Fun Dog Studios CEO On Infusing The Forever Winter With "Absolute Anarchy"

02.05.2024 - 16:53 / screenrant.com / Deven McClure

is an upcoming looter-shooter that offers a twist to the typical wartime game, making players unallied civilians trying to survive amidst powerful war machines. It's the debut from Fun Dog Studios, a developer founded by industry veterans that have worked on titles like and. It's a title that can never truly be won — enemies will always have the upperhand, but players can do a bit better every journey.

draws inspiration from a myriad of sources, from games like and FromSoftware titles to the works of Mamoru Oshii. The game incorporates elements of survival, roguelite mechanics, stealth, and squad-based tactics where players will journey out onto the battlefield to attempt resource collection. Finding things like new weapons and supplies to bring back to base will help make them stronger on the next run, but taking valuable items will also attract the attention of the world's warring sides who can attack with a much stronger arsenal.

interviewed Fun Dog Studios CEO Miles Williams to discuss the biggest influences behind the game, designing an unforgiving world, and what players can expect from.

Screen Rant: Something that really interests me about this game is the idea of a dynamic encounter system. Can you tell me a little bit more about how that works and also just how building something like that goes from a behind-the-scenes perspective?

Miles Williams: Totally. That was super, super integral for the fantasy of our player characters being scavengers and very small in this super messed up combat ecosystem. And actually one of the core inspirations for us — because usually people think about a lot more of the horde-type systems they have in games like Left for Dead, where it's basically spawning units that are specifically just to intersect and disrupt the playe — our perspective was looking at more film inspiration.

Obviously the opening scene of Terminator II and the future war sequence of the first Terminator, the Animatrix, and a couple of those, that fantasy seemed much more horrific and much more chaotic. And it was not necessarily, «We're specifically there for these small critters,» basically the humans within that space, they were there primarily for each other. We took a lot of inspiration from more RTS games, so a lot of the Relic titles like Company of Heroes, Dawn of War, Homeworld, and much more of that perspective.

And we also took a lot of inspiration from tabletop miniature games. When we were building out units, remember early 2000s, when you think of co-op shooters, you'd think of Army of two, Gears of War, et cetera. There were very archetypal definitions of a lot of the villains. We looked at it more from a world-building standpoint and how real military structure their