Zombie Beach Party
Contents
Gameplay Video
The Game
My 7th published game as a programmer.
Zombie Beach Party is a fun new twist on the “snake” genre. The player controls a zombie that goes around the beach infecting humans. This makes them “join” the zombie in a conga line that gets longer with each infected human.
As time passes, enemies start arriving at the beach and make the game harder. First there’s cops, then the army, then the navy, etc. Eventually, missiles will drop from the sky, leaving flaming obstacles for the player to avoid.
Zombies have different skills, so infecting different humans will help the player’s line survive for longer, get a higher score, collect more coins, etc.
The game was featured multiple times on the Apple AppStore and the official AppStore twitter account tweeted about it.
My Role in the Project
This game was done in Unity. I was the gameplay programmer in this project. First, I started off with a quick prototype and quickly iterated on it based on the designers’ wishes and ideas. I worked with them on choosing features that would remain for the actual game.
I programmed the controls, movement, artificial intelligence, zombie behaviours, physics, powerups, etc. Everything gameplay related. I had to make sure my code was performant due to the large amount of characters on screen, each one with different behaviours.
I created a random map generator with tuneable constraints, this allowed us to retain control over the balance of the maps while still having them randomized and unique. I also created many custom editors so designers could tune and customize the game to their liking.
Artificial Intelligence:
– A* algorithm for the humans to move around in orthogonal directions on the randomly generated map. This also allows for on-the-fly map changes caused by the missiles.
– AI controlled zombie lines: the player’s conga line can get split by enemy bullets or missiles. This will create a separate, AI controlled zombie line that reacts to nearby obstacles and tries to avoid them, and also tries to grab nearby humans. This adds a lot of flavour to the game and makes the zombies feel more alive.
– Simple human AI that walks around and tries to flee from zombies. Panicked humans will also make other humans panic when seen, this creates a nice domino effect where eventually all humans on screen will be running around scared (until they get tired of running, of course, which makes it easier for the player to infect them).
– Some humans have special behaviours, such as the “Shane” human who will actually try to fight off the zombies with his cricket bat for a bit and then run away. Also, the “armed” humans (such as cops and soldiers) will chase the zombies and try to shoot them. The AI for these special characters had a lot of editable variables for the designers to play around with until they found a balance that they liked.
Behaviours:
– There are 10 types of different zombie skills, such as zombies that spawn coins, zombies that stun nearby humans, etc.
– These skills can be tuned, edited, and even combined by designers.
Misc:
– The game components are controlled by an event system and by multiple managers. These are in charge of managing the spawning of humans, powerups, cleaning up the level and re-generating a map once the player dies, etc.
– Lots of optimization to avoid a CPU bottleneck when there are many characters on the screen (since the player’s conga line can get pretty large plus all the humans and enemies in the level).
– Tools like a debug menu to allow for quick testing and iteration.
– I created custom editors in scriptable objects were very useful for artists and designers to tune and balance the game. This allowed for quick iterations and changes related to zombie skills, gameplay values, defining air strike patterns, etc. For example, here’s a picture showing some of the strike patters created with the tool I made:
Links
To download the game, you can go to the following websites:
Chart Rankings
iOS
#59 in Kids Games (iPad) on Oct 13, 2018
#29 in Arcade Games (iPhone) on Oct 13, 2018
#17 in Arcade Games (iPad) on Oct 13, 2018
#31 in Action Games (iPhone) on Oct 13, 2018
#18 in Action Games (iPad) on Oct 13, 2018
#78 in Top Games (iPhone) on Oct 13, 2018
#31 in Top Games (iPad) on Oct 13, 2018
#59 in Top Apps (iPad) on Oct 13, 2018
All images from Zombie Beach Party are property of Popreach Inc.
