Modding Zombies into RISK

03-03-2015 - As an FYI, here is the most recent version of the mod rules.  If you like it, let me know at jmchattin@gmail.com (or even if you don't).

Forward:
Wow, it's been awhile!  With the excuse of moving half a continent and getting settled, my new home is Portland.  Here, I hope to make sweet games and create fine experiences for the days of tomorrow.  But first, what follows is a recap of a game tested last month.

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RISK: a game of grand strategy that has armies marching across the surface of the world. Zombies: monsters that ravage the forces of the living to add to the undead legions.  Alone, they are great; together, they are an unprecedented force: RISK Zombies (or Zombie RISK if you're so inclined).

The first draft of this mod had to detail what a Zombie does in the game, and the Zombie faction's role in the game.  Zombies were randomly spawned, appearing on any RISK territory after ever human player has had a turn.  When Zombies land, they removed a player's piece and replace it with a Zombie and combat is automatically started.

Zombie movement and combat were laid out: Zombies moved to an adjacent territory that had the most player pieces; combat is like regular RISK combat of dice rolling, but Zombies won ties and for every piece a human player loses, the fighting Zombie force gains another unit.

OK - so Zombies have an advantage, and popup anywhere.  After the first playtest, a few discoveries were made: Powerful Zombies are fun(!); Zombie hordes balloon really fast; and, Specifics on combat and movement need to be fleshed-out.  Things needed to change!

Draft number 2 defined that territories could remain empty if a Zombie horde had passed through.  The rules were sectioned-off into various points of the game mechanics pertaining to players and Zombies.  Human players were given an 'Evacuate' ability, allowing players to remove units from territories around Zombie hordes at the cost of additional moves, attacks, or fortifying.

After this second play, Zombie groups were specified as 'Hordes', multiple Hordes could attack and combine themselves, and a step-by-step for a game round was added.

  

Before another round could be played with the near-final rules, being a Conference Associate at the Game Developers Conference, finishing my final month of school, and job-searching took away most of my time.  However, some additions of note were made: 'Uber Hordes' were added, were Zombie Hordes of 20+ units would form near-unkillable units with hit-points that could be removed; How to remove Uber Horde hit-points was detailed for players; and, general grammatical changes to the notes were added.

Overall, I was disappointed I did not get to try-out the last set of rules, but I am overjoyed on how much fun the mod is for players.  It was a great time designing this mod, and I learned a lot: Using a foundation-set of rules and pieces is a great way to experiment with game design; Getting people together to try-out a multiplayer board game is also really tough at times.

It may be a long time until the next game comes around (I'm learning some tools and getting myself settled in Portland).  Let me know what you think of this work, play the game yourself, and take care!

P.S.  Special thanks to Jesse Fortune, Jesse Parkinson, Matt Isler, and Ryan Sturzenbecher for special help in testing this game!

GDC-4.0-The Walking Dead: Crafting a Stylized World for the Mature Franchise

by Jonathon Banks ( Lead Environmental Artist at Telltale Games )

Telltale used to produce pretty things.

Pre-Production

• The team looked at the portrayal of the comic but had to add a style of their own.
• The environment was developed before the zombies and characters.

Art Process

• Nothing of the characters/environments was done before their concepts were done.
• Comics were used as filler for some concept pieces.

Handcrafted Line-Work

• Puzzle Agent was the source of the visual form.

Colorful Textures

• Huge saturation and detail proved very important.
• Textures were generally in the format of [highlights and shadows]:[overlayed watercolor textures]:[line-work].

Atmospheric Lighting

• There is high contrast, with all lighting made from color-key art.
• Depth-fog and color overlays are used for cleanup.

Technical Constraints

• 30,000 vertices for environments at max.
• Vertex lighting only and no SSAO.
• Keep post-processing pretty limited.
• Reduce the light-map sizes whenever possible.
• No HDR!

Production

• Style guides are a must!  Get them and use them!

// Up Next: A First Time CEO's Guide to Growing in Mobile

4.28.13 - A Fury Void Update

This is the last update before a postmortem next week.  The weeks leading to this point have gone by too quickly, but Team Fury is still forward-marching.  As the team Producer and Product Manager, I couldn’t be prouder of this team.

The schedule over the last 2 weeks has been a hectic one; bugs, small feature tweaks, and general polish of the Fury Void game have taken priority.  There is a plethora of items still to complete in the next week, but even more are loaded into the team’s list of items that will not be tackled in time for game completion.  The following is a brief on the features added and the bugs fixed in the recent weeks.

An issue already resolved was the inclusion of additional nebula skyboxes for the game.  This was done by the outside initiative of a Team Fury member; no story was written for this item, but it is well received.

Another visual change was the remodelling of some of the 3D ship assets.  High polygon counts (leading to long load times) and model clipping were corrected to give .

2 more colors have been made available to players for their weapons: magenta and neon-green.  Missiles now reflect the colors that are selected, while the laser beam is bigger and meaner.

Black holes are now stark-black.  The original issue was caused by allowing various texture effects to influence the black hole object; removing these, black holes are truly dark and terrifying.  Further, black holes will start pulling-in objects within 3 seconds of spawning instead of 5, leading to more frantic play after they are spawned.  However, due to an issue of black holes pulling every in-game object in before the player ship either left the level or was destroyed, the size of any system level has been reduced to accommodate for this (doing even more to concentrate play).

A previous issue with black holes was that they killed each other if 2 came into contact.  After multiple attempts to add black holes to a list of objects that the black hole will ignore destroying, it was finally accomplished; to ward off future issues with multiple black holes, however, code was added to check if a black hole already exists, so that only 1 black hole will be spawned in any given level.

To indicate to the player how many points they will gain at the end of a level and to encourage them to move on to a new level, the ‘Population Density Bar’ has been added.  This small object at the top of the screen shows how much the player has destroyed and how close they are to getting the highest score multiplier.

A completely new section to the menu system has been added.  Under the ‘Options’ page, there is a section for explaining what Fury Void is about, what the player is trying to do, and what is in the game.  The first page covers the brief context of the game (copied directly from the intro text-scroll seen at starting the game).  The next page describes the goals of Fury Void (destroy the galaxy to save it) and how that is indicated through gameplay via the ‘Population Density Bar’.  Later, planets, enemies, and powerups are described.

Numerous options have been repositioned in the menu system.  The player may no longer select their control scheme from the ‘Options’ menu and the settings for difficulty have been moved to the ship-selection screen.

As the player’s health is small and tucked into a corner, the screen will flash red when the player’s health goes below a certain limit.  This is an indicator that the player should be leaving the system to retain their score.  Further, a blue onscreen warning is given when black holes spawn.  It will display periodically as long as the player remains in a level with a black hole.

There was a vast amount of text pixelation throughout Fury Void’s menus and playspace.  This has been corrected fairly easily, though extra work was needed on some screens as the viewing camera is not in a standard location on all pages.  Additional work on having uniform fonts and font-sizes in the game is being done; the issue is likely to be included with Fury Void by the time of this update’s publish.

When loading levels, any object or text displayed through Unity’s OnGUI service would remain over the loading screen’s background.  To amend this, a simple check on every OnGUI item to see if the level is loading was added.

At times, when attempting to view Fury Void’s credits, they would not display.  On a gut feeling, Team Fury’s lead programmer double-checked the time scale of the credits screen.  He found that, after entering play, exiting, and then attempting to view the credits, time was stopped; it had not been restarted from the act of exiting the in-game play.  Fixing this, credits now scroll no-matter what the player does beforehand.

In the following days - the final days of student development on Fury Void - there are a number of features and issues that are aimed to be addressed: Individual ships will have unique names; Transitioning between system levels will be faster; Enemies will fire different weapons; More enemies will be spawned; and, if time allows, each save profile will have their own name to keep track of their save.

Please pay attention to Fury Void’s Facebook page for further updates on Team Fury’s progress to help players save the galaxy by fire.  More work will be done, many planets will be destroyed, and many explosions will be had!

The latest build of Fury Void can be found here; the next build is Fury Void's official v 1.0 release!