Rovient

The one that stands out as cleanest is the co-op mode. We have a lot of experience of designing co-op gameplay into the main progression of the game through our previous games, so we understand how best to create the levels around this kind of feature.

If you've ever tried playing Dawn of War II in co-operative mode you already know how compelling this form of multi-player can be in an RTS.

EDIT: One really compelling idea for competitive multiplayer is where both players control a reaper. They both work to convert the local population to their side (so an element of PVE worked into the PVP) while trying scupper the other player's efforts. Perhaps the winning scenario is who can reap the most Black Hearts in a specially designed environments, with those Black Hearts acting as choke points to force the players into conflict.

Currently the only way to control a human is to infect him/her with the plague. If you're talking about a potential competitive multi-player setting, we'll certainly be looking into it.

Special moves: yes! Throughout the game Grim will be able to unlock special abilities that he can unleash on the enemy during the levels. These are not always just offensive or defensive buffs (such as boosting attack damage of a unit or making them move 25% faster etc.), but are sometimes more strategic or sneaky! Perhaps a full frontal assault on a fort would result in too many lost units? How about spawning a bunch of scurrying, biting, short-lived plague rats from the piles of rubbish inside the fort's walls? Perhaps you can bite enough guards to attack from the inside?

An excellent question SirCabbage. Firstly, nothing is set in stone at such an early stage in development. There is a lot of design work that needs to be completed before we can give a cast iron response and things always change once you have something in-game to play with. However, let's consider what Death Inc. aspires to be.

Death Inc. is both a real time strategy game AND a business simulation. Ideally, both parts will be equally important and equally enjoyable in different ways. Personally I look forward to seeing how both aspects of the game feed into each other, with gameplay in the RTS being enhanced by the business sim, and the business sim benefiting from Souls, Black Hearts and perhaps rare objects collected in the levels.

So why have Black Hearts at all? Why not simply have Souls as a currency and make everything purchasable with Souls alone?

The most important reason is that we want players to have to play both aspects of the game. If we make all progression through the "story mode" tied just to Souls, then players could potentially unlock and complete the whole game experience without ever visiting a level. What happens in the case where the player needs to vanquish the King of England in the final level, which they unlocked by displaying excellent business acumen, only to find that they lack the RTS gameplay ability to defeat the end boss level?

Of course the opposite is also possible, whereby the player focuses on nothing but collecting Black Hearts through being a strategy Ninja and ignores Souls, research and development and nurturing their staff. In this case they'll not unlock to the special abilities that in many cases will be required to gain access to a portion of Black Hearts in the levels.

What Black Hearts do is offer a set of unique tokens that CAN’T be obtained via any other method than through RTS gameplay. We will balance the game so that number of Black Hearts needed to progress through the Story mode to the end is the minimum (perhaps just 1 per level), but finding more will of course provide the player with more options.

Hopefully this answers your question!

A serious answer for you bagheadinc: boxers.

It was actually one of our artists Jon (EcksAndWhy on reddit) who said "wouldn't it be great to play a zombie game where you control the horde?". We all agreed but in the same breath felt that zombie games had been overdone to say the least. Instead, we looked for a style and era that hadn't been done before and tried to work that gameplay concept in there. I feel that it works wonderfully!