Dead Island 2 was the direct sequel of Dead Island, one of the most successful new IPs released in the past years. This franchise sold more than 8 million units around the world and this new title was going to be released on PC and next gen consoles under Unreal Engine 4.

My first steps into Dead Island 2 happened right after finishing Spec Ops: The Line, back in 2012, when the game was entering pre-production. By then, the studio was pretty experienced using Unreal Engine 3, and we crafted most of the features in a few months using this engine. My role during preproduction was to design instanced competitive multiplayer game modes and maps involving 3 factions: both human teams and the zombies, which would be used as neutral tools during the whole match.

In 2013 we switched to the recently announced Unreal Engine 4 and, due to the absence of many basic multiplayer and online features in the editor in that moment, I was forced to join the main campaign team as Level Designer for a while. As the editor improved and the multiplayer code started to work slightly better, I was assigned the task of designing new MP competitive events for the game, which were embedded into the main “seamless” Single Player experience.

Unfortunately, in July 2015, Yager’s Dead Island 2 was cancelled by Deep Silver due to differences on the game’s vision.

In June 2020, a build corresponding to the latest version of the game (following a huge redesign that was very distant from the seamless open world concept we worked on for many months) was unexpectedly leaked to the Internet.

Unexpectedly for most of the developers involved in this production hell named Dead Island 2, Deep Silver finally managed to resurrect the franchise thanks to Dambuster Studios. There was not much left of our first intentions in what Dumbuster Studios released in the end, except for the setting and the overall tone of the game. However, the game was exceptionally polished and fun, which is something I wasn’t expecting for such a problematic 10 years long production. And yes, that made me happy.