Interview With Sebastian Haley Of Downward Viral, Developers Of Z. Year One

I recently had the chance to sit down with Sebastian Haley of Downward Viral to discuss their upcoming free-to-play digital card game Z. Year One. We talked about Haley's frustrations with other card games, what this Kickstarter means for the game, and more.

Can you explain, for our readers, how the game works and how a typical match might go?

Haley: The elevator pitch is Magic: The Gathering, or Hearthstone, meets The Walking Dead. If you’re familiar with any of those games (or even Yu-Gi-Oh) Z. draws a lot of inspiration from those games, what I like about them, and also Z. was designed around things I didn’t like from other games. I took all those things out and avoided doing them. If they frustrated me I didn’t want to put them into my own game.

Then, on top of that, there is a location deck. The location deck goes in the middle of the playfield and the survivors have to search it. By doing so they’ll encounter new items and weapons and characters. It makes it feel more like a movie with a setting and an environment, rather than just a survivor and a zombie player throwing cards at each other.

You go back and forth. The Fallen try to wipe out the survivors and the survivors try to achieve their objective.

What were some design elements that you left out that frustrated you?

One of the biggest issues that I have with Magic is resources. I’m going to win over like ten of your readers and piss off like a thousand of them, but I’m not a fan of Magic’s resources at all. I think that, just like using dice to determine combat prowess and rolls, randomized resources in a competitive card game is not fun or balanced.

The Survivors and the Fallen are asymmetrical. They work a little differently from each other. The Survivors have a lot of control over their resource management. Both factions get one resource, whether it’s supplies or aggro for the Fallen, at the start of every turn.

The Survivors have to get more supplies by searching. So just by searching they get another supply and then they encounter whatever the card was from the location deck. They can also do things like complete events or scavenge dead bodies that they’ve killed from the other player and stuff like that. They can also salvage cards from their hand or anything that they’ve picked up. So let’s say you have a shovel and you go “oh, I don’t really need this.” You can salvage it and then get another resource.

There are all these different ways that you can get extra supplies, but, when you spend supplies, they’re gone forever. In Magic, your mana resets at the start of every turn. With the Survivors, their supplies are permanently lost. You really have to use all of those ways at your disposal to get resources. You actually have to do that.

The Fallen work a little bit differently. They are more like mana or crystals from Hearthstone, except that the resources don’t come out of your deck. You get one at the beginning of every turn automatically. Then you get “burst aggro” whenever the survivors make noise. So if the survivors shoot a gun or blow something up or step on glass—something like that—you will get a certain amount of temporary resources that you have to use by the end of your next turn. But it balances out. Guns are really, really powerful. If someone comes running in with dual AK-47s and shoots a bunch of Fallen up, it’s pretty devastating, but on the next turn, you might be able to play a Fallen Horror, which are kind of like our big, heroic named cards, or do a lot more than you would have if they hadn’t given you those extra resources.

I should say that the Fallen aggro is not permanently spent. It automatically resets. The idea there is that, over time, the Survivors are making more and more noise, attracting more and more Fallen to their location and it becomes more and more dangerous.

How is it balanced? Are the zombies considered weak, as in your stereotypical zombie scenario, or is it more balanced because it’s a card game?

Zombies have really been done—I don’t want to say to death—but they’ve been done a lot over the past few years. Zombies are so hot right now. And so, I wanted to do something different. In my first iPhone game—don’t play it, it wasn’t that great, but it was called Pocket Zombie—you could play as the zombie. You chased down these cartoonish survivors, ate them, and then used their brains to power you up and buy a zombie dog, a zombie girlfriend, and stuff like that.

With Z, I wanted the players to be able to play as the Survivors or the Fallen. The Fallen needed to be cool. They needed to be intimidating and The Walking Dead zombies are not intimidating. The Walking Dead has turned zombies into a joke or an afterthought and it’s more about the survivor versus survivor conflicts. For the Fallen, they are not undead. They’re not rage infected. It’s this virus. I can’t get into it without spoiling the story. But they are more physically fit than any of the survivors. Even the lowest level roamer in our game is more aggressive and powerful than the most fit scavenger.

You work your way up the hierarchy of Fallen and you get ravagers that are really fast, can dodge bullets, and stuff like that. The big thing about the Fallen is that they don’t feel fear and they don’t feel pain, and that makes them very, very dangerous. They’re just like hunters.

The game is balanced to where it’s not like one side is always going to win. For a long time the Fallen would always win because they were so powerful. I didn’t nerf them. I’m not a fan of nerfing things. I had to find a way to give the Survivors better tools to survive. The story of Z. is that the Survivors have to find a way to combat this enemy. I had to literally design cards and rethink how the Survivors worked to make them able to survive against the Fallen. So now it’s pretty balanced and there’s an asymmetrical aspect to it. If you let the Survivors do their own thing and don’t attack them, they can get away from you pretty quickly, but if you let the Fallen build up and you shoot off guns like a madman and don’t think about the consequences, the Fallen can overwhelm you really, really quickly.

The short answer is that it is balanced, but the Fallen make a really cool enemy and they needed to be really cool for the players that play as the Fallen. I think we’ve done that. When we do blind playtests people immediately start looking through their Fallen cards and they’re like, “oh, I can’t wait to play the Bride.” Or they’ll look at their opponent and they’ll smirk like, “I’ve got something really cool that I’m going to use to kill you.”

To clarify, would you say they’re closer to Resident Evil 4 or 5 than Walking Dead zombies?

I wouldn’t compare anything I do to the later Resident Evils just because, but I would say that the thing about Resident Evil 4 and 5 is that they have a slight intelligence. They’re like farmers and they do stuff when they’re not attacking you. In Z there isn’t any of that. There’s no leftover of what they used to be. They’re solely there to hunt. When they’re not hunting survivors and either eating them or trying to convert them into more Fallen they will roam. That’s why we call the basic Fallen roamers. Because that’s what they do. Also, Walkers was taken.

They also can’t use weapons or items, which is another thing Resident Evil does. You’re not going to see any zombies carrying assault rifles. They do carry them, like if you find a military Fallen, it will have a gun in its holster strapped to it. You can kill it and take the gun from it. That’s how the Survivors get a lot of their really cool guns.

Imagine a human being who doesn’t feel fear, doesn’t feel pain, doesn’t care about anything else, and is just out to kill you or eat you. That’s what the Fallen are.

You said that originally the Fallen were winning a lot. Was it ever a goal to make it so that the Fallen always win, but it was a matter of how long the Survivors stayed alive, like most zombie scenarios?

I know this is somewhat bad for a competitive game, but I liked the idea of hopelessness. There have been a few times where someone totally outplays the Fallen. They know the game better and they had the right combination of cards, which in the final game you can’t do. We have a balanced matchmaking system that only matches you with the proper opponent. But there were a few times where the Survivors wiped the floor with the Fallen and I was like “that doesn’t feel right.” That doesn’t feel like how it would be in a zombie apocalypse. Especially when facing zombies as formidable as the Fallen.

I kind of like that the Survivors have to be on point at all times or the Fallen will take you over. There’s also a mode where the Survivors can’t win. It’s literally, as you said, how long you can last. Then both players trade sides and the player that was the Fallen is now the Survivors with the same exact deck and they try to last longer than the first person.

We have live action cinematics and we have light story elements in the game. I think people will be surprised at how dark and serious of a tone it takes with everything. When you first look at our game, you see a samurai school girl and you see a guy in a giant pink suit with assault rifles and chainsaws. We do have a sense of humor. I was really excited about our Goat Simulator crossover, which is basically items that you can equip to your weapons for special bonuses in single-player. But that’s about 1% of our game—jokes and references to pop culture. The other 99% is a serious, violent zombie apocalypse game and story.

How is the story going to fit in?

We have prologue chapters—which are sequential tutorials—for each of the six starter decks. There are three Survivor starter decks and three Fallen starter decks. It’s a few different chapters that teaches you the game in a way that also introduces you to these characters and the story and the world. It really lays the groundwork in a, hopefully, not annoying way.

We really tried to make the tutorials really cool. It’s the first thing that people are going to see and you don’t actually have to play all of the tutorials. You just have to play one and, if that’s the deck you want to use, then you just take it. We really want to introduce people to the game in a really cinematic way that shows a vertical slice of everything that they’re in for and also, the story.

The cards are all fully voice-acted. Even if they’re not part of the story, like the tutorial and the prologue; each card has about 200 lines that they can say. They’re pretty short lines, but they can react to different things that happen in the game like if they get attacked or they find something cool. A lot of characters in the game have relationships with other cards. It might be a brother or a sister or a lover or just a friend. Reggie and Pinky, Pinky’s like Reggie’s spirit animal so they have a blast whenever they’re together shooting zombies. Then, if one of them dies it’s super traumatic.

The other thing that we have is live action cinematics. I think, with a card game, a lot of people don’t want to sit through a 40 minute long Hideo Kojima cutscene about movies and weird shit.

There are two ways you can get the live action cinematics. One is at the end of every match. So if you think of Street Fighter, when you win or lose a match, the winning character does a little taunt or pose. In Z, instead of that, you get a live action cinematic that is relevant to whatever happened. If the Survivors lose you get one of several potential live action cinematics of the Fallen overrunning or killing someone. Or a mother and a daughter in a dead end with the sound of the Fallen coming to them and the mother’s holding a gun and looking at her daughter. We just cut it there and you’re like, “wow, that kind of sucks.”

If the Survivors win, we have a bunch of cinematics of things like Reggie pinning a Fallen to the ground and unloading his assault rifle into its face. We’ve actually already done that one. It came out pretty cool. Nano, our samurai schoolgirl—we’ve got a bunch of cool ones of her. And we’ve got other ones. Even if the Survivors win, you might see one of our scouts or scroungers or something moving away from the location with a bloody arm. Winning in the zombie apocalypse is not like going to Disneyland. It’s like, “hey, we didn’t die, but some of us probably did and we got a couple cans of dog food. So yay.”

You get those really quick glimpses that hopefully people like, but they’re so short that they won’t bother people. The other way—that I’m actually really excited about—was a late development because I was trying to figure out how we work the story and atmosphere into the game and this idea popped up where, at the main menu, instead of having some generic bullshit behind the menu, every time you login, you would get one of several random live action static shots.

A lot of games actually do this. You didn’t say Resident Evil 6, but we’ll use that as an example. In the main menu, whatever background you’re in, is a static shot from one of the game’s environments. So it might just be the camera locked onto an alleyway and then the shadow of a monster will be up on the wall and it will walk by. There’s some other sort of atmospheric stuff happening.

In Z you get that every time you login. You don’t have to watch it. It’s literally there in the background while you’re doing other stuff and it’s also not a 40 minute long scene. It’s a fly on the wall type thing.

You might come in and there might be one of our characters, who is a mechanic, just working on a car with someone watching guard and she’s got a radio on and it’s got a song on from one of our crossovers. Weird stuff like that. By the way that’s not a confirmation. That’s just an idea.

The potential for these scenes is endless. Every time we do a shoot for new cards we’re like, “hey, go stand over there and look like you guys are having the worst day of your life.” Then whoever we’re shooting with goes over and stands next to their supplies and they’re all bloody, dirty, and bandaged up. We film them on a loop for a few minutes. One time, you’ll be playing the game and you’ll just see that shot. And you don’t learn the secret of the outbreak or anything like that, but it gives you this insight and makes you feel like you’ve learned a little bit more about these characters without them saying anything.

A lot of what I’m saying is probably easier to show than to explain. It all comes down to the execution, right? That’s something that we take very, very seriously and I have impossibly high standards for myself. I’m my harshest critic.

It says on the key features list that all location decks are free to access to all players. Does that mean that location decks can’t be customized?

That’s correct. Think of a location deck like the mall in Dead Rising. You can’t customize it. You don’t need to pay for it. It’s part of the game. It’s part of the experience. If you take the mall out of Dead Rising it would just be Frank running around in a purgatory space cross-dressing.

That’s how integrated the location decks are to Z. We have a bunch of them. We do have a mall. We have a police station. We have a hospital. And you don’t need to customize the decks because it’s semi-randomized which cards you encounter.

You asked me what are some of the things I did differently from other games. I play Hearthstone a lot. I used to. Like seemingly quite a few people, I’ve kind of tapered off recently. When I was playing, I was consistently in the top 5% and I just played a lot. Sometimes, I’d be like “I’m just going to play one game” and then it would be 4 AM and I’d be like “I guess I need to go back to work on my thing.”

I really did like the game, but one of the things that you learn if you watch competitive vanilla Hearthstone—at some point, if you look at someone’s deck or you look at someone else’s deck, or even if you only know one person’s deck, it basically becomes a mathematical formula of what they play. I used to watch on Twitch where the shoutcasters would literally predict every move. They would be like “okay, this has happened, so this will happen. Yep, this will happen.” It was just like “where’s the fun in that?”

I think Blizzard recognized it as a problem pretty early on and they countered it with something that people are divided on. Some people like the RNG craze that has hit Hearthstone and some people don’t, but that’s how they countered it. Almost every card has some kind of random effect that you can’t predict and now, it kind of has the adverse effect that yeah, every game is unpredictable, but now, it all comes down to that RNG. So maybe Unstable Portal gives you that one crazy card out of all the several hundred that it could have given you and your opponent is screwed.

So, in Z the locations offer up a way where what you have in your actual deck is not the deciding factor of who wins.

Again, we do have balanced matchmaking and that’s really important to us. In Call of Duty terms we don’t want a level 60 going up against someone who just started and having all these cool unlocks and squashing them. That’s something that we are definitely watching out for. It’s one of the oldest features that I’ve announced way back on the 2012 Kickstarter, which is something that we are keeping in mind. I guess, in a way, that’s another thing that Z. does differently.

The location decks are a little bit random in terms of which cards you encounter. There’s actually three stacks that you encounter in each location deck. One is safer. There’s a second stack that’s kind of like “caution.” Then there’s a third stack which is “danger.” If the Survivors search the safer stack, they’ll encounter weaker discoveries. Like a lot of public places have a break room, where everyone died or whatever and you go in there and are like “oh, lots of gore, but there’s something left in the freezer or refrigerator that we can use.” Nothing special. Then the caution deck: you may run into some dangerous events or might step on glass or twist your ankle in classic horror movie fashion. But you may also find a power saw or a handgun or something like that. Then in the danger stack, that’s where you can find really dangerous dangers or really cool rewards.

Location decks are the heart and soul of Z, but the point is that you don’t have to randomize them because there’s already so much diversity and they’re already semi-randomized anyways.

What we’d like to do for the digital version is create more location cards for each location than you actually use in each map. Let’s say you search every location card in one match and then you do the same thing in the next one, you would get different cards each time you play. Not like the entire location deck would be different. That’s why you go to different locations. But there would be even more diversity that way.

Then, if you’re playing the physical edition—we designed the game and we hope that people enjoy it—but I am all for house rules. Once you have the game in your hands, you can do whatever you want. You can be like “I don’t even like the location decks. Let’s just take them out” or “let’s just shuffle the hospital and the police station together and let’s see what happens.” Go for it, you know?

Your title is Z. Year One. Are you planning to extend into more years in the future?

If you go back to 2012, the title of the game is actually just Z. with a period for trademark purposes and one thing that happened is that there’s actually an RTS called Z from the 1980s or early 1990s. It’s not like it had a resurgence or anything. It did get re-released on Steam, but it wasn’t that big of a deal. But I looked at that and thought that—even if I could legally get away with it—I didn’t want to name my game after something else. That sucks. It sucks for me to do that to them. They had a good 10-15 year head start on me. And it’s not even a zombie game.

The other thing is that yeah, Z. has a five year story arc and then, it could branch off to the side if it really did well enough. There is an overall story arc, as well as a progression to the game mechanics. In Z. Year One, say you have one of our Survivor Heroes, whose name is Whitney. She is a stealthy scavenger badass. In year two, she could be dead, she could have learned new abilities, she could be promoted, or she could be a Fallen. That model, she could now come back and we can make her a Fallen Horror, which is the equivalent of a Survivor Hero. There are all these things that we can take from Year One and show the progression of what a year in the zombie apocalypse had on them.

Two, once we’ve laid down the mechanics of Z. the sky is the limit in terms of new types of cards and mechanics that we can add. From a story and design perspective Z. was set up to have a pretty long lifespan. Even if we only ever made Year One—which would be a little bit of a bummer—it would be supported the same way that a lot of other digital card games are.

Our core set is at least a couple hundred cards bigger than the average digital card game’s core set. Right off the bat we have a ton of content. On top of that we can add new location decks, locations, expansions, and cards. I think that even within Year One we have around 1300 cards designed that could potentially go into the game.

I don’t have the budget to make 1300 cards and have Anthony program them and all that, but I designed ahead. If the game does well enough or I do find a way to fund those things the potential is there. I like creating. Once I got into Z. the cards just started making themselves. I like zombie games. I like horror movies. It was like “if we have this, then we should have this.” It was really fun to design.

With the Kickstarter backers I take suggestions. People have helped me name cards. In a fantasy game you can just do whatever you want. “Oh, this is the Archaic Gobble Gobbler” and it’s like “alright.” No one’s going to challenge that. In Z. it has to be named something relevant and feel appropriate. I was a professional writer for most of my life so I have a pretty good vocabulary and I also have Thesaurus.com open but still, after 1300 different cards that are all about roughly the same thing you start to run out. So I took suggestions from the Kickstarter backers. You get some cool hints and ideas that way.

I also take suggestions for straight up new cards. So some people who playtested the game early on would be like “you know what would be cool? If we had this.” And I’d be like “you know what, that would be cool.” So we added it to the game.

Someone was like “hey, it would be really funny to have a survivor hero that uses a lawnmower like in Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive.” And I was like “yeah, that would be really cool.” It took us like a year and a half to get around to it, but we did make that card. So now, as part of our Kickstarter-exclusive Horrific Homage pack, there’s a bunch of horror movie references in there and one of them is a survivor hero with a lawnmower weapon.

Your Kickstarter goal is pretty low. Is it just to finance the final push of development and manufacturing of the physical editions?

It is the final push. We have been funded before. This has been a long project and it’s also a very ambitious project with the digital edition. If I could go back to 2012 I would have done either one version or the other first and then been like “okay, we’ve got all this experience and we’ve got a product out. Now, let’s make the digital version of the physical version” or “let’s make a physical version of the digital version.”

They are essentially the same game but trying to make them together at the same time definitely presented some challenges. We’ve come this far and the Kickstarter that we’re doing right now, which was funded over the weekend, is literally the final push. The goal is so low because that’s how close we are to finishing. We have a ton of images that we create using real photography. We get models and makeup, we give them weapons, and they fight each other. We have a really talented retoucher come in and Photoshop them and make it look like a scene from a Hollywood movie. That is the biggest part of our visual identity for the game.

So that goal is relatively low because we’re really close to being done. But at the same time, Peter, who does most of our retouching was paid at first. Then, when we ran out of money, I was like “hey, we ran out of money. Let me get back to you.” He was like “nah dude. I’m in it, let’s do it, let’s keep going.” For a really long time he worked for free with no guarantee that we would ever get money back into it.

As with all things it turned out that there was just so much to do. Hundreds and hundreds of cards needing basic to advanced photoshopping. It just stacked up.

Pretty much everyone who works on Z. is volunteer. I don’t get paid. Without my girlfriend, I would literally be homeless.

There are two people who definitely get paid. There’s the programmer Anthony. He came on board recently after some run-ins with other, not so great programmers that severely delayed the game. He’s worked on World of Warcraft and the Ratchet and Clank series and we just hit our stride. When he got on board it was like “okay, let’s get stuff done,” and he understands card games, which is really important of course. He needs to be paid.

And then Peter, who does the retouching, it was like “okay, you need to be paid. I can’t expect you to do what’s left and not get something.” To be honest, neither one of them is getting paid what they actually deserve and a lot of our makeup artists and other people who have come on to make the hundreds and hundreds of card images, they’re people who have worked on True Blood or Star Wars and they basically bring their rates down to a fraction because, for whatever reason, I convinced them that this was a cool project and they liked doing it. Without people doing that, this game would have cost around $5 million. But at the same time, I know what it’s like to want to do something and want to be a part of something but to also have to pay your bills.

That is what the final push Kickstarter is all about. It is completing the images and assuring that the people who are doing that don’t have to look over their shoulder and wonder how they’re going to pay rent and eat this month.

You mentioned that Early Access is going to be where you start for the digital edition. When do you think that’s going to start?

Pretty soon. Probably the number one thing I learned early on—well, actually, it took me a few times to learn it—was to not give an exact date unless you are 5000% sure that is the exact date. There were a lot of times I was like “hey, we’re going to do this. Our milestone’s coming up, it’s looking great,” and then such random things would happen. I know any game developer can pretty much relate to that.

So I can’t put an exact date on it. I hate to give the soon, trademarked like Valve or Blizzard, or the response of “when it’s ready,” but we’re in our final push. We’re showing the game off. We’re showing everything we have. The digital version is still behind closed doors, but it’s playable and it’s more about audio-visual polish.

Even though we are going into Early Access and we will develop things from there, we also only get one first impression. Back in 2012, there was no Hearthstone, there was no SolForge or Infinity Wars or Hex. The only other digital card game was really Duels of the Planewalker and Yu-Gi-Oh games. I actually grew up playing Yu-Gi-Oh for the Playstation 2, Duelist of the Roses. Well, I didn’t grow up on it. I played it for a year.

So there weren’t all these other games. Z., the plan was to make it look not like a card game even though it was a card game. The plan was to make it look like Left 4 Dead or Resident Evil or something like that. When you see the digital version, we have the location decks you interact with but we also have a 3D environment with dynamic lighting, weather effects, and stuff like that of the location. So if you’re in the hospital, playing the hospital location deck, the cards are in the actual location. It looks really cool. And the attack animations are all like, if you use a chainsaw to do a critical hit on an enemy you’ll chainsaw that card in half and blood will spray out. Our audio-visual presentation, it’s super important to us that we’re not only that we’re impressive and that people look at it like if they’re walking by at PAX and they go “wow, what is that,” and maybe it gets them into card games if they hadn’t been before.

In Duels of the Planewalker you have your imps and your angels and it’s just this blob-like mashup of these fantasy concepts and characters. Z. is supposed to be much more grounded. Every time you play a match you and your opponent are creating your own mini zombie movie. You can’t do that if everything feels detached from each other.

The point is that we want to have our audio-visuals and our overall presentation be really solid for when we first unveil the game in a playable form. Closed Beta, Early Access, and stuff like that, it really needs to look and sound good, and knock people’s socks off. We are in that process right now. That’s a relatively fast process but there are so many little things that need to be added, but you don’t really think of until you hear it. For example, “hmm. Clicking on this thing in the menu should make a noise.” Or when the scout runs, her feet should be quieter than Reggie, who is carrying a bunch of equipment. Stuff like that.

The short answer is soon. The longer answer is that the game is actually really far along, and it’s playable in multiplayer, but we really want to make sure that it impresses when we do unveil it and put it in front of people.

So you’re really trying to push the fact that it’s a digital card game?

Yeah, I mean that’s originally why I wanted to do a digital card game. The digital format offers a lot of opportunities to do things that you don’t get with the tabletop version. The tabletop version has it’s own pros as well that the digital version can’t do, but the digital format presents so many cool opportunities to make a very cinematic card game. Z. was designed to take all of those into account. Not only from a presentation standpoint, but also from a gameplay standpoint. In terms of rewarding the player with free cards, booster packs, challenges, and achievements. All of these things that you don’t really get with a physical edition. It really takes advantage of the digital format in that regard as well.

What kind of rule changes are planned for the Remix Arena?

We have a really long list and I’m sure that, once people start playing it, on the Steam forums, we’ll have a thread dedicated to Remix Arena suggestions. There are so many. A couple are that we manipulate the cost of every card so that maybe every card costs one resource. That means you could take every super powerful card you have—that normally cost five or seven or ten—and just start playing them from turn one. There are a few where you get a larger starting hand or you get to choose your starting hand.

The Remix Arena probably sounds a lot like the Arena mixed with the Tavern Brawl from Hearthstone, and it basically is, but keep in mind that Hearthstone hadn’t even been revealed yet. Certainly the Tavern Brawls haven’t been revealed yet. That all came after we had announced them for Z. But, you know, it’s sad to say that Blizzard releases games faster than we do. But they did and they beat us to the punch, so people will always see Z.’s Remix Arena as inspired by that.

It was more of an opportunity for us to do crazy things and diversify the gameplay. I’m all about variety. I love mutators from Unreal Tournament. That’s more of the actual inspiration for something like this.

It was also a way for us to test alternate dimension gameplay rules. When designing Z. we had to make some really hard decisions in terms of the final rules. This needs to work like this. With the Remix Arena—because I can’t leave well enough alone—it will give me the chance to go back and see if I made the right decision. What if you can do this instead of how it actually is and what’s the response to that?

In Early Access we will still have the opportunity. If we put out this remix where players are like “oh my god, this is how the game should be” and it’s unanimous and in seeing it myself, I agree with that, then in Early Access, we still have the opportunity to improve the game and make it better with this kind of experimental mode.

I’m excited about Remix Arenas and, even if they don’t change the game permanently, they’ll just be fun and kind of crazy. We have other things planned that people wouldn’t normally expect. We have a lot of surprises in store for Remix Arena, but you know, they’re surprises so I can’t really get into it.

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Z. Year One is currently on Kickstarter and has met its goal of $10,000. The campaign ends today at 4 PM EST.