will trade a lot more items with you, and most importantly, he will trade TINDER with you… So now you won’t be stuck without Tinder because you used them all

Miscellaneous

• Added a privacy setting button in the option, for anonymous data collection.
• The saves have been reworked, they should be less corruption-prone.
• You can now re-use traps even when you catch something.
• The drag n drop angle in the bottom bar has been reworked.
• We added a “quit without saving” button, for the save-scummers
• You can now access the Character sheets outside camp.
• Reworked the starting random traits: their maluses have been globally lowered, but now you get 3 instead of 2. All characters also draw from the same big list of traits, and can get any of them.
• Added a check so that Eustache and Blodeuwedd’s romance won’t go to the final level if the player rebuked Eustache at every occasion.
• Changed the “eat mud” tribute, to reflect if the player always gave meat.
• Boosted a bit the Elites stacks during retaliations events.
• After day 120, added new “full elite” enemies stacks and added some random buffs on them.
• Changed a few runes and storyline dialog trees so that you don’t have to start the dialogues again if you fail consecutive skillchecks.
• Sheeps are now ordered by Health before being given food => the ones with lowest Health will be given food first, which can matter when there isn’t enough food for every sheep.

Balancing

• Dryer: food dries faster each days (+20%), for each weather type.
• Dryer: lowered stolen food chances without upgrades from 15 to 10%.
• Pens: lowered basic milk output from 8-12 to 6-10
• Lowered a bit the “easy” mode: -20% animosity gains, -10% disease chances, -10% dehydration chances.

Fixes

• Corrected the final event for Moira and Gudrun: the wild sheep wasn’t removed from the inventory.
• Corrected some exploits with the Helmet guy and the Cursed Tablets.
• Corrected a rare bug that made the player stuck in battle
• Corrected the floating bearded head rune
• The last tribute won’t be shown anymore once you’ve completed it.

That’s it! We hope new and old players alike will enjoy the game even more now. If we corrected things that made you give us a bad review at first, don’t hesitate to update your review As a small developer, we rely on that A LOT.

And here’s a small gif summing up some of the new features!

If you liked the game, don’t hesitate to write a review on Steam. And, if you need some advice, or just want to talk to us or other players, please join our Discord server!

The post Post Natal #2 – Patch 1.1 is out NOW appeared first on Dead in Vinland.

Hello survivors! Time for a little roadmap, don’t you think?

So, Dead In Vinland has been out for almost 3 months now (whaaaaatt?? already?! We could have sworn it was just yesterday…), and the response from the players has really been great. So, first of all: thank you all!!

Since release, we didn’t take a break: we released many patches, hotfixes, and the BIG 1.1 patch that we released last month, which addressed the most important feedbacks from the community.

We’re rather pleased with the state of the game right now, however, we don’t want to stop there. When we released Dead In Bermuda (in 2015), we wished we could have made more post-release content, but due to design and technical constraints it was not possible.

So, when we started development of Dead In Vinland, we had this in mind, and didn’t made the same mistake. We CAN make new content for the game, and – that’s what this post is actually about – we WILL!

We checked the forums, we checked the ideas coming from the Feature Wishlist thread, and some of our own… and we can now officially announce that we will be working on at least 3 DLCs for Dead In Vinland! And free updates, of course.

We made a little roadmap, let’s check it out:

ROADMAP DETAILS

1. New Companion
   This summer, we’re going to add a new companion in Dead In Vinland. We think you’re going to like having this one in your camp.
   Release: Summer 2018
2. New Game Mode
   We’re adding a brand new mode for Dead In Vinland that will give you a totally new way to play the game. It’s a mode that was actually asked by the players. Can you guess what it’s going to be?
   Release: Fall 2018
3. New content
   We can’t reveal much, but we will add some new content in Dead In Vinland! We can only say that this one will have to do with the dialogues. We’ll share the details in 2019.
   Release: Q1 2019

FREE UPDATES

Each DLC will be accompagnied with a major 1.X patch, with new features from the DLC that will be available for free to everyone, as well as smaller improvements on the game. We’ll show some sneak peek on our Twitter starting next week!

UNANNOUNCED SURPRISES

Shhhh…

We hope you guys will like what we’ll be adding to the game! We want to keep working on it as long as we can. We already have a lot of ideas for after the 3rd DLC, but it will only be possible if the sales go well, so spread the word and show us some love <3
Oh, and for those asking: yes, we’re starting to think about our next game, but it’s way too early to be talking about it…

Follow us!

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Happy surviving!

The post Post Natal #3 – Development Roadmap for 2018 and beyond appeared first on Dead in Vinland.

Hey survivors!

Right now, we’re facing a very stong enemy: Drought is today’s weather in France… But like our survivors, that doesn’t mean we’re not working! And like our survivors, we’re craving for some rain!

The work on 1.2 and 1.3 Patches is advancing pretty well, we have almost finished developing all the features, and we are entering the playtest and localization phase. It will take some time, since we made some changes that can have some impact on the whole game’s balance, so we have to playtest in “real conditions” – aka dozen and dozen of hours – before making tweaks. But don’t worry, the 1.2 Patch is still coming this summer ;).

Today we’ll talk a bit about one of the new features in the free 1.2 patch that will be released at the same time as the DLC…

Random Traits for enemies stacks

As you may know, in the first version of the game there was some sort of day limit that triggered a game over event if the player was taking too long to finish the game. Initially, we needed that because we feared that after a while, there wouldn’t be enough content – and so no more reason to continue playing. But in the end, people were afraid of having this kind of time limit, and feared that they would have to “rush” things. This was not our intention at all, we think that the game should be enjoyed without any time constraint. So we removed this game over event, and tweaked a bit the end game content, so now (since the 1.02 patch) you can enjoy playing as long as you want.

We think that was a good decision, but because of that, the game lacks a bit of variety if you continue playing for a long, very long time… We are talking about more than 70 hours playthroughs, it doesn’t concern so many people if we look at the data, but still, we thought we should do something about what we considered to be an issue.

In the last 1.1 patch, we introduced some variability in the end-game stacks of enemies by adding random modifiers (Traits) to the battle characteristics of the enemies, like +2 HP, +10% To Hit, etc…

In the upcoming 1.2 patch, we have expanded this system and reworked all the stacks of enemies throughout the game by adding those modifiers to every single enemy in the game, meaning that every encounter will be unique.

You’ll for example end up sometimes with a “Quick Pillager” with a bonus to initiative, or a “Frail Archer” with lower HP, and another time an “Armored Pillager” and a “Precise Archer”.

The bonuses themselves are rather low, like +/- 5% to Hit, +1 HP, +2 Initiative… But when you reach endgame, we start stacking bonuses and throw some more powerful variations in the pool (like +2 max Damage, +1 Damage resist, +20% To Hit, …)

The only stat that we won’t touch is AP, because it would have too much of a big impact on the AI of the enemies, making them potentially acting “dumb”.

New Modifiers

Here’s a list of the different basic modifiers we added:

• Precise
• Mighty
• Evasive
• Quick
• Vicious
• Blessed
• Armored
• Tough
• Defensive
• Short-sighted
• Feeble
• Easy Target
• Slow
• Hesitant
• Dumb
• Frail
• Off guard

The difficulty of our enemies stacks gets higher depending only on the number of days passed on the island (apart from the retaliation stacks, which are special, and that we boosted a lot), and so the random Traits that enemies can get are growing accordingly: at first, they’ll have only flaws, making the start of the game a bit easier, but soon they will start to gain increasingly good Traits, and even 2 or 3 good bonus Traits!

Enemy traits you’ll meet at the start of the game

This will make battles a whole lot more challenging, but since it was an area of the game that towards mid-game was getting easier and easier we thought we could add a bit more spice here Now the enemies evolve like your characters, so you’ll have to carefully plan ahead and make sure to have some combat specialists in your team! (that should be easier now with the rework of the level ups, see the 1.1 patch changelog for more details)

We’ll still have to playtest the balancing of this system to see if we didn’t made the game TOO challenging… but we feel it will provide a good challenge for hardcore players, as well as some more variety for new players.

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Happy surviving!

The post Post Natal #4 – Patch 1.2 Random traits for enemies appeared first on Dead in Vinland.

Hey survivors,

We hope you’re okay! it’s almost September, which means summer holidays are officially over But this also means the DLC and the 1.2 Patch are releasing VERY SOON! We know it’s been a while since we last updated you about the upcoming 1.2 patch. However, we’ve been working a lot on the different changes/new features AND the DLC that will be released along the patch!

For those who want to know more about the “New companion”, please wait just a little longer, it’s almost ready!

Today we’ll go into details of another big feature of the upcoming free 1.2 patch: the Special Effects for Camp Stations!

Special Effects for Camp Stations!

We added “a few” new Traits that you can get when you do activities in the camp. We’re still playtesting the values, but the gist of it is that you’ll sometimes get positive or negative Traits added to the result of an action.

New Trait: Fortified!

We already did this kind of thing by adding the possibility of getting the Energized trait while setting your characters to a mid-day nap. However, this time, we “just” expanded this system to almost every camp station

These additionnal effects are not documented anywhere in the game, so here’s the list that we have right now (which can change over time, so don’t take it for granted):

• Shipwreck: chances to get Depressed or Lucky
• Rest Area: chances to get Energized
• Medical Tent:
  • Healer: chances to get Depressed, Headache or Fortified
  • Patient: chances to get Bored
• Workshop: chances to get Crushed Fingers or Inspired

That sounds painful…

… But you can get the Inspired Trait, which is not half-bad!

• Forge: chances to get Crushed Fingers or Inspired
• Tavern:
  • Relax mode: chances to get Demotivated or Refreshed
  • Party mode: chances to get Drunk or Excited
• Shelter: chances to get Bored or Refreshed
• Fetch water: chances to get Back Pain
• Harvest Fruit: chances to get Bruises, Tick Bite or Food Stash

Sometimes, you will get the Food Stash trait…

And sometimes, you’ll get the Tick Bite one… Ouch!

• Herbalist:
  • No focus: nothing
  • Hemp: chances to get Allergies or Relaxed
  • Healing Plants: chances to get Poisoned or Healing Pouch
  • Seeds: chances to get Rash or Bird Bait
• Garden: chances to get Back pain
• Pens: chances to get Smelly
• Hunt: chances to get Fractured Arm, Small Wound or Food Stash
• Fishing: chances to get Bored or Relaxed
• Exploration: chances to get Sprained Foot, Fractured Leg or Scouting
• Wood Cutting: chances to get Dislocated Shoulder, Bleeding or Fortified
• Mining: chances to get Back Pain, Dislocated Shoulder or Lucky

Sometimes, fishing is not so exciting

Now, Traits are more important than ever in Dead In Vinland, so you should definitely pay attention to your character’s sheet!

Of course a lot of these Traits are new ones, and we also added a new “Tapeworm” disease, that you can get while eating raw meat (0.5% chances)… In exchange, we lowered a bit the Sickness you get when eating raw meat.

That’s it for today! Next time, we’ll officially announce everything you need to know about the first DLC of Dead In Vinland!

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Happy surviving!

The post Post Natal #5 – Patch 1.2 Special Effects for camp stations appeared first on Dead in Vinland.

Hello survivors, and welcome to our first look at the Vallhund!

So, this summer, we’ve been working very hard on our first DLC for Dead In Vinland (the Vallhund), and the 1.2 Patch. And great news: everything is finally (almost) ready!

The first DLC of Dead In Vinland: The Vallhund

We are very excited to finally announce that we will release the first DLC for Dead In Vinland, The Vallhund on September 19th 2018!

Recruit the Vallhund (a Norse dog) that will become a valuable part of your camp!

Here are the first official screenshots!

Free 1.2 Patch

On September 19th, we will also release the free 1.2 Patch, that will bring many improvements and new features for everyone!

One of those new features is the random traits for the enemies!. But there’s also some new special effects for the camp stations a 3rd mode for the exploration, and many other new exciting things that we’ll talk about here.

We have also updated the roadmap for the future of Dead In Vinland!

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The post Post Natal #6 – The Vallhund is coming in your camp on September 19th + Udpated Roadmap! appeared first on Dead in Vinland.

Hello survivors, time to talk about the 1.2 Patch!

We’re getting there! Next week we will be releasing our first DLC after some hard working months under hot temperatures… We nearly finished the development naked. And believe me, it was not a beautiful sight.

We’re really excited to push new content live, and playtest the game again after all these changes. Since release, we have come a long way! Features that were a bit rough are now really working well, most notably the speeding features and the little resource track bar. The new distribution mode for water and food during night are also very welcomed for long runs.

We’ll talk about the content of the DLC in details in another post, right now I’ll explain to you the last new features included in the free 1.2 patch, that will be releasing at the same time of the DLC.

Expanded Battle Character Sheet

This one feature was really lacking: you couldn’t see in your character sheet the calculated bonuses/maluses given by Traits. You could see the list of Traits affecting the character’s battle skills, but you had to somehow do the maths. It wasn’t practical.

Now we’ve added the info in the character sheet – and when you select your characters for battle, so it should be easier to keep track of your character’s battle strength.

Note that these changes will also be visible in combat!

All these values start at 0, and come on top of basic active skills values shown on the skill’s tooltip. We made the choice to keep the basic values of skills shown in the active skills’ tooltip, so don’t be surprised to see that they are unchanged after level-up. In battle, the tooltips will show the calculated values, but beware! You still have to take into account the bonuses/maluses of the enemy you are targeting!

For example: a skill thas has 80% base hit chance. The characters has 2 Traits that gives him +5%, so the new hit chance for the attack is 90%. BUT, the enemy he is targeting has 15% Dodge, so the final hit chance for the attack is actually 75% chances! Or 25% chances to miss, which is quite high actually.

The only tooltip that shows the good, final hit chance value is the one appearing when you are targeting an enemy. It’s a bit tiny, so keep an eye out for it. (if the value is coloured, it means it has been modified).

Crits on camp actions

This feature was actually one of the rare features that didn’t make it to the final game, but we had it in mind during the development. What’s more depressing than going to a nice fishing spot, hoping to catch 1 to 8 juicy fishes for tonight, and coming back to camp with… One. And. Only. One. Damned. Fish.

You know the feeling… depressing. On the other hand, when you come back with 8 fishes, yeehaaaa! Tonight will be party time! Invite Björn and Elof for dinner!

So… To translate this feeling into the game, now very low and high yields in camp actions will be transformed into “Crits” that will give a very small buff/debuff on the depression gauge of the character. It’s not a game changer, but it’s a step toward making the depression gains of the characters more tied to the actual results of the actions they just made. That may be something we’ll want to investigate further in a next Dead In game.

Misc.

• Look for a fight

We’ve talked about it in 280 characters or less on Twitter, you’ll now have a 3rd possible focus for exploration: Look for a fight.

In this focus, you’ll explore very slowly (-66% exploration speed) but you’ll raise the chances to trigger a fight, based on the Hunting skill of the character who is doing the exploration.

It was asked by a number of players, and can be useful if your usual explorers become TOO stealthy, and you’re itching for a fight… (in fact, completely avoiding fights and/or exploration is really a bad idea: you’ll need the extra loot provided by the battles, and you’ll definitively want to have a steady exploration pace to advance the story AND get precious “free” resources or state-lowering events)

• Breeding

We reworked a bit how the sheep are breeding in the game, it was rather confusing before (even us couldn’t tell how the whole thing worked without looking into the code x))

Now you have a nifty info in the pop up showing exactly how much breeding chances you have at any time, and the tooltip further explains exactly how the system works.

• How much XP is needed to level up a skill

We already showed you that now you’ll have the information of how much XP you have in every skill, and how much is needed to level up this skill. Can be useful for those who really want to min/max the game. Even if you certainly don’t have to go that far in order to win in normal difficulty.

• Safety checks

Another little feature that was asked by a few players: we added some safety checks on deleting profiles. Now you have to click a specific button to delete the profile, and confirm your choice in a subsequent pop up.

• Dryer and traps

On the balancing side, we made some changes here and there. You’ll have the complete list in the patch notes, but I wanted to make a focus on these ones. We re-balanced a lot the dryer and the traps, which were not that useful before. Now with the changes we’ve made, they should be a more viable build for your camp.

Traps now have 75% chances to be recovered in all cases, that is to say even when you catch something. Traps being rather costly to craft, now you can use them for a longer time.

The dryer works as before, but we changed the values a lot since release. Now meat and fruits dry a lot faster during sunny days and drought, and the base steal chances has dropped to 10%. You’ll just want to avoid storms…

Phew, that’s it for today, survivors! The 1.2 Patch will be big for Dead In Vinland, so don’t forget to check it out on September 19th! And of course, we’ll release the first DLC: The Vallhund to get a cute fluffy companion in your camp.

See you next week for the Patch and the DLC!

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The post Post Natal #7 – Patch 1.2 Expanded Battle Character Sheet, Crits on camp actions, and more! appeared first on Dead in Vinland.

Hello survivors! Time to welcome the Vallhund in your camp!

That’s right, the newest member of the camp is now available! This is actually the first time that we’ve released a DLC for a game, sooo we’re quite nervous! As we’ve stated before, we want to keep working on Dead In Vinland as long as we can! Today, we’re going to present to you the Vallhund, but also the full patchnotes for the FREE 1.2 Patch for Dead In Vinland

The Vallhund

For the first DLC of Dead In Vinland, we wanted something that:

• Was rather quick to develop, that we could push live within a few months after release.
• Would add something new to the game…
• … Without breaking the overall balancing

Of all our potential DLC ideas, adding a small animal companion was something that would fit all our pre-requisites, with a few constraints:

• It would add a new camp station, but an autonomous one, like the food dryer: you don’t have to put a character to interact with it (much easier for us).
• You can’t bring it to battle, so that means fewer costly animations to make.
• Few texts, so few localization time.

So how does it work? Owners of the Vallhund DLC will trigger a mid-day event where they will be able to “recruit” the dog into the camp. It will happen on day 5 for new games, but you can also load your save and the event should trigger the next mid-day if you already passed day 5.

Actions

The little dog will now be part of your camp, and each half day you’ll be able to select 1 action that the dog will do. (more on that later)

The dog has 2 gauges: Affection and Energy.

• Energy will enable him to do more complex actions, and is spent when you do any action. You recover Energy each night, and when you do the “Rest” action.
• Affection will enable him to learn new tricks. He has his own little upgrade screen, in which you can spend Affection and other resources to “buy” upgrades for your little dog.
  • You gain affection by giving him food or playing with him (special action), but you lose a bit of affection every night.

The dogs’ actions are very diverse:

• The most basic action: Rest! The little dog will regain Energy.
• You can send him to Fetch resources:
  • Bones: in fact, it’s the only way to have a steady inflow of Bones. Without that, you’ll have to rely on exploration.
  • Basic resources: he will fectch some Wood, Ropes or Fabric.
  • Hunt: he will try to bring home some food.
• Decrease states:
  • Send the most depressed character in your camp play with him, to lower a bit his Depression.
  • He will lick the wounds of the most wounded character in your camp
• Give bonus Traits:
  • He will give temporary boosts to some characters in various areas.
    • One special boost for Kari.
    • Boosts for the whole camp, which gives some temporary battle buffs.
• Treasure hunt: he will try to find one of the Skill Upgrade items! My precious…

Training

Like every other camp stations in the camp, you can “upgrade”, or rather, train your dog! This training won’t take any in-game time, so the effects of that training will be immediatly available after the upgrade.

You’ll notice that you’ll need several things in order to get an upgrade:

• Affection with the Vallhund
• Some Energy
• And some resources

Story

And of course, there is a little story between your beloved dog and Kari… We added a few night events for them. Will Kari manage to train this cute little dog to be a fearsome beast?

Patchnotes

NEW LANGAGES! The game now fully supports:

• Polish (Community translation. Thanks A LOT to our awesome polish translators: MrOrochimaru, Amne, Jacek “OddFables”, Kosciesza Starszyjsierzant, Wioleta (Vix) Perkowska)
• Italian (Official translation. Thanks to Roberto Bertoni of Daring Touch)
• Chinese (Official translation. Thanks to our chinese partner WhisperGames)

NEW FEATURES

• Random traits for enemies stacks: now enemies will have between 1 and 3 bonus or malus traits. They become harder as days pass.
• Crits on camp actions: camp actions that yield very low and very high output will give a small increase/decrease of Depression to the character.
• Upgraded battle character sheet: now you’ll see the aggregated values of the different bonuses, like bonus to Hit, bonus to damage, etc…
• Upgraded infos on character selection screen before a battle: you’ll also see these values before a fight.
• You can now check the characters sheet during the night.
• Special Traits on camp actions: you’ll now have the chance to get some temporary special bonuses or injuries when using camp actions.
• Implemented a 3rd mode for exploration: Look for a fight. You’ll get more chances to trigger a battle, linked to the Hunting skill of the exploring character(s).
• Reworked how the breeding chances for sheep work, and updated the visuals in the pop up to show exactly what chances you have to breed + extended tooltip.
• Added skill level up progression values in the skills’ tooltips.
• Changed the way “new games” work in the main menu, to avoid deleting saves by mistake. (there is now a double confirmation process).
• Traps: changed the way they work. Now there is a chance for the trap to be re-usable even when you catch something, making traps way more useful. We changed the pop up infos to indicate how it works.
• Added some moments of silence in the daytime music playlist.
• Developed a DLC Manager, and integrated some visuals in the main menu to show which ones you own.

FIXES

• Greatly reduced some loading times.
• Reduced the level of some high pitched sounds (flutes song for example)
• Corrected a few typos in the french translation.
• Dryer: Fixed a small display bug.
• Tributes: Fixed small display bugs for some tributes.
• Changed “come at me bro” and “you can’t touch this” actions names.

BALANCING

• Made the battle level up traits with drawbacks a bit more worth it. (overall, lowered the drawbacks)
• Lowered base water fetching range from 4-8 to 4-6.
• Changed how the “handcatch some fish” action works.
• Lowered needs for Make Salt action: 1 non potable water -> 0.25 & Fire intensity -5 to -10 -> -5 to -5.
• Dryer: increased base salt cost from 3 to 4.
• Dryer: lowered a bit the drying speed (a very tiny bit).
• Traps: lowered a bit the meat range from 3-6 to 3-5.
• Lowered Talented trait from +50% general XP to +33%.
• Knives Guys now have 8 base HP instead of 9, as it was intended.

And that’s it! We hope you’re going to like this one! Here are the links to get the DLC “The Vallhund”:

• Steam
• GOG

And the new features/improvements included in the 1.2 Patch are of course free for every owner of Dead In Vinland!

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The post Post Natal #8 – The Vallhund is available now! appeared first on Dead in Vinland.

Hello survivors,

It’s been a while since the last blog post… After the release of the Vallhund DLC we kept on working on the game non-stop, and we’ll keep working on it until the 3 DLC’s we promised are finished. Part of the team started to work on a new game though, but it’s still waaaaaaay too soon to talk about it ^^  SO, we’re pretty excited to let you discover the new features we’ve been working on for the Battle of the Heodenings DLC, since we kept them rather secret and there’s a lot of new things here.

An endless mode

A bit of context first about the name of the DLC. The Battle of the Heodenings, or “Hjaðningavíg“, is a legend from Norse mythology about an never-ending battle. It’s not very well known, but you can find references of it in some poems. All in all, we thought it fitted well with the concept of our DLC: a new endless, sandboxy mode.

In fact, when we released Dead In Vinland, we were quite amazed by how many people wanted to play the game like a sandbox “build your own viking village” game, which was quite unexpected for us because it was not how the game was designed at all! In retrospect, I think that when you sell to people the idea of a management game AND a survival game, people immediatly think about sandbox, maybe like the excellent RimWorld.

Some people also didn’t care one bit about the game’s story, but were really enthusiastic about the management aspects of the game. At first we were kind of disappointed, but all in all it meant that our systems were strong and interesting, even if they represented only half (maybe a little more) of the whole game.

SO we thought it would be a good idea to give these players a way to experience the game the way they wanted, that’s why we came up with the idea of this DLC.

Okay, enough blabbering, let’s look at the features!

So now when you start a new game, you’ll be able to choose between the story mode and the new Heodening mode.

In Heodening mode, we went crazy: we kicked out ALL the dialogs between characters, ALL the quests, ALL the storylines… No more nuisance, you can focus on surviving! The only goal of this mode is to survive as many as days you can. No limit. To achieve that, we had to rework some (a lot of) features.

The tributes

Now the tributes are endless: they start right away, and every week Elof will come ask for the tribute. The dialogs are at their minimal, and always the same: you’ll be able to pay him the exact amount asked, 25%, 50% or 75% of this amount, or 125%, 150% or 175% of this base amount (or nothing at all). Of course, if you give him more or less than asked, the Animosity gauge will still change accordingly. You’ll still get retribution events every 10 steps of the gauge, and if you reach 100% animosity you’ll lose the game.

We reworked completely the system to make it procedural, meaning that Elof will now ask you for other resources than in the story version of the game.

It works like that: every resource has some weight number attached to it (Wood being the base 1). Every tribute asks for an increasing number of resources, multiplied by the weight of the resource (which has been drawn randomly).

An example, let’s say that Fresh Fruits have a weight value of 2, and the basic value of resources asked by a tribute is 10. Elof will then come and ask for 20 Fresh Fruits. (it would have been 10 Wood if Wood had been selected).

We added some control on top of it: some resources can’t appear before day X has been reached… Since some resources are harder (impossible) to produce early on.

You can still end up with unfair demands, but well, that’s the magic of the procedural generation ^^

The map

Of course if we talk about an endless game in a finite map, there will be a problem at some point… So we thought of a way to make the island truly endless: every number of days (for now, it’s 25), all the empty cells of the map will regenerate a random content! You’ll never run out of things to discover in Vinland.

We made the tiles generation more procedural too: now there is a definite pool for every type of cell (Forest, Beach, Lake and Volcano). When you explore a tile, it generates a content from the pool, and remove it from the pool until you exhaust all the items in the pool, so there will be some kind of sense in the randomness. But that still means that the very first cells you explore contain Rune challenges or anything else… You’ll just have to keep them for later.

While playtesting it, I found that there is now a real utility in a little option that very few people used before: you can set the next target cell you want to explore by clicking on it on the map. In story mode, there is no real use of it because the progression is “intelligent”, but in Heodening mode if you don’t use that, you’ll never be able to reach the volcano… It can be useful. You’ll have to experiment.

Maybe you noticed? We added 3 big buttons on the map… the 3 “gods” are not generated on the map, but we thought it would be cool to have some use of them… In fact, they are clearly REALLY useful to mitigate a bit the randomness of this mode. Now, you can click on these buttons and go talk to them directly . They will act as traders, a bit like how Loki worked in the story mode.

Loki has a new inventory of useful items to sell (most importantly: Fire Crystal, Ancient Knowledge and Tinder), Freyja will give you some temporary powerful blessings or some instant healing, and Thor will give you temporary battle buffs.

They will all exchange their services for Orichalcum Beads, which are VERY important in Heodening mode. You’ll get them by completing Rune challenges, and by defeating boss squads.

Fighting

Talking about fights… We reworked a lot too how they are generated, to make them truly endless. We iterated on top of one of the features we implemented in the previous patch: now the enemies you’ll face will automatically get an increasing number of random Traits the more days you stay on the island. We made a new encounter’s table too, you may fight harder stacks early on, but they will have 2 bad Traits until a few dozen days have passed. You’ll also have the chance (?) to encounter one of the 5 boss fights we have in the base game… very hard fights, but if you manage to win them, there will be good rewards. (yes, you’ll also be able to face Björn!)

That’s really something hard to playtest on our own, so we’ll need A LOT of feedback on your experience with the balancing of it all, but especially the fights, when you’ll be able to play the DLC… We have a ton of parameters we can adjust, but well, it’s kind of experimental.

That’s all?

Of course not! There is still a BIG new feature in the endless mode that I didn’t talk about, but let’s keep it for another blog post ^^

There are also some massive surprises for the free 1.3 patch, I can’t wait to show you!

The second DLC and the 1.3 free patch will be available this winter.

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Happy surviving!

The post Post Natal #9 – Battle of the Heodenings – part 1 appeared first on Dead in Vinland.