Estimated reading time: 15 minutes, 3 seconds.
Experienced players should skip to the Ethics section. From there, estimated time: 9 minutes, 4 seconds.
A teardown is a document that dismantles a competing company, service, or product with the goal of informing business decisions. My business is Tinydark, a microstudio that produces ethical, experimental indie games. Today I’ll be tearing down a game known as Die2nite, a game released in December 2010 by Motion Twin. Prior to this release was the French-language version known as Hordes, released on July 2008.
Overview
It’s the zombie apocalypse.
A town is randomly generated and players are assigned to it with the goal of surviving as long as possible. The game begins once 40 players have entered. Each player will play a self-determined role for the survival of the town: some will scavenge outside of town, others will construct buildings, and brave souls will risk their lives camping overnight in the World Beyond for a copy of a building’s blueprint. These player decisions are enacted using AP: Action Points, which are given at the start of each new Day and are replenished through food, water, alcohol and drugs.
The Attack
At midnight, the zombie horde attacks. Defense is up to players inside the town walls. Some will stand on the battlements as Watchmen, risking their lives and inventory to personally defend the town, while others cower in their homes. Defense is simple: 1 Zombie eats 1 Defense. Any zombies over Defense enter the town and terrorize the citizens, leaving personal survival up to luck and the citizen’s Home Defense. When the attack is over, the loop begins again, with a greater number of zombies in the next wave.
The World Beyond
Leaving the town presents the player with a grid and coordinate-based system of travel. Taking a step in any direction will cost 1 AP, meaning each step costs a total of 2 AP if they plan to make a return trip. Once on a new tile (or “square”, “coordinate”), the player is given the ability to scavenge or camp. Players have limited inventory spots to hold supplies and scavenged items.
Scavenging will immediately search to find an item, and then start a two-hour timer to continue searching while the player sits on the tile. The player will autosearch while offline, with the responsibility that they must return to town before the gates close. Zones eventually become permanently depleted and return only scrap materials. Scavengers and the loot they return with are critical to the success of a town and it is a thrilling, if not dangerous, role.
Camping allows the player to survive one night in the World Beyond, enabling farther trips and rewarding a scavenging bonus the next day. When a player finds a good spot, they can spend AP to improve the area and camp out there. There is a risk of death that scales on how far you are from the town, and only Survivalist heroes can max out at 100% safety.
Every move to a tile presents a risk of being outnumbered, and immediately trapped, by zombies. In that case you can either wait for help, try a hard luck challenge to kill one with your bare hands, or escape but leave with an injury. For this reason, it’s best to travel in groups, which can be difficult in PUG towns.
Finally, buildings known as ruins exist in the World Beyond. Campers often only camp in ruins, which provide protection and reward a blueprint when finished. Blueprints are used to unlock buildings in town. Examples of ruins include an abandoned bunker, cave, destroyed pharmacy, and a restaurant.
Heroes are premium (cash) players. Being a hero costs $11.50 for 31 Days at the time of writing. The 200 Day pack costs $69 and rewards a very useful item. Days only tick down when you actually play a day in-game.
Being a hero allows the player to choose one of six classes:
- Scavengers find many more items when searching in the World Beyond.
- Scouts can go through zones with zombies in them undetected.
- Guardians have more control points in a zone and contribute defense to a town just by being inside the gates at night.
- Tamers can use their dog to send objects back to town while in the World Beyond, effectively doubling their inventory size. Their dog provides a little more defense when acting as a Watchman.
- Technicians have an additional action bank: Construction Points, used to construct buildings.
- Survivalists are able to find food or water in the desert once per day, and are capable of having a 100% camping success rate.
In addition, Heroes unlock skills the more time they spend as Heroes. Some of these are very powerful and give incentive to keep paying the Hero subscription: it really sucks to lose these abilities when you run out of Days.
It
is possible to earn Hero Days without payment. The Last
Man Standing
in a town will receive free Hero Days based on how long the town
survived. Only one person can receive this; this incentivizes
selfish play, meaning the undead are not always your biggest threat.
It could be poisoned food, you may be locked out of town, or perhaps
even eaten by a half-zombie player.
One
must work toward both the survival of the town and the preservation
of one’s self to receive an abundance of soul points and hero days.
Game Loop
Each day, the player will log in and spend their AP. 6 are available by default, and a player can receive 6-8 AP from food, water, alcohol, and drugs, giving a max of 30-33 AP. (at least without drug addiction) These can be spent as follows:
- Directly building constructions
- Converting materials
- Repairing items
- Moving around the World Beyond to scavenge
- Misc. uses, such as Guardians spending 1 AP to temporarily increase town Defense through the guard tower
As 40 people spend their AP, each player’s personal agency improves the town’s chance of survival. It is critical to have diverse roles in the community: scavengers bring in materials. Buildings won’t be built without builders. Advanced blueprints won’t be found without campers. Players often take on multiple roles during a town’s lifespan.
Other Elements
Die2nite’s a complex game. A few other notables:
- Water supplies can be sparse, but it is both essential to life and a powerful weapon vs. zombies: they absolutely disintegrate at the touch of it.
- The Shaman is a democratically elected role which allows a player to work with the souls of the dead; a sort of recompense for losing fellow citizens. They can summon rain to fill water reserves.
- Ghouls are players who’ve engaged in cannibalism — eating players’ remains or certain rare items — and come out of it half-zombie. They can devour one citizen per day and will be awarded a Hero Day for each. A single punch from a citizen will kill the ghoul.
- Drinking alcohol results in nonsensical speech on the forums, and items sent through the mail will sometimes end up at the wrong person. Similarly, becoming Terrified during the night attack will cause one’s speech to become erratic, and head injuries result in slurred speech. Sadly, these can all be circumvented through posting the same message multiple times.
- Distinctions are a huge part of D2N culture. They’re effectively achievements and they award titles once you’ve done something enough times. They can affect player behavior and sometimes communities will raffle off the ability to build a certain item for a distinction.
Ethics
Die2nite’s core engagement and monetization are unethical.
Realtime Dedication
The most egregious offense is baked directly into the game’s core. Because so much of the game is dependent on realtime interaction, optimal play requires that the player is engaged throughout the day. The best players will log in as soon after the attack as possible so that they may begin their duties.
Scavenging is the most problematic. Since areas deplete after so many searches, and it is never known to any player how many searches are left, you could set your character to search overnight but deplete at the first tick. The player implicitly understands this and may check in throughout the day, or even night.
If in the World Beyond, the player has to manage when to return to the town. This is usually an hour before attack so as to maximize efficiency. If they don’t make it, it’s instant death and they earn no distinctions for that Day. Navigation in the World Beyond is Flash-based and the the player must be at a PC, or technically apt enough to get it running on the phone, in order to move.
Things are quieter in town, but someone still must close the gate. As the population dwindles, fewer people are available for this critical task, meaning those who are less able to do it are forced to check in, or die. Organized play usually makes gate-closing a trivial task, but the point stands: when you require players to check in at a certain hour, they could be anywhere and it could be any time. In-law’s for Christmas, birthday party on the weekend, engaging in an activity in which they simply cannot use a device for a while.
More than a few times I have inconvenienced my real life just to return to the game. Add into it the guilt of letting your town down, and the simple act of returning can be more than a chore, but also a matter of duty. Players often set alarms to remind them to return. It is only unethical games that punish players for not logging in. (“your castle will be destroyed in 15 minutes”) A push notification for a potentially missed opportunity, such as capitalizing on a temporary 2x resource bonus, is not unethical engagement.
Pay 2 Win
Heroes are very powerful. One could argue they should be — the game would not exist without them — but the power disparity is far too great. Returning to resident class after six months of being a hero was so hard that I ended up quitting; one becomes accustomed to being an all-powerful sentinel. The moment I quit was when I was trapped by zombies in a zone and reached for an escape-hatch item that I’d earned by spending $60 in Hero Days. When I went to use it, I learned I had to become a hero again, and the game even taunted me about it.
While we strive for self-sustainment, it will not be achieved by intentionally dooming the player and offering them a life-saving resource for real money.
— tinydark monetization pillar
Heroes are just as eligible for earning Hero Days as residents are by being the last survivor in a town, but with an added bonus: they get extra personal defense, they get easy access to certain items, and even a way to avoid death that they might otherwise have suffered. This makes it harder for f2p players to become heroes; the rich become richer.
Design Concerns
The ethical problem of realtime dedication is a huge game-defining concern. Player churn is high and pug towns often do not entail playing with 40 people, but anywhere from 25-30 after three days of inactivity causes them to dehydrate.
An immersive tutorial would probably help, but there’s enough information in the Newbie Mode UI that anyone should be able to get by. Still, often the first question a newbie has is what to do.
Motion Twin’s achilles heel is luck-centric design, and it shows in Die2nite. Indeed the majority of items and buildings are randomly discovered, and the map is randomized such that important locations can spawn very close or far from a town.
Finally, the game encourages passive aggression. The gate is one of the worst mechanics in Die2nite, and the game would be wholly better without it. The implications that Last Man Standing brings are worth having, but a scaling reward system for highly successful towns would be welcome: give 2+ players some hero days if they managed to be highly successful.
The Tinydark Takeaway
Given
Adobe’s announcement of discontinuing Flash in 2020 and Motion Twin’s
disinterest in the Twinoid platform, it is assumed we will completely
lose access to Die2nite before 2021. If proven viable, tinydark could
create a spiritual successor to D2N.
Our
proprietary game engine’s development turns toward multiplayer
experiences, a spiritual successor to
D2N
is a strong
possibility for the studio.
Die2nite’s design is experimental and the experiment wasn’t a huge success; for how many people sign up to towns, many go inactive soon after and D2N in particular has had a lot of exposure it hasn’t been able to capitalize on. What makes D2N great is also its greatest weaknesses, and overcoming those obstacles while still retaining the feel of the game may be impossible.
But there’s a ton of value in trying. For a small studio striving to one day be full-time, filling a void left by a dying game can provide a good opportunity for growth. The game design also lends itself to a subscription model: Die2nite isn’t a game you pick up for three days and drop for a month. You’re surviving sometimes as long as 21 days with the same character in the same town, to do it all again next time. To this day, some top players have never had a long stretch of time where they’d actually quit. Subscription models are sustainable and we could charge significantly less for “hero time”.
Proposed Design Improvements
Here are some cursory, macro-level changes that I have in mind.
1, 5, 20, 40, 100 Players
The game should be able to be played in small groups, with scaling difficulty. Truthfully, supporting a 1 player map is a dream, but I would like to strive for it. Organized play will not require the “coalition jumpers” that D2N does.
Each tier of segregation will allow the creation of a character: you’ll be able to have a solo character, a character each in a small 5 map or an epic 100 map. This will allow the player to stay engaged with the game even if they are waiting on others’ actions. I am considering a means of hotjoining a town.
The Attack
I am having a lot of difficulty imagining an ethical system involving one single attack phase per day. What may happen is that hordes work their way toward the town, Walking Dead style, organically. These hordes would be composed of existent, killable zombies. Advanced notice would be given for this event. The town falling will send the map into panic mode.
Direct zombie combat will be handled by the engine’s encounter system and will be auto-attack, though not necessarily simple. The town’s defense will likely be handled by the same system, with everyone joining a “party” and the zombies aggro’d to defensive structures first. Walls may not initially be built for the players.
Immersive Design
There’s a lot of potential in the environment that videogames rarely realize due to the nature of 3D environments. As I sit in an office typing this teardown, I see a desk that can be used a barricade, dumbbells as weapons, furniture that could be deconstructed, electronics that could be used to confuse a zombie horde, and some food. Not only is it nonsensical that five players hitting Search on a building removes every useful thing from it, but it does the design an injustice: our real world is littered with useful objects, but in the apocalypse, it’s a matter of what we can carry. Inventory management and deconstructing objects will be a focus.
Explorable areas should have multiple buildings, if the locale allows, and I would like that to be the default means of finding useful items.
Soul XP and Composite Classes
There will be soul experience similar to how Die2nite works: the longer you survive, the higher the score. I want to offer bonuses based on levels of participation, but that will be dependent on how participation is defined, and that’s difficult to measure. Soul experience will be level-based and each level will offer new options to build out your future survivors.
From Level 1, the player will be offered only the ability to be a basic survivor. Even modest success in their first town will reward enough exp for Level 2, which will give them a few options to choose as a class. As the player progresses, more classes will become available for play, and eventually I expect that we will offer a perk slot in addition to the class. This offers both horizontal and vertical progression, but with an emphasis on the horizontal once the perk slot is unlocked.
“Heroes” will be rewarded with the ability to specialize their class; a tamer’s dog could return sooner, a looter may be able to find an object in a depleted building, a cook may spawn with ingredients. Alternatively, simply offer them the ability to take a second class.
There is one problem with accruing soul XP: I want people to be able to play multiple characters across town types. This experience system would encourage people to make as many chars as they can, to progress quickly. I may have to limit XP earned, and perhaps unlimit it for subscribers/heroes. Another suggestion has been to award XP to characters themselves, who’d be persistent entities.
A Town At All?
More likely to be a game mode than the default gameplay, but people could random spawn anywhere (safe) on the map. I like the idea of towns being organically created around anchor buildings, but I fear the system’s far too ambitious for one tiny dev.
Other Mentionables
There will be distinctions. (already built into The Hub) Distinctions that encourage self-centric play should not exist; players should not earn distinctions for fixing certain broken items, thus using resources.
I am considering different types of zombies, maybe horde leaders. Think of the special infected from Left 4 Dead.
More support for roleplay, writing character descriptions and nick-naming people.
The game should be good at telling game stories. The time the player took a risk, searched that extra spot, found that crucial item or building, made it home just in time.
Similar Games
Grimmwood (dead)
Successfully iterated on d2n’s design, and a Steam release is fantastic progression for the genre. Unfortunately it collapsed under financial weight. Die2nite’s formula is too niche to rely on a hit-based model and the game was not popular enough to keep the servers running.
Arctic Lands (dead as of 2020)
Inspired by Die2nite, but snow where there was sand. More emphasis is placed on personal survival and I suspect The Long Dark was an inspiration for the developer. Unfortunately its development appears to be stagnating and the game is technically unimpressive.