The Art of Balancing… or How to Tear Your Hair Out

My respect for tight rope walkers and the guys who worked on Starcraft has gone up a hundred fold in the past week. You see I got lumbered with the job of balancing up Zogma and quite frankly it’s a nightmare. Not a full blown “my undead neighbour is trying to eat me” type nightmare, but a nightmare nonetheless.

The thing with a game like Zogma is that balance is completely vital if the game is to be fun. While in a well made shooter or RPG a slight imbalance might be forgivable – in Zogma if the balance is out, the game just won’t work.

The balance will really make or break the game. Too easy and the player will give up in boredom, too hard and the game will get chucked away in anger. So I’m painfully aware of how hard I need to work to get it right.

Walking the line:

What has really surprised me is the effect the smallest change to a variable can have, often wrecking an entire build. It’s really butterflies flapping in their wings in South America type stuff. For instance I just slowed the firing rate of the assault rifle by about ¼ of a second, to make the first 3 mins of the game a bit trickier. It fixed the start and I really thought I had got it, until I realised I had made the game impossible from about the 6 minute mark. Cue swearing and a strong whiskey with, a whiskey chaser.

The most heartbreaking one was yesterday. I thought I had finally hit El Dorado, a perfect working build. Everything seemed to be working perfectly. Then I gave the game to my girlfriend to have a test. The first thing she did was to arm all her survivors with shotguns. I was nervous by now; I had been testing for so long I had somehow forgotten to check how an all shotgun setup worked. Surely it wouldn’t be overpowered though, would it?

It was… all shotguns meant no zombie ever got within 20 yards of the house. I should have guessed, everyone knows shotguns to Zombies are like stakes to Vamps. Resisting the temptation to take my i-phone back and, off a short Keith Miller style run-up smash it against the wall….I thanked her and got back to work.

I still haven’t hit that build yet, but I haven’t given up either

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

Why Zogma?

What is Zogma for starters? We know what it means to us but we’ll let you determine what it means to you (Let us know how you go with that!). Zogma, as the tagline suggests, is a “Tactical Zombie Survival Simulator”. Whilst there’s a number of Zombie titles out there they’re either full on, top down action or a 2d/3d platform action games.  We wanted to go for something a bit more accessible to the broader gaming community

a. In the look and feel and,
b. In the game play itself. This game will offer varying challenges across the market.

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Keep it Silly, Stupid

Over the last couple of days I have been getting a bit of the creative writing for Zogma done. As the game is principally concerned with pulping the undead with an armoury of weapons and grenades, there isn’t a heap to do. Saying that I am still finding it hard!

For Zogma we have gone for a light hearted cartoon approach to the Undead Holocaust, but every time I start playing around with any ideas I start getting serious! The problem is I was raised on this post apocalyptic stuff… I know pretty much all of it is terrible dross, but I still can’t get enough of it! From On the Beach to the Day of the Triffids I love it all. : P

So I’ve found it hard to write things that are firstly light hearted and secondly brief. I sit at the puter to write a 50 word blurb to set up a level and three hours later I have a gritty in-depth story about a stockbroker escaping a zombie plague ravaged city, learning about himself and his strained relationship with his wife as he does so. It’s worse than Bernard’s first attempt at a children’s book in Black Books! (If you don’t watch Black Books you should – but the ‘kids’ story is about an academic surviving in post Stalinst Russia, their 2^nd attempt is much better.)

What this fooling around has really told me is that;

-          Firstly Zombies and apocalypses rule as a theme for a game, they are so much fun to play with.

-          Secondly, I really would like to have a detailed look at a serious Apocalyptic Game. Not a distant future Mad Max, Fallout type set up, but a more Dawn of the Dead collapse of modern society type thing!

Oh I did eventually get some stuff done as well… this is the blurb for the hospital level – tell me what you think!

Level Name: Dead on Arrival

The staff at St. Jude’s are normally concerned with keeping the living, alive. But after that derelict Taiwanese tanker grounded on North Beach things have been a little different.

Scrubs and swabs have been swapped for shotguns and saws. Now it’s about making the undead, dead again.

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

Why Zombies?

Out of all things supernatural Zombies are probably the most terrifying, sure vampires are super smart and strong, ghosts can move through walls and hurl toasters at you and werewolves will casually tear you to pieces before playing basketball. There’s a sense of purpose to their actions though and they’re usually low in number. Zombies are on par with a horde of particularly nasty spiders, they’re dumb, they can’t be reasoned with and (not really like spiders) they’re a shadow of humanity at its worst. They also make for some of the most exciting and enjoyable movies and games out there.

P.S There are no spiders in this game, though that would be just as fun.

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009