1. Don't be a dingus
2. Try to be helpful to others. Kindly direct people to info they may have missed.
3. Lean more towards "real life etiquette" rather than "internet forum behavior"
4. Generally try to stay on-topic, some veering off is ok.

I don't want to spend a ton of time moderating, I'd rather work on the game. Due to this, I reserve the right to nuke topics from orbit if someone's going out of their way to be tiresome. I don't do this often, but try not to be too mystified if it happens.


If you want more frequent news than major news that we post as Steam Announcements, follow me on Twitter or Facebook:

http://www.twitter.com/rocketcatgames/
http://www.facebook.com/rocketcatgames/


1. What are you working on next for updates?

See this gigantic board for what we're working on next:

Death Road to Canada Update Plans MEGABOARD[trello.com]

Make sure to read that initial post. Summary: STUFF HAPPENS, so update plans can change all the time. Still, this is a good resource to know what we're considering.

We will also do Announcements in the News section for when a big update is coming. On the way to an update, there are also Testing Branches were you can see the changes early, as they happen. Check the News section for details on how to access the testing branch when those are up.


2. I have a suggestion for the game, can I post it?

Please do. There's a Suggestions sub forum for this. I never, ever read that forum, ever, but often something posted to Suggestions will coincidentally show up in the game.

Also if you see me typing in that forum it's a forum bug, typo, or maybe some kind of impostor.


3. What about online multiplayer/localization/workshop support/other big feature?

All of these have been on the list (now on the board) for a long time. They're big additions, especially online. We'll try for them, and in some cases have already tried but run into problems.

For online multiplayer specifically, the likely case is that we have to do a followup or sequel first, look at what we did to make it work, and then see if we can back-port it to Death Road to Canada. Best case is that we at least have to do a prototype game first. Worst case is that we try and fail, which would make online multiplayer sequel-only (unless you use the Hamachi hack to do online multiplayer right now).

The problem with workshop is mostly getting stacking mods to work. I'm not sure if this is possible without a sequel. It would be easier to do loading one mod at a time, which would allow for bigger all-in-one style mods.

Summary: We'll try, [death road flashing text] NO PROMISES [/death].


4. Will you port this to Xbooooone/Sony/Switch/Ouya/etc?

Maybe! We wouldn't handle the ports ourselves. We have to negotiate with a porting company to do it. We might be in talks for some of these now, but generally can't say much due to NDA's.

Android is on its way. It's out on iOS right now, check http://www.deathroadtocanada.com for store links.

Switch is likely only if it gets on other consoles first and is successful on there.


5. Any plans to add special zombies?

Nope. The point of the game is to do Romero zombies convincingly, which no one else bothers trying, for the most part. That is, one zombie type, extremely slow and not dangerous alone, but in gigantic groups that attempt to track you down.

We'll likely make other games with lots of monster types. My past games like Wayward Souls have tons of enemy types, too. But only one enemy type for Death Road, unless you count pre-DUODENUM propane tanks as an enemy type.


6. What was your inspiration for making Death Road to Canada?

Initially I wanted to make a big procedurally generated zombie game. The design changed from its earliest incarnations, where it was going to at first be more of a one-city small scale open world survival game. Or something like Rebuild, where you reclaimed zombie areas for civilization. It morphed into the road-trip small location form it has today, as a way to address the problems I saw with large scale worlds.

Oregon Trail is a vague inspiration for the road trip parts. I didn't want to make something too similar to it. I will accept "it's like Oregon Trail" comparisons if it sells copies though haha.

A lot of the theme for Death Road is inspired by how the zombie genre presents itself, versus how unintentionally goofy it can be. A big specific inspiration for this was the last full episode of The Walking Dead I ever watched. It was the one where Sheriff Ted Times screams "CAAAAAAAAAAAAARL" for about 40 minutes.



These questions don't come up as much as the above, but they come up enough where I thought I'd address them here.


A. What about an Endless Mode?

I wanted to do this really early on after the launch of the game. I was planning on it for the Spleen update. The problem was I couldn't find a particularly good way to make it FUN.

It's still on the list AKA the board. I'll likely try to tackle it again once I do a Game Modes update.


B. Why is this game so RNG based?

I don't think it's too bad, based on what I see from players. My big test here is: Can some people reliably win the game over and over? The answer is yes, at least for all but the highest difficulty modes. This changes for K*E*P*A Mode, but at that level of difficulty I'm way less concerned for player safety than I am with Normal Mode or Deadlier Road.

Even the random stuff in the game, for the majority of cases, have built in things to make it more predictable and fair. My goal is to appear random and have some level of uncertainty, but also have safeguards for fairness. Some examples:

- Most stat checks in the game automatically succeed if you have over 4 ( The :) smiley ) in a stat.

- You can get 3 or so with-car bandit events per game. If you lose your car, the walking bandit events are in their own rotation so there's no limit to them. However even then, you can only get so many walking bandit events per X walk events.

- Most events can't outright kill you. Generally you're safe at full health, barring some weird exceptions.

That said, I do read feedback on tweaking difficulty. In the past I've done a lot of requested tweaks to various events. If you think something specifically seems unfair, post about it and I'll likely see it and consider it.