Death Inc. Kickstarter prototype demo released to the public

A prototype of strategy game Death Inc., currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, has been released.

It's available to download now from the Death Inc. website.

Death Inc. is a point and drag real-time strategy game in which you play as the Grim Reaper, infecting villagers with the plague before commanding them as your army. The prototype, which you can download from Ambient Studios' website, is an early build of the game that has been in development for just 10 weeks. You need to infect villagers, soldiers and archers to take over the village before heading towards a mansion where you need to kill Lord Cornelius Stanthorpe III. The prototype is so early there's no sound.

Ambient director and co-founder Jonny Hopper, who used to work at Media Molecule on the LittleBigPlanet series, described the demo as a "short 10 minute slice of gameplay meant to give a little flavour of what it'll be like to play Death Inc."

"It's not even really a demo," he told Eurogamer. "It's a prototype. We don't think anyone's done this before: release a game that is so early upon the world. There's no audio, for which we apologise, but like I said it is so early. But we do have the basic mechanics in there. It's easy to extrapolate and see how much fun the fully developed game could be."

The Death Inc. Kickstarter asks for £300,000. At the time of publication it had raised just shy of £60,000 from 2334 backers with 15 days to go.

Hopper said Ambient hopes the release of the prototype will raise awareness of the game and improve the Kickstarter's chance of success.

"It's a tough world on Kickstarter at the moment, tough to stand out," Hopper said. "And there's this general malaise around when projects might be perceived as vapourware. When we're not making a sequel or using nostalgia quite as heavily as other projects, this seems to be the best way to help people understand what they're backing."

Funding permitting, Death, Inc. is slated for an October release on PC, Mac and Linux.

Death Inc. Gameplay Video 2 - Part 1 from Ambient Studios on Vimeo.