Dead in Antares News

[p]Hello Space survivors![/p][p][/p][p]We hope you're doing okay! Summer is finally here, and despite the heatwave that's trying to kill us (we don't have the same thermostat as our characters, sadly. but at least we're not on an unknown planet, thousands of lightyears from earth, so we'd say it could be worse).[/p][p][/p][p]Today is not an usual "Captain's Log" (number 3 is coming out soon, don't worry!!), but we still have some GREAT NEWS for you![/p][p][/p][p]We had the opportunity to take part in Tacticon! Please take a look at our newest trailer:[/p][p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p][/p][p]That's right, next month, on August 27th (for the tenth year anniversary of Dead in Bermuda!), we will release the demo of Dead in Antares! And you can already add the demo to your wishlist![/p][p][/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p][p]You'll be able to try the very first days of your adventure, explore the new systems, and meet part of the cast of characters that will try not to die on your watch.[/p][p][/p][p]Tacticon is a premier Steam-based digital event organized by publishers Firesquid and Hooded Horse, for its fourth year, celebrating the best from the world of strategy, management, and simulation games from now until July 21.[/p][p]This year’s event kicked off with another showcase hosted by Hooded Horse’s own Renee April, with cool trailers, reveals, and announcements revealed during the 60-minute broadcast.[/p][p][/p][p]Here's the sale page, where you'll find a lot of other cool strategy/management/simulation game that we can easily recommend![/p][p]https://store.steampowered.com/sale/tacticon2025[/p][p]Take care

[p]Hey space survivors, it’s time for another dev blog!
[/p][p]A bit of news from the team, first. Everyone is hard at work revamping the battle system of Dead In Antares. It’s a big chunk of gameplay with a lot of new things to implement, so it has taken quite a bit of time. We’re quite excited by this new battle system, we kept the overall view and flow but we changed a lot of things on the game design side.
[/p][p]For now, I can talk a bit more about how we modified the Exploration system from Dead In Vinland. We always found that this part of gameplay needed some love, it took a lot of shortcuts and didn’t really feel like exploring an unknown land. We tried to input some new interesting ideas here.[/p][p][/p][p]First and foremost we now shifted to an Expedition system.[/p][p][/p][p]Instead of virtually sending characters to “explore” in a camp entity, you now set up expeditions.[/p][p][/p][p]Every day, you can choose to launch 1 expedition in order to examine the content of a tile that has been previously discovered by the Radar entity, in the camp. The Radar will uncover several tiles each time you use it, and when you feel ready you can send 3 characters to explore one or more tiles in a row, before going back to camp.
[/p][p][/p][p]Sending people in expedition will cost 1 unit of Water per character. You can choose to give them any type of water if you are lacking in pure, clear water (or if you just don’t like your characters, no judging).[/p][p][/p][p]We made the choice that sending people to expeditions is asynchronous from the time passed in the camp: the expedition phase is self-contained, you play it until you get back to camp and you can resume your turn there. Characters coming back from exploration will be available for their daily tasks, but they will endure the Fatigue cost of the expedition. So it’s not entirely “free” either.[/p][p][/p][p]After you've selected your expedition team, you’ll get access to the map and from there you will be able to choose a discovered tile to explore. The farther the tile is from the camp tile, the more fatigued your team will be! (Of course you’ll be able to lower this with camp upgrades, to explore farther)[/p][p][/p][p]Early in the game, you’ll be able to explore more than 1 tile every expedition. Then the Fatigue cost will be calculated from the distance between the tile you’re leaving to the new one, so you’ll have to plan a bit your travels to maximize each expeditions.[/p][p]
[/p][p][/p][p]Of course, roaming around camp is dangerous, so each time you travel to a new tile there will be a chance you’ll trigger an encounter with a foe, the farther the destination tile is the more chances you’ll get.[/p][p]As you can imagine, this is NOT how this will actually look like in the game[/p][p][/p][p]Here, we wanted to give more player agency. First the team will make a Stealth Skillcheck: if passed, you’ll then have 2 options, either you sneak around and get access to the tile without combat, or you ambush them, getting a small advantage during the battle (and after that, you’ll get access to the tile).[/p][p][/p][p]If you fail the skillcheck, we’ll still give you the option to retreat: you’ll then lose 1 expedition point and get Fatigued as if you did the exploration, but without the reward. If you still have exploration points, you can try again or go to another tile.[/p][p][/p][p]With that, we want to give players more control on the flow of the game: maybe you just don’t want to fight because your characters are already in bad shape, or because you didn’t bring your best fighter along with you. But you’ll maybe want to force battles to get you some loot, if you are confident. It’s up to you!

[/p][p][/p][p]When you finally arrive on the tile, you can at last interact with its content. You’ll be shown a screen like this, with a nice background showing the biome you are exploring and an “entity” (that’s what we call them), which can be anything really: a small object, a big weird tree, NPCs (whoops, is that a spoiler?)… [/p][p][/p][p]We wanted to streamline a bit more the exploration content here: an entity will have only 1 and 1 only point of entry - you click on it and interact with it - and most of them will present to the player some straightforward choices. We’ll describe a bit what kind of challenge you’re facing, and then we’ll give you a small amount of choices.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]These choices can be of many types, but globally we want the player to have more infos on the possible outcomes: while hovering on a choice, you’ll be able to see the positives and negatives outcomes, if there is a skillcheck you’ll get the exact information on that, and finally we also added some agenda on choosing “who” will be doing the action. You’ll maybe want to use a character with a skill that will boost the resources gained, but also maybe be wary of any negative impact on their health.
[/p][p]You’ll also get access to more complicated, non predictable storyline entities, but most of the time we want you to make educated choices on which risks you will be taking, and which rewards is more impactful for you at a set time. (a bit more boardgamey if you like)
[/p][p][/p][p]And that concludes this diary focused on the exploration part of the game! Of course, a lot of the fun will reside in discovering those weird entities and what outcomes they can provide. We’re making quite a quantity of strange and interesting thingies, see above one of the latest ones drawn by our talented HUMAN artists (*wink* *wink*)...[/p][p]
That's all for today![/p][p][/p][p]If you have any question related to the dev, please feel free to let us know in the comments here or on our Discord server![/p]

Hello Survivors!

We hope you're doing well, as we're finally getting close to summer. Which probably means that it will be way too hot once again, and we'll try not to melt in our office. For now, we're good.

We have some amazing news!

We had the opportunity to be part of the "ActuGaming French Direct" (or AGFD).

AG French Direct is an event that highlights French and French-Speaking games through a broadcast rich in exclusive announcements and new trailers, followed by exclusive demos on Steam!

For the occasion, the team of AG came to our office and recorded a dev diary about the making of Dead in Antares. You might even see some never-seen before footage of the game ;)

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

And we're using this opportunity to make a very special announcement: we will release a public demo of Dead in Antares this summer!

Are you excited about the release of Dead in Antares?

Hello everyone, and welcome to the first Captain's Log as we start the blogposts!

We’ll try to give you some exclusive insights every month until the final release. Don’t hesitate to ask questions in the commentaries section or in our dedicated discord.

Just a word of caution beforehand: I’ll repeat this every time, but don’t forget that everything that you see and read here is heavily work in progress! Some things aren’t even implemented into the game yet, so take it as it is. A game like Dead in Antares is systemic by essence, so the sad counterpart is that we can’t really have a good feeling of systems during development until everything falls really into place and we can see it all interacting with each other, so in the final months/weeks we may change a lot of things - we’ll for sure ask for the help of a few dedicated beta testers to help us fine tune, so keep posted.

We got a lot of messages from returning players from the previous episodes in the series (Dead in Bermuda and Dead in Vinland). We want to say how cool it is to see returning players who loved the first games in the series! And it's always fun to see new debates about those games! This is why today, we're focusing on a few of the features that will be different/updated in Dead in Antares!

[h2]Character States[/h2]

We didn’t change a lot here since Dead in Vinland, the major modification has been to turn “Depression” into “Stress”. We feel it conveys better cohesiveness with the other states gauges, and it’s more open to interpretation so we can use it more easily.



A major gameplay change that is quite invisible here for now is also that we changed how states interact with the activities efficiency: In Dead in Vinland, every single % of Fatigue would mean a negative impact on everything. In Dead in Antares, we want to work more with thresholds. More on that in another Dev Blog maybe.

[h2]Character Skills[/h2]

To reflect on the SF setting of Dead in Antares, we had to make quite a lot of changes into the skillset of our characters. A lot more of science-related skills, of course, but we also iterated a lot on all these so that they fit well with all the activities in the camp. More on that in a detailed Dev Blog about camp stations, but the overall idea is that every skill is useful in more than one activity. We also reduced the number of non-innate skills.



[h2]Energy System[/h2]

One major addition to Dead in Antares is that you now have needs in electricity for some aspects of the game that you have to manage. In the meantime, we kicked out the fire management system, which was obsolete considering the setting.



So how does it work? Every day, the camp produces some Energy Units which are accumulated in low-capacity batteries, which you can upgrade later in the game..

Some activities will now require 1 Energy Unit on use to be available during the day. That’s everything needing high tech or computers (of course, fishing or water fetching won’t cost any electricity…).

And some activities will have the option of an Energy Boost: you can use 1 Energy Unit to boost the outcome of the activity. Think about adding a chainsaw in your lumberjacking daily routine, sure it will help.

Considering that every night, your batteries automatically replenish in full, it’s not an overarching system where you will have to carefully plan your energy usage, but it can lead to some interesting min-maxing choices at critical times.

Of course, we added a camp station to fiddle with Energy production: you now have a generator that you have to manually activate to produce some Energy Units. You can also burn some carbon resources to charge the batteries.






[h2]Shelter & Thermostat[/h2]

In Dead in Antares, we wanted to give a bit more “presence” to the shelter. It’s a chunk of the spaceship where the team can rest, eat and sleep.
The Shelter now occupies its own screen in the camp, and you can see unused characters resting there. For those familiar with Dead in Vinland, we merged the old shelter and the rest area entities into one, and that’s also in the same screen that the team will regroup at night to share food, ware, stories, and have a well deserved rest.

To give it a bit more substance, we added a new system which makes use of the Energy system: you’ll now have to take care of the heating of the habitat. External weather will now be more impactful and bring some temperature modifiers, slowly changing the internal temperature over time. Cold nights are not so good for relieving our characters from their daily Fatigue, and you don’t want them to suffocate either.

Of course we'll give you means to alleviate that with the Thermostat. It basically is a reversible air conditioner… It will try to bring back the internal temperature towards the “comfortable” state, which of course is the better one, but it will cost you some precious Energy Units doing so.

Look at this beautiful screen mockup made by our designers, turned into satisfying UI art:





[h2]Water types[/h2]

Another resource which has a big impact on our characters’ survival: Water.

We tried to make it a bit more flexible and interesting by adding a third water type, for a total of 3. And the major change is that you can now drink any type of water during the “share the water” phase, the unclean one will just be less potent and will give you some nasty disease points… So you’ll certainly want to give clean water to your little team as soon as you can, considering that purifying water is rather costly in resources and in Energy.



Water will also be a critical resource for exploring the map of Antares, but we’ll talk about it in another Dev Blog.

Generator and Water Supplies in the camp


That’s it for today! As you can see, we tried to keep the fundamentals of Dead in Vinland while adapting to the new setting and refining some old systems. We try to be less unidirectional in each element of the game, to create some interesting intrications between them - without burdening the player with overcomplicated stuff.

If you have questions about the game, please feel free to ask them in the comments, and we'll be more than happy to answer them if we can for the next blogpost!

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.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

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