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!


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.


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.


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.



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:


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.

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