So, not unlike a quickly sobering bar fly, I have decided to put ‘the girls’ away. The pre-pre-Alpha has been taken offline, after having gathered some feedback and info from the select small group of folks that even know this project exists at this point.

I was made aware of some fairly serious performance issues in the game engine, mostly due to pathfinding. So I’ve retooled the guts a bit to allow more graceful scheduling of that most processor intensive part of the engine, and that should help pep things up a bit when the zombie count gets ridiculous.

At this point I’m implementing a rudimentary animation engine, so the action will get a bit prettier in future iterations. I’m wary that the increased prettiness will have a hefty performance cost, so we’ll have to see what trade-offs prove to be worthwhile as the situation develops.

I anticipate that I have another month of development before I’m ready to unleash the game. I was hoping for a shorter time line, but I want to be sure it’s done properly. Hell, a month may even be optimistic, but I’m going to cling that hope never the less.

Aaaaand, I think that wraps it up for now.

Move along citizens, nothing to see here.

-Joe out.

Well, I’ve thrown a half baked Alpha version of the game on the main site. It is really in need of artistic polish and still needs a few game engine loose ends tied up, but I needed to get something out to start letting folks play with it and give me some feedback. There is a part of me that feels that revealing the game too soon is a mistake, but I’m fairly sure that the current obscurity of the project will insulate me from making a bad first impression. So go and check it out if you’d like, but expect that the current incarnation will most probably be taken offline for future incubation in fairly short order.

So now that I’ve found some spare time, allow me to write a bit about the pilot project. Luncheon of the Dead, is the working title. Basically it’s a casual game written in Actionscript 3.0. This represents my first foray into programming in Actionscript, as well as a first ernest attempt at game programming (my background being primarily in business application development). I intend to go into more detail about some lessons learned and interesting problems encountered while producing the game in later posts, but for now, I’ll stick to introducing the brain-child.

If you had to put Luncheon of the Dead into a category, it would probably be Survival-Horror Real Time Strategy. Doesn’t roll off the tongue, I admit. But it’s the most fitting collection of words I could think of on short notice.

The gameplay is fairly straight forward. You control a group of 9 survivor/defenders trapped inside a mall. You have to fend off ever increasing hordes of zombies which filter in through the main entrance, while collecting supplies from abandoned stores to fuel the defense effort (ammunition, medical kits, and debris to build barricades).

My current thinking is to finish it off as a continuous Pac-man style game, where you can never ‘win’ per se, with the point being to get the highest score before you’re defenders are inevitably picked off one by one by the shambling hordes. Good times. Although I must admit, having a finite game mode and allowing players to truly win does have it’s own attraction as well, so that may be added in later versions.

There are a few more nuggets that will be revealed later, and I will go into more detail about how the game is played in later posts, but what has been presented thus far does give a sneak peak into the game.
I hope to have an early version of the game up here soon. and I will continue to post progress and such here.

-Joe out.