Raging Dead.
polycounter lvl 20
Hey folks, ol' durface here again.
So me and some buddies got together and made us a little iphonez game. Thought some of you would like to see, play, discuss, etc..
http://ghostbirdsoft.com/ragingdead/
For some of you tech nerds, there was some cool stuff we implemented. For example all the building tiles are rendered models, which are directly linked to an obj. The obj isn't drawn in game but it is used to generate a ray traced shadow. Which is then applied as a shadow pass. If you look closely the sprites and can pass underneath the shadows. It was also done this way to make it a million times easier for our level guy and me to work together. He just builds the tiled level like a normal tile based game, then hits render to generate the shadows (Instead of him laying out the levels and me remaking them in 3d and rendering that way). Really easy and resource efficient.
We tried a whole bunch of different ways of going about, all were either too slow to make, less pretty or too resource intensive. Pretty proud of what we came up with. Looks good too.
edit: also a cool thing we came up with is what we did for that screen shot ^ up there. Programmer buddy just made a button for me to just export all the levels as obj's but placed as they are in the tile-editor. It took about 15 minutes total to make that city scape up there. Pretty sweet and could be fun to other things with.
Anyways, if you gots any questions, ask away.
durface
So me and some buddies got together and made us a little iphonez game. Thought some of you would like to see, play, discuss, etc..
http://ghostbirdsoft.com/ragingdead/
For some of you tech nerds, there was some cool stuff we implemented. For example all the building tiles are rendered models, which are directly linked to an obj. The obj isn't drawn in game but it is used to generate a ray traced shadow. Which is then applied as a shadow pass. If you look closely the sprites and can pass underneath the shadows. It was also done this way to make it a million times easier for our level guy and me to work together. He just builds the tiled level like a normal tile based game, then hits render to generate the shadows (Instead of him laying out the levels and me remaking them in 3d and rendering that way). Really easy and resource efficient.
We tried a whole bunch of different ways of going about, all were either too slow to make, less pretty or too resource intensive. Pretty proud of what we came up with. Looks good too.
edit: also a cool thing we came up with is what we did for that screen shot ^ up there. Programmer buddy just made a button for me to just export all the levels as obj's but placed as they are in the tile-editor. It took about 15 minutes total to make that city scape up there. Pretty sweet and could be fun to other things with.
Anyways, if you gots any questions, ask away.
durface
Replies
ps. Love the help screen
looks awesome, if I had an iphone I'd buy it
Anyways, very cool way of putting the levels together. From the screenshots, it reminds me a little of Urban Dead - which in turn reminds me that I've been waiting just outside a warehouse for about six months now because I keep forgetting to log on, and am probably undead by now.
danshewan: Yes, gin is most definitely food.
lotekk: Thanks for buying, i hope you enjoyz it. We spent the better part of six months. Problem being that we all work full time jobs which for the most part use up all of our mojo. But we got awesome tools out of it.
nrek: Thanks!
Ferg: HAR! Gots to be quick on these iphones. Fun story, we made a painting/photoediting app. To this day i think it's unrivaled. Unfortunately some dude released photogene about two months before we did and got featured by apple. Apple can only feature one app of an ilk. So we got hooped, basically. Sucks too because all the little apps that have single features like, sharpen or blur or noise reduction sell more than ours, which has all those and then some.
danshewan: Sucks buddy. Best of luck with the gin.
Best of luck with the sale of this one.
Those tools definitely sound very cool, too; really nice job on those.
A few suggestions if I may.
A retry button at the map completion screen, having to return to the level select screen to play the same level again is a little annoying. Mainly if I get a B and know I could have scored and A for the level. Just hitting retry will throw me back into it instead of being forced back to another menu screen.
How it displays how many humans you've saved and how many zombies you've killed, there should also be a display of how much money you've accumulated. Being forced to go into the store every time to see if you have enough money for an upgrade is tedious.
I also agree with LoTekK about the splash damage feeling like it should be stronger, but that may be the way you guys balanced it without making it too easy to destroy large hordes at once, or without sacrificing too many humans while trying to take out the zombies.
I didn't feel any compulsion to use the machine gun. The balance between the two weapons feels off; I never really felt like there was any significant downside to using the bombs, even on solo Zs, partly due to the essentially fire-and-forget nature of the weapon, and partly due to the fact that I was never penalised very heavily (I bombed with impunity, but still managed As on half of the levels, and Bs on the rest).
More damningly, the few times I busted out the machine gun, I never felt like I could keep up with the spread of the Zs. I'd switch to the MG for loners/pairs, then find the rest of the groups had multiplied rapidly. Replaying the same level with just bombs, it was all boomboomboom.
Minor niggle: after completion of the game, replaying the last level probably shouldn't bring up the ending scene. I retried it a couple times to rack up cash for the final MG upgrades, and going through a few screens each time I completed it got a bit old. Though I suppose the retry button emil suggested would help alleviate that.