DayZ - Interview mit Lead Designer Dean 'Rocket' Hall

No time to plan anything! We are very busy with the planning for the next steps for DayZ. It really is taking up all our time, as well as preparations for Gamescom 2012.

I was working as a contractor for Bohemia Interactive prior to the mod exploding, and it certainly has changed my life. The biggest change is probably that I don't have enough time to do everything, so I constantly have to make decisions about what I can and cannot do. Some of things I have to say no too, I really want to do as well!

I think it is telling about what gamers will get up to if you give them the tools to do so. There are a number of games that allow people some degree of free roaming, and gamers love these kinds of games. DayZ is quite a gritty game that is stripped right back to the basics of design, I think gamers appreciated the direction being taken with it, and were able to see through the bugs and the flaws towards what the game is hoping to be.

Well, it still works. You still have big franchises making plenty of money. As long as the more traditional models of production and development still work, then I think you will still have projects doing that. For every DayZ-style success there will be hundreds of failed or unappreciated projects, both mod and indie games. I do think that being innovative about the way you develop, and what you develop, is a great way to experiment and find new ways of doing things. Certainly the way DayZ is progressing is what I prefer, and it really worked for Minecraft. So, too far? I don't think so - but I think there are other options.

I think they're necessary. It would be very easy to get carried away with all the hype and enthusiasm from players out there, and when that happens it is easy to focus on the things you want to do rather than the things you really should. Crunching the really tough bugs is usually not very fun or glorious. With any criticism I think the key is to keep it in perspective, it's not personal because people never have the full story. You can't take positive feedback without also accepting the negative.

Initially all development was done by me and tested in singleplayer mode only. This shifted to me developing and testing in multiplayer at all times, server and client separate. It takes a little longer to develop this way initially but saves significant time and pain later. A decision is made about hotfixing once severe bugs are fixed. We then pass the build off to a group of closed testers, made up mainly of trusted server hosters, who try the build and help to verify it. Dwarden, who is the BIS Community Manager, gives up his own time to help with this process, he is very knowledgeable in reading the logs for the servers and finding issues, so he will always cast his eye over it too. Once that is done, we torrent the patch and then once it is all good to go it is released.

I think we will keep working on it as long as it makes sense too. I see development going well beyond 1.0 so long as sales and community interest is good.

I don't see myself giving up any time soon, but I do think that eventually the weight of the involvement will take its toll and I'll end up wanting to work on something else. That is a natural part of the development process. Over the coming months more and more of the functions I do now will be done by other people, so that more can be accomplished.

Community involvement has been key to DayZ's success, and is also a key part of the Bohemia Interactive philosophy. So yes, I think this kind of stuff can be a fantastic addition to the project.

Player developed content is awesome, but it does open up for the potential for hacking and exploiting. So this is something that it has to be balanced against. I think initially, we will lock it down as much as possible. Later we will look at allowing more freedom, once we have things setup and controlled in the right way.

The mechanism needs to be authentic, whatever it is. I think it is more a matter of giving more options to the players rather than punishing or rewarding particular player styles. Currently the only real challenge when you get good at the game, is to hunt other players. So we need to give more challenges, more tools, to the world.

Most of these issues are ones that would be solved in a standalone product. I'm confident we will have news on this soon.

I think it is more a question of design being underdone, than zombies being overdone. Poor design is to a game what a bad script is to a movie. I think the zombie projects out there, most of them are really interesting and exploring some great concepts. Project Zomboid is one of them, there is some great design work involved there. I think if designers explore stuff that makes sense to them, and interests them, then something really great comes out of that.