Blogging of the Dead

Sorry for the vast dearth of updates recently. This hasn't been from lack of activity on my end - on the contrary, there's so much to discuss that I don't know where to start.

Zombie City Survivors is gradually creeping towards the light of day. Barely any actual work has been done yet, but I've been making steady progress in assembling my team. I have two artists and a writer for sure, and am almost positive in my choice of a musician. I still need one more artist, but I have plenty of applications to sift through and choose one from. Which brings me to this message: With the exception of sound design, all positions are currently closed for application. Feel free to email me about your talents, but you will face the very real threat of being ignored.

As a side note on this subject, I would like to thank Insert Credit, GameSetWatch, and Kotaku for linking Zombie City Tactics on their frontpages. Their support has been a great help in raising awareness and hype for my future projects!

Anyways, enough blabber. Let's talk about SURVIVORS.

Zombie City Survivors will follow the parallel stories of two characters: Ajax Turtledove, and Vanessa James. Both of them stumble unintentionally into an unnamed city in the midst of a zombie outbreak, and are then trapped in by a military quarantine. The player chooses one of these two characters, and leads them to survival, banding together, and taking back the city.

The game will be divided into smallish regions, varying in size from a city block to a single house. If you destroy all the zombies in a region, then you get to upgrade one character, and all adjacent regions are unlocked for you to travel to. If you lack the firepower, you can also run through an area, avoiding confrontation and getting safely to the other side. However, doing so only unlocks one adjacent region, rather than all of them. Human survivors will be found throughout the city, and can be rescued and recruited to join your team. Day and night will pass as regions are completed, allowing the player to tackle the more difficult areas during the day and push through the safer regions at night, when visibility is limited.

Man, the planning for this game is evolving at a mile a minute, and I really don't know what to say about it. So instead, I am going to share some EXCLUSIVE ZOMBIE CITY SURVIVORS CONCEPT ART with you:

Ajax Turtledove
Vanessa James
Assorted Zombies
Some more zombies
A couple special enemies from the late game

That is all for ZCS for the moment. Questions are encouraged for the comments section, and I will try my best to answer them!

In other news: Zi was featured in Bravo Screenfun, as I announced earlier! It had a fairly minor appearance - no mention in the actual magazine, just on the included DVD. The description, translated into English, was approximately as follows:

At first, "Zi" reminded me a little of "Tetris," but the game plays completely differently. Blocks fall towards the center from above and below, and must be pushed together so that three or more similarly colored blocks are together. Only then can you remove the blocks with a right-click. The more blocks the group contains, the more points you get. If a column reaches the edge, it's game over! There are four different play modes: Three difficulty levels and a Fun mode. Control is with the mouse.

Not bad, aside from a couple factual errors (only two difficulty levels, and the game can be controlled entirely with the left mouse button)! I haven't gotten any crazy German fan mail yet, though.

Stay tuned for more undead updates!