Death Inc. is an upcoming strategy game where you play as Death. Not the badass one like you see in Darksiders. More like, the one whoâs running his business from the basement of his granâs house.
https://lastchance.cc/we-are-going-to-play-as-the-grim-reaper-and-spread-the-5982664%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
Itâs a quaint setting, especially when you consider the fact his âbusinessâ â and the aim of the game â is dispensing the deadliest plague this planet has ever seen, but itâs not whatâs really winning me over. Whatâs doing that is the gameâs art design, which is all bubblegum colours and painstaking attention to detail.
Nowhere is the latter more evident than in the way Ambient Studios, made up mostly of ex-Media Molecule (LittleBigPlanet) devs, went about designing the playerâs âhomeâ. Instead of just whipping something up in PhotoShop, their lead artist Jon Eckersley actually went out and built a scale model of the thing.
Um, why?
âBuilding a physical model forces you to not only work to an art style, but everything must practically function as wellâ, Eckersley tells us. âYou can cheat a fair bit with a 2D concept, but you definitely canât when youâre making it out of wood and card â that forces you to make a lot of design decisions. Those choices directly feedback into the game and sit sloshing about in my head when Iâm making actual game assets â how far can I push this without breaking things? It makes the world our characters are living in really believable.â
Thatâs a pretty common thing to do with movies, and also when designing, say, a character or vehicle, but a house? To become Deathâs doll house? Thatâs pretty cool.
The images you can see below are of the house Jonny built. The team have also made a demo for the game available here; itâs fairly basic, and very early, but it does give you an idea of the mechanics the game will be using.
