DEADCRAFT Developer Blog #1: Combining zombie action, zombie survival, and zombie crafting

This is Hisashi Fujii, the producer of DEADCRAFT at Marvelous.

The idea for this game came from Kenichiro Tsukuda, the head of Marvelous Global Games Studio, who asked me if I would be interested in doing a life simulation game set in a post-apocalyptic world.

I asked, “Do you mean post-apocalyptic farming?” and he replied, “Doesn’t that sound fun?” I was quite interested in the subject, so I immediately agreed and created a proposal that combined Tsukuda’s vision with my own.

In the early stages, our plan was to utilize elements of our company’s signature farming simulation titles with a post-apocalyptic twist. Given the setting, we imagined bandits coming to steal your water and seeds, and even taking away your precious crops. If they robbed you, rob them back! Then players could kill bandits and use their corpses as fertilizer for their fields. Though not all of our early ideas made it into the final product, this was our vision for a life simulation game set after the end of life as we know it. We also decided to incorporate roaming bands of zombies into the setting, letting the player grow zombies as “crops” in their field.

Of course, an important part of the simulation genre is enjoying life itself, so we decided to think beyond the post-apocalyptic setting and introduce some original elements, creating a brand-new survival simulation game. From that, we decided the main character should be a half-zombie who uses special undead powers to survive.

We started development in March 2020, and soon after we were forced to work from home due to COVID…
In game development, the director, planners, and other staff must meet frequently at the start of the project to decide on design specifications. Working remotely made this more difficult and introduced other challenges we were not used to. I am happy that we will be able to successfully launch the game under such circumstances, and I’m sincerely grateful to the entire team for their hard work.

Hisashi Fujii
DEADCRAFT Producer

*Screenshots captured from a game still in development.