Zombie Tag Postmortem.

What went right?

Week five, game five. The week of two games. With this week’s game to complete and Ludum Dare 44 over the weekend, the week was looking to be packed. Finally! I got to make a gameboy game this week. Of course, it’s nothing like TMNT: Fall of the Foot Clan, but hey, I’m still a shy around platformers. As far as ideas go, this is another one that just popped into my head and I ran with it. I literally wrote down “Turn Based Zombies Ate My Neighbors On Gameboy”. After having family in town last week, I was burned out and just wanted to take it easy this week (you know, and make TWO games!). I decided I would add in an element of Pacman into this basic concept and with my idea in hand, I set about prototyping.

Ideally the player would have a limited number of moves per turn, in this case 3 moves, to move toward various survivors to rescue them. The zombies on the other hand would have limited movement, in this case 2 moves, however, each zombie could have 1 of 4 characteristics like the ghosts in Pacman. In code they are actually named Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde, although Clyde was cut out and there are only 3 possible characteristics in the the final version. Blinky moves to the player’s positions, just like in Pacman, Pinky moves two spaces ahead of where the player is, just like in pacman, and Inky targets a random survivor and moves straight for them, just like in any zombie movie ever. Clyde just kind of ran around like dum-dum, sort of like the Pacman version, but in a turn based game it was too unpredictable and I didn’t have a ton of time to get it tested out.

Once I set up a mapping system and this basic AI, next came the turn based movement, which was pretty straightforward. Wait for the player to finish moving, the wait for the zombies to finish moving, repeat, nothing unique here.

After this came the implementation of the rest of the game’s rules. If the player is hit by a zombie, the player dies and the game is over. If all of the survivors are eaten before the player can rescue at least one, the game is over. If a survivor is killed by a zombie, they come back as a zombie in the next round. Once all the survivors are cleared from the board, the player is teleported to another board. The win condition is to collect 25 survivors. It’s really straight forward, and I’m glad I kept it that way, as I’ll explain in the what went wrong section.

The music was a lot of fun. I had never really used Famitracker, but I do like some chiptune and I love old school video game music, so I gave it a shot and it was pretty easy to get a simple loop. Props to the people who really know how to manipulate that program and get some epic music out of it. I kinda of rushed the music loops and there is a slight hiccup in the songs from time to time, but that's the way it goes (see What Went Wrong). For the SFX I stumbled onto BFXR which was a life saver that I plan to use more often in the future. God bless whoever made that program. The background art is from Cluly over on itch.io. I hope it was ok that I slightly altered the hues of his art. I already started building the game using a color palette and they didn’t quite match. I did the same on the art I used from Danbu on opengameart.org. Thank you both for your art, because I’m broke and programmer art is a travesty.

What went wrong?

Wednesday night, the 3rd day I was working on the game, I was nearly finished and planned to wrap everything up the next day. It would only take me a few hours, which would leave me the rest of the day and all day Friday to prepare for Ludum Dare 44. That’s when I heard it. Clunk! WRAAAAAAAAAAARRRRR. The fan in my power supply decided it was done being a fan. I quickly shut off my computer to avoid damaging anything else. Fortunately I found a great replacement on Amazon that would be at my house the next evening. No big deal. I could finish the game after it arrived and still have Friday to prepare for Ludum Dare.

Thursday, being the great son that I am, (and since my computer was out of commision) I went around to my parent’s house to help them with some chores. When I returned home in the afternoon and stepped into my office, I stepped into a wet spot. The stupid cat had peed on my carpet! So I thought. Upon further investigation it was actually my hot water heater! It was leaking at the water input. Terrible. I spent the rest of the day with my dad repairing the input and output lines. It was an annoying deviation from my plans, but still manageable. The power supply hadn’t shown up at the house yet and it was getting late. I would have to work a bit later than I wanted, but I would still have Friday off. We finished replacing the lines on the hot water heater and fired it up. With all that happened I kept telling myself things could have been worse. This, of course, was before we realized that it wasn’t just the water lines that were leaking, it was the hot water heater itself! That night, my family and I enjoyed ice cold showers, but hey, at least the power supply finally arrived, but I was just too worn out to stay up.

On Friday, I spent most of the day replacing the hot water heater. There was no time to work on the game, and knowing that in the evening, I was needed to volunteer at my older daughter’s school, I spent the day trying to decide if the game was done enough to publish. Ludum Dare was to start in a matter of hours after all. Well, fate answered my question when the LD44 theme came out. I hated it. It did not inspire me one bit. I sat up for awhile before bed on that Friday night trying to think of anything that would be fun to make using the theme. Nothing. I was drained and upset. I have looked forward to Ludum Dare since I learned about them. I loved participating. It was when I realized why I loved them so much that I found some calm. It was because it really made me focus and put my game making ability to the test. It was a challenge to my skills and I learned a lot from each one. But that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 5 weeks. I’ve been growing, learning and pushing myself. Once I understood that, I fell right asleep knowing the answer to my problem. I would finish this game on Saturday and then take a bit of time off to relax. I was prepared to overwork myself this week in order to complete my personal 10 week challenge and participate in LD44 and it wasn’t worth it. The hot water heater situation and dead power supply sucked, but that’s just life. It would have been silly to run myself into the ground trying to complete 2 games in one week. I would have been doing LD44 just because, and that wouldn’t be good for me or any game I made. I guess next week I’ll have to stop being put off by platformers and make one. This is all for learning after all.