Zombie City by Samm
A Unity game that plays like a board game. The player controls four heroes searching an infested city for the items necessary to stop the pandemic. Features randomly generated cities, a dice rolling combat system, and event cards to make the game play slightly differently each time. The rules are available on the main menu, and press 'm' at any time to toggle the music.
Two of us worked together on this, and it was our first game jam. We figured a board game was a good analog for a game that has one screen, so we took out some graph paper and brainstormed up a simple game, adding a few things that wouldn't be as practical in a real board game. There are definitely some balance issues and a few rules tweaks necessary, but personally I'm just happy everything works. There was a totally reasonable amount of coffee and a fair amount of cider involved. We would love to read your feedback!
Ratings
| Coolness |
82% |
2 |
| Overall(Jam) |
3.53 |
241 |
| Audio(Jam) |
2.84 |
457 |
| Fun(Jam) |
3.39 |
248 |
| Graphics(Jam) |
3.04 |
620 |
| Humor(Jam) |
2.43 |
589 |
| Innovation(Jam) |
3.61 |
187 |
| Mood(Jam) |
3.44 |
227 |
| Theme(Jam) |
3.96 |
158 |
Feedback
Thanks for the feedback! The music was put in about two hours before the competition ended, and a Mute button was on the list of things that didn't make the deadline. That, and balancing the cards so that things like "zombies popping up out of no-where" are far less frustrating. Believe me, we noticed that too :)
Once the dust from the competition settles, I'll probably crack the game back open and take a stab at balancing it.
You better be making a full version!
Feels nice and solid
I'll have a Linux build available shortly; however, neither of us have Linux machines at our disposal so it will be a largely experimental build. Please let us know if you come across any issues and we'll do our best to resolve them.
Thanks again for playing :)
I found that most of my characters would completely destroy most zombies without a scratch. Though I did end up with one character who was knocked down to 5 or so might which grew tense near the end trying to "protect" him by navigating away from zombies to the helipad.
I think aside from the balance issues though, I had an issue with how information was displayed after you end a turn. I enjoyed the card drawing aspect, but if you split up characters and sent each of them into a building... it wasn't very clear which cards were being drawn for which buildings. So that left me with quite a lot of detachment towards the 4 characters, as it hindered my ability to recognize when their stats were being changed. Since a lot can happen in between turns, figuring out the best ways to display information to users is really important. (but I definitely understand that the time limit cut into a lot of the time you guys could have used to polish that).
This other thing goes back to what I just mentioned, but I apparently picked up all the vaccines without realizing it in the game. Having a vaccine count or something would have been nice in case someone misses information somehow. So yeah, I ended up exploring every single building/park/graveyard on the map haha. Then returning everyone to the helipad to be surprised that I must have not noticed picking up 3 of the 4 vaccines.
Finally, I noticed a bug near the end where if you selected one character, and then selected a different one... you could move your currently selected character to the other character's potential movement squares. Which means you could essentially move a character with 1 speed to tiles they shouldn't have been able to reach.
I'm sorry if all my criticisms give the impression I didn't enjoy the game, I did like it quite a bit! I think you guys did a really fantastic job considering how much you managed to pack into the game in such a limited time frame. The fact I could write up so much about the game (and still not even mention certain mechanics) goes to show that it has a lot of potential depth.
- Dylan Gallardo
Maybe having some sound effects could make this a better board game on videogame (like heartstone).
I'm not sure that the rules are perfectly balanced, i feel too strong but that was fun to play with.
A box version maybe ;)
Further improvements and you will have a great little game here.
Maybe if the zombies were hiding in the houses as well. The players could have range attacks and specialist weapons abilities. Or usable items as cards.
Variety of Zombies.
Clearer objective to win.
Have fun making this great!
As has been brought up quite a few times, the lack of visual indicators on which characters are being effected by which cards is definitely an issue. Similarly, it's an issue that there is no indication on how many items are left to be found and what buildings could they be found in. Since fixing those would be outside the scope of a "typo bug" which we are allowed to fix after submitting the game, I can't in good conscience implement that change until the judging is over. That being said, I completely agree with the feedback on those issues. Thanks for pointing it out :)
The there was a "typo bug" with the items not spawning after you beat the game once. I fixed that issue and deployed the change. Happy zombie hunting everyone!