Hello survivors!
It’s been a long time, friends… Almost 10 years since the release of Dead In Bermuda, the very first entry in our beloved “Dead In…” series and the first game I had the honor of writing and designing.
After that, a lot of things happened for us. We worked our asses off making Dead In Vinland, releasing it on PC and Switch while making 3 DLCs for it. It was quite a journey, with a formidable team, filled with joyful moments. I want to give a shoutout to the core team who is still working at Ishtar after all these years: Jacques & Thomas, respectively Art Director and Lead Dev (now Lead Game Designer!) who worked on The Last Spell, and Manon who started as an art intern on Dead In Vinland and took charge of the art direction of one of our latest games: Lakeburg Legacies! Let’s not forget Bruno who managed and built this wonderful community of players we have, growing from a few dozen fans to several thousands now!
And of course a big thank you to all who contributed in one way or another, let’s grab a beer sometime ;)
So yeah, 10 years later, here we are again, revealing that we’ve secretly been working for some time on a new entry in the “Dead In…” series. It feels nostalgic, but in a very good way. We feel at home when working on this game, we stumble upon old good and bad design choices, and debate for hours and hours about how to make everything better. That’s fun, in a kind of masochistic way, but this is the way of the people who make games, I guess.
A bit about this new game, Dead in Antares, without revealing too much (it will come in due time!): as you could see in the announcement trailer, the game is set on a faraway, unknown planet located in the Antares system. Why and how did our heroes end up here? That’s what you’ll have to uncover… Your first priority is to set up your camp and find a way to survive in this strange environment.
Setting the game in the future and on a fictional planet brought a new very interesting challenge for us: imagine this world from scratch, design its flora, its fauna, its weather… It’s a very good playground for our talented artists, and I think you’ll love what you will see. From a design point of view, it enabled us to tackle new systems linked to those themes: science, the sense of discovery, energy management,... even temperature management!
Before closing this first dev blog post, I can talk a bit about the vision and the team:
The main vision was to go a step further in the survival management aspect of the game, while streamlining a lot of the user experience. We want to go deeper in the systems, but with everything clear and smooth, to bring more control to the player to make strategic choices. We also want the game to be accessible to a larger audience: we want players focused on story to have fun AND we want hardcore survival spreadsheet masters to feel challenged. We’ll definitely have more thought out difficulty options so that everyone enjoys their stay.
Storywise, we want to bring a real sense of camaraderie to the formula: this time, we control a crew of specialists set on a mission, so the dynamics are not the same than our previous “Dead In”. The overall tone will be more serious, with hard choices to make, but also shining with endearing personalities who will bring their moments of joy and doubts.
We will also expand 2 areas that were still a bit lacking in our previous games: combat and exploration. Without revolutionizing everything, we will bring enhancements that should give these two areas some love.
To bring this vision to reality, we brought together a very interesting mix of new and old friends: Jacques & Thomas joined the team to bring their experience and expertise to the table, but the superb art direction and vision is led by Julie for her first collab with us. Robin who worked on The Last Spell brings a fresh take on game design. Christophe, a long time collaborator who wrote a bit for Dead In Vinland is in the design team full time now. And on the dev side, we started a collab with Alain, Vivianne from Alkemi and Julien, who had the hard work of cleaning the old code we wrote and making it 2025-like. Little nod to Elliott who worked on tools for the project during his internship. Thanks a lot!
And last but not least, we have Benjamin on producing, who also worked on The Last Spell, and Antoine our marvelous magician of all kind of sounds, be it **kling** **beep** **boop**, **vooooooooooooo** or **zweep**. The rumors say that he will also write and play the music score and even… sing!
See you soon here, we’ll force ask the team to present their work until release to keep you waiting.
Cheers,
-Matt, Creative Director