zombie match defense @zombiematch-blog - Tumblr Blog

Raising the dead... digitally.

You ever wish you could resume your game EXACTLY where it left off when your battery dies? Well NOW YOU CAN! It works in any situation, thanks to the magic of a persistent game state.

How many times has this happened to you? You’re playing your favorite game game on your phone and you’re interrupted by a call:

You take the call, and immediately have to go do something, forgetting about the super good time you were having. When you finally get back to booting up the game again, it’s been so long that the game has to reboot, and you’ve lost all progress on that crazy long level you had finally almost defeated.

That is a thing of the past, my friend!

Since the game board in Zombie Match Defense is so finite, it’s really easy to track literally everything happening in the game, and update it every move, and save all that information out in a file on your phone. So, every time you make a move, I update the saved game data. Your battery could die and you could leave your phone dead in a drawer for years. When you finally charge and boot it up again, it’ll ask you if you wanted to resume the game you were in the middle of.

It’s one of those little quality of life things that I think is worth the investment. I wish every game did something like this, but sadly it’s not possible in most types of games. Are there other things like this you’d like to see in Zombie Match Defense? Do you have a similar pet peeve? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter!

Let’s try on something revealing.

One way to add juiciness is through transitions and reveals. We already had one that we liked with the change between the level select and the game itself:

The circle transition fit our style really well, but this was just a colored circle being scaled, we wanted to do the opposite and have a color frame a circle of just the game. Unfortunately the engine we’re using doesn’t support masking, which would be the easiest way to do this. If we cut a circular hole in a texture, that texture would need to be really large so the circle could encompass the entire screen, otherwise we’d get blurry/jagged edges that would look ugly. The goal was to mimic a film technique that is called an “iris wipe.” It’s a pretty classic technique that gives a good retro feel. We wanted something that looked like this:

When I started thinking about how they do it with a camera, I realized I could mimic this with our engine. They’re opening and closing the blades of an iris.

I could make iris blades out of rectangles and rotate them to make a larger and smaller hole... that wouldn’t really be that bad of a performance hit. So I started fooling around. Here’s a version where I randomly assigned a color to each blade so I could see what was going on.

Once I got it working properly, I switched them all to one color to make sure I was getting the effect that I wanted:

That’s really what I was going for and I was pretty happy with how it turned out, so I started implementing it with our new front end menu. Another thing I thought would look cool would be to combine this reveal with something like the old Batman TV show transitions.

In my mind, the background was still and the batman logo spun and scaled, that seemed to work better for our purposes anyway. Also I thought it would be better to make it more of an homage than a direct copy.

Once I had the transition working properly, I started thinking about all the other ways I could use it. It seemed so easy to start slapping it together with other things. One of the easiest things to do would be to add some easing to the iris blade rotation, thanks to the GoKit library we’re using for all our tweens.

After a few quick modifications, I had a demo that looked really fancy.

From there it was a short walk to get it working in some places where we needed to add emphasis, like the last zombie you kill in a level:

We also use it when a zombie escapes out a door and you lose the game. Do you have any favorite transitions? Can you think of a sweet example of one? Let us know in the comments below or on twitter!

The unbearable flatness of being... a zombie.

For #ScreenshotSaturday we thought we should write about our art style.

Here’s some of the behind the scenes on how we developed the art style of Zombie Match Defense. When we started, we really didn't have a solid idea what direction we were going to go. The first few images we started with were very quick sketches that helped us get going.

Next we very broadly looked at if we wanted the game to look flat, flat with shading, or something highly rendered.

We knew pretty quickly that we wanted to go with something very flat.The shaded flat look was cool, but not what we were looking for.

After a few rounds of designs and some discussion we landed on wanting a line around the designs and we wanted there to be more curved lines. The next pass on designs got us quite a bit closer and eventually led to our final look. We played around with a few other shapes and looks to make sure we definitely liked our direction. And we did.

We began trying to contextualize the look, to us it was beginning to feel like a bit of a throw back to 1960s art, so we looked at some mid century designs to inspire more shape language and our color pallet. And this is where we landed.

We’ll probably explore more art styles again in our next game. Do you have a favorite? Let us know on twitter or in the comments below!

#screenshotsaturday

We grew a Spine!

We just decided to COMPLETELY move all of our animations over to Spine by @EsotericSoft. Previously we had been using traditional 2D animation with sprite sheets. This means that each frame had to be saved out individually and we would flip through them one at a time (this type of animation is also called flipbook animation). The benefit of this was that we weren’t constrained to using the same shapes every frame and we could make things look extra squishy. In practice we weren’t taking advantage of this. The downside of the old animation system is that each frame took up space, so each new set of animations dramatically increased our texture footprint. In attempts to reduce this footprint we would use fewer frames, which made our game look like it was performing at a framerate lower than it actually was.

Check out this comparison:

It’s crazy, right? That sprite sheet on the left was only 5 animations: the idle, jump, match death, shotgun death, and shield hit. On the right we’ve got literally limitless animations (provided we don’t need new things like the dazed stars). Spine lets us save out the animation data in a text file, which is basically free. In addition to that, our animations look silky smooth now. It’s super exciting how many other features we get from this shift. Really the only downside with this change is the ramping up while we learn the animation software and best practices for creation and implementation.

Very briefly we had considered only using Spine for our scientists since we already had several zombie animations done and it seemed more fitting to use a skeletal animation system with something that actually had a full skeleton... and not just a skull... but as we dug in, we realized the potential of this system and decided to move all our animations over to it.

Anybody out there have experience with 2D animation? What’s your take on this decision? Let us know on twitter or in the comments below!

THE COMBIN-O-TRON

This is the solution to three major flaws:

Some items were completely over powered (the slurpee) and some a little under powered (the shotgun)

Your inventory fills up too quickly, this was initially on purpose to encourage you to use your items, but there’s not always a good opportunity to use the items you are awarded before you reach capacity

There’s not many things to spend your zombucks* on.

How it works:

Place two identical items into the Combin-O-Tron

Watch as SCIENCE HAPPENS

Reap the reward of an upgraded item.

Combine two shotguns to receive a double barrel shotgun. A double barrel shotgun will kill two zombies before the scientist decides to discard-- err... recycle it. Combine two double barreled shotguns for the dreaded TRIPLE BARREL SHOTGUN. I’m not even gonna tell you what that one does.

Actually, I probably should tell you what that does, because there’s a balance issue that I’m pondering. Spoiler: The triple barrel shotgun will fire three times before being discarded. Herein lies the rub... Should the third level of the shotgun fire 3 times or 4? You did need to combine two guns that would fire twice to create it. I may not be the best programmer, but I know that 2+2=4. But it seems like the benefit of having that only take up one space (and set & forget on a scientist) may be worth the sacrifice of losing 25% of the power. I’m going to do some serious play testing and see if folks upgrade to the final level, or if they find it feels more efficient to limit themselves to only upgrading once.

Speaking of upgrades, let’s talk about how you access all these fancy new things... from the ice cream man, of course!

This is our store screen, it’s where you buy and upgrade items, purchase unlockables (which are noticeably light at the moment), and bind which item you are rewarded for performing which action. Here you can see the slurpee and shotgun being swapped out for the “match four” reward.

Once the combin-o-tron has been unlocked, each item at Peet’s Treats will appear with a little power meter next to it. In the image above, the slurpee is still level 1, while the shotgun has been upgraded to level 2. Each level of upgrade will cost you some zombucks, but it’ll allow you permanent access to combine that item to the corresponding level. Ideally, unlocking items in this fashion will give you something to spend your zombucks on as you’re mowing through zombies and racking up a fat stash of cash.

Any thoughts on zombucks, upgrades, or the game in general? We’d love to hear from you! Hit us up on twitter or in the comments below.

*just a reminder that Zombucks come from killing zombies, there is no IAP or premium currency

We’ve got a new home!

Jake has been working out at the @PocketwatchG offices for the past two weeks. The other members of Shovelware Games are still working out of their respective homes, but this has been a HUGE change for the day-to-day goings on. In addition to not going stir crazy due to the lack of interaction with other people, it means having a built in audience to bounce ideas off of. Not just any people, but other developers. Not JUST other developers, but friends. These last two weeks have been amazing and it feels wonderful to be welcomed by the San Diego indie game community.

Thank you, Pocketwatch Games. Seriously, you guys are amazing.

New Zombie - Hockey Player

This is an idea that I’ve had bouncing around in my head for a while. Generally I tend to think of a mechanic first, and then come up with some flavor that supports the mechanic. The initial concept for this zombie sprouted from the desire to add some amount of unpredictability without increasing the challenge too much. All zombies currently move forward one space every time they’re able to, but what if they didn’t? What if they randomly chose a direction to move? That would be crazy! Yeah! A crazy zombie! Or maybe a drunk zombie?

So the idea for a drunken/crazy zombie lived in my head for a while, until we realized that we had this ice arena with nothing that really fit in it. People drink at hockey games, he can be a drunken fan! How do we get all that across in just the head? This isn’t quite working... what if he was a player? Yeah, zombies don’t seem coordinated enough to be moving around on ice. Yeah, much easier message to deliver.

So I coded it up and tried it out! Almost immediately it became obvious that they weren’t putting enough pressure on the player, they popped up and down and while they were unpredictable, they felt too dumb and not imposing at all. I tried making them move up or down more rarely than they moved forward, but it still just wasn’t jiving quite right.

After showing it to some friends (more on this later) they agreed and suggested maybe making them ALWAYS move forward, but in randomly in the lane above or below their current lane. Diagonally? The concept of diagonals doesn’t really exist in this game, but it was too good a suggestion to pass up, so I tried it.

Oh man, these guys are SCARY now! Look at them, gliding down the ice, dekeing up and down! They feel like a well organized team! Holy crap, I love it. It fits so well with the hockey players, too! I’m sold.

What say you? Is it too aggressive? Would you prefer the more dopey, lost looking zombies? Comment below or tweet at us!

Tutorials - Part 3 (the last part)

Boy oh boy, am I ever tired of working on tutorials. It’s been a while since the last post. A lot has happened! I’m pretty sure that this will be the last post dedicated to tutorials. The system that drives this is pretty much finished. There’s still some polish and juiciness to add, but that shouldn’t require it’s own blog.

So taking what we had from the previous two posts, let’s show you where we’re at with what a tutorial pop-up looks like right now:

This is something that shows up only AFTER the player has spent a significant amount of time playing the game and hasn’t yet managed to kill a zombie. This is the most hand-holdy we get.

The initial goal of hiding all tutorials from players who understand the game was a strong motivation, but in the end it had to be sacrificed for the greater good. We still hold on to that value, but there were certain cases where we needed to make sure all players knew what was happening. There’s another type of tutorial pop-up that occurs when we need to pause the action and call out something specific. In this example, the player has just made a match for a bonus item, but their inventory is full:

The other time we pause the action like this is when the player moves a brain with a zombie on it for the first time. It’s a little confusing as some players expect the zombie to stay put.

In terms of things left to do with tutorials, we’ll probably swap out the image for something animated, and maybe give it a better background. One of the things I think is best about our adaptive tutorial system is that it doesn’t require that we use a specific seed so the first level is always the same. We don’t require that the player follows the tutorials, they’re welcome to play however they like. The popup detects which row the important element is on and will appear from the top or bottom so it doesn’t block that element.

Next blog we’ll be talking about a new zombie type! As always, please comment or tweet at us. Seriously. Somebody should.

Tutorials - Part 2

We left off last time talking about creating a system to track all of the possible matches on the board. That system now exists and HOLY CRAP is it eye opening. I created a little debug system to highlight all the brains that are a part of a possible match. Check it out:

That’s a lot of possible matches! Most games start out with a ton of matches, but now because this system exists, I can be even pickier about what a “good board” looks like. Previously we were just re-rerolling a board if it contained any brains already lined up for a match, but now we can detect if there’s less than 3 POSSIBLE matches out there, and re-roll in that situation as well.

It’s also really cool to see the ebb and flow of the matches without having to keep track of them all in your brain. This highlighting won’t make it into the final game, but it’s a really interesting learning experience. The next step from here is to start tracking specific things, like when a zombie is not just on a brain that is part of a match, but on the specific brain that must be moved in order to make the match. We’re also not yet tracking which matches are bonus matches. This will all come online soon. It’ll be under the hood, feeding the tutorial system, which will ideally keep you from seeing extra tutorials that you don’t need. All in all it’s a pretty robust system that will never be SEEN by players, and if it all works correctly, people won’t realize that it even EXISTS! In my mind, things like this are the hallmark of a well-designed game, when you’re doing it right, people don’t have to think about what they’re playing, they just play it.

Since the last post, we’ve also settled on our company logo. I worked with coryschmitz on it and I’m REALLY excited about how it turned out:

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts! Tell us what you think about tutorials, the logo, your favorite type of peanut butter, anything really. Comments are below, and we’re also on Twitter!

Tutorials - Part 1

Today I began the arduous task of implementing the tutorial system. I know what you’re thinking: “I’ve played a MILLION match-3 games, I don’t need a stinking tutorial!” And that, my friend, THAT is exactly why this task is such a pain in the ass. I don’t want the tutorial system to annoy you. In fact, I don’t even want YOU to SEE the tutorial system. Literally. If you pick up the game and you inherently kick ass at it, my goal is that you never see a single tutorial pop-up.

In order for this to ring true, there needs to be all kinds of fancy systems that are detecting how you’re playing. They need to track what kinds of moves you’ve made, and more importantly (and difficult to determine) what moves you HAVEN’T made. I hear you again, thinking to yourself: “This dude is an idiot, that’s the same thing. Either I have made a move or I haven’t, that’s the same test to determine.” You’re not entirely wrong, my condescending friend. In this case the difficulty lies in WHEN to make that determination. How long should the system wait before it tells you that you’re allowed to move a brain that has a zombie attached to it? It’s entirely possible that you know that, but there hasn’t been a good reason to do it. Ideally, the system informs you of this precisely when there’s a good reason to make use of this information. So using those two bits of information, the system should tell you that this is a possibility when the zombie is attached to a brain that can be moved into a match. It also shouldn’t do this the very second that a zombie finds itself on such a brain -- we don’t want you to see the tutorial for the move that you’re about to make anyway. So we have two triggers:

1) We detect the first time this situation occurs and start a countdown. If you don’t make any move before the countdown completes, we show you the hint.

2) The second time you’re in this situation, we immediately show you the hint so you don’t continue making non-zombie-swapping moves, completely unaware that this is even an option. (As in the example above)

But what if you don’t heed the hint? We don’t want to continue to spam you to force you into doing it. You should be free to play the game however you want. And what if you keep on playing your way, and after some amount of time, you forget that moving brains with zombies attached is even an option? Well, we should track that and remind you eventually, right? Well that’s yet another system, one that persists between gameplay sessions. It’s no wonder most games just give you a bunch of crap to click through all at once. Hey, if it was easy, everybody would do it, right?

So today I got the first few steps in. There is a system to deliver the tutorials to you. It hasn’t gotten any art yet, so it’s a little ugly, but it’s functional. I found a good place to trigger this system from: after all the brains have fallen, the zombies have moved, and the field is static -- just before you’re allowed to make another move. I started tracking the simple stuff: Have you ever moved a zombie before? Have you ever made a match? I’ve got the first few hints popping up now. Tomorrow I’ll start on the heavy lifting: writing something that analyzes the board to see when specific types of matches are possible.

What’s your take on all this? Does an intelligent hint system matter to you? Tell us in the comments or on Twitter.

Zombie Match Defense unveiled at GDC 2015.

Last week was the first time we've shown the game to strangers and it's staggering how warmly it was received. In addition to getting covered by 148apps, Touch Arcade, and Cult of Mac, we also got TONS of really good feedback from our friends in the industry. We started this blog because thought it would be really cool for anyone who wanted to follow along and see how things change and when new features get implemented.

Since getting back from San Francisco we've mostly been catching up on sleep, doing chores around the house that were neglected during the GDC crunch, and following up with folks that we met. We did have a few spare moments to create a new level loading transition.

Right before GDC we changed how we loaded in the assets, spacing them out across the game so you're not hit with a big load when you first boot up. Unfortunately this resulted in a weird situation where you were stuck on the map screen for a few extra seconds and could actually launch multiple copies of a level by repeatedly pressing the button. We decided to cover this load and keep you from staring at a static screen full of buttons by having some sort of "wipe" transition. This is the first draft:

Better? Worse? Hit us up in the comments or on twitter!

We're still a bit out from having a public beta, but if you sign up with your e-mail address in the sidebar, that's what we'll use to send out our invites!

#GDC #toucharcade #148apps #cult of mac #beta

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