Well, for only having been able to work on this for 12 hours, I think I did a pretty darn good job. I used JPixel again (as I mentioned before), which basically has support for OpenGL, pixely particle effects, and a lot of other junk.

Okay, I admit it, I was banking on “Escape” when I came up with my game idea. Therefore I will admit that the only thing that this game really has to do with islands is that it randomly takes place on one. I really would have loved to be more original here and go with the actual theme, but I was very short on time (12 hours was even far more than I suspected) and having spent 3 of that drawing the characters I had to go with I had planned. I already had design docs written up and all that beforehand and this sort of game really uses JPixel well, so that’s that.

Anyway. In Zombie Grinder you are running from a horde of zombies! I thought it would be fun to do an escape-type fighting game where you’re not limited by hit points. So, in this you can’t die unless you touch the horde on the left side of the screen. As such, even though you can be attacked by up to 50 enemies at once (I limited it because any more might slow down older systems), as long as you can stay on the right side of the screen you’re pretty safe. Turns out this is more difficult than it sounds.

I coded all the characters using the same base class, and gave the AI the ability to compare “factions” for who they wanted to attack. This ended up giving the awesome side effect of being able to drop in allies (same faction as the player) with very little fuss. All I had to do was draw a new character (or just tint the player’s guy, of course). This adds a very cool element where you’re running madly from these zombies and you can have some dumb friends drop in and distract some of the zombies. I really would have loved to play on this mechanic more but obviously didn’t have the time.

Overall I’m pretty pleased with this. It’s a simple little time waster that does, more or less, what I went for. And the number of moves you can do, along with the complexity of the combat system, is pretty awesome. My big disappointment is that I didn’t finish doing weapons in time – trust me, they would have been awesome.

Anyway, give it a play and let me know what you think.  This could use a lot more work and quite a bit more polish (worst backgrounds ever!), but hey we can’t have everything. And don’t worry about losing – you can’t!

PS – Yes indeedy the gameplay and characters are inspired by River City Ransom.

My favorite screenshot

Lots of zombies and a few allies