PLAION: Dead Island 2 SoLA DLC content

The first suite of assets leaned towards the promotion for the SoLA festival, as though it was a real event. This included a video asset that teased the festival itself, mentioning the in-universe bands that were attending, which was also able to reveal a glimpse of the environments that players were going to cavort around. As we’d hoped, the Dead Island community took to the teases with relish and genuine excitement.

Production continued on a fashion ‘look-book’, taking inspiration from glossy fashion magazines, we were able to show off how stylish and different the zombies in SoLA (and Dead Island 2 in general) continue to be, and perhaps even reveal how players could replicate the look!

Alongside fresh takes on familiar asset types - such as a new Selling HELL-A asset highlighting a plot-significant location in the SoLA festival grounds, a 1960s Wes Wilson-inspired poster for the DLC, and updated SoLA-themed versions of weapon and boss reveals - we also focused on creating engaging, imaginative assets that captured the distinct tone of the SoLA experience.

We created a festival survival guide in the style of listicle TikTok videos, offering viewers "top tips" for making it through the event. Of course, in true SoLA fashion, the guide focused on literal survival from hordes of zombies. Each tip was crafted with a cleverly written script where each tip had a double meaning.

We rounded off the project for SoLA with work on two slightly different requests from PLAION. Firstly, an infographic that celebrated the 1 year anniversary of the launch of the game, with our designs being utilised as an asset for posting on social channels, as well as being picked up by the PLAION CRM team as the template for the email newsletter version of the infographic.

Then secondly, adding another skill to the Project N video team talents, we contributed capture of the game direct from a Steam Deck that was utilised as part of the reveal of the base game releasing on Steam.

As our third instance of working alongside PLAION on the same IP, we were fully confident in our capabilities to hit the tone needed to portray the game in the best manner - knowing we’d tick boxes for the client themselves. However it is always a delight to have that confidence reinforced by the reaction of the players.

Community sentiment was at a high during this work, with positive feelings to the DLC reveal and our assets directly. Understanding the audience over the time of working on Dead Island 2 has been a large contributing factor to the success of these assets and ultimately the efforts by the client to make the game a worthy sequel to a much loved classic.