This is Definitely the Final Build

After 20 weeks of sleep deprivation, head banging against desks, and hair pulling moments, here is the release candidate for Survival Zombie.

The Omega Final Build

Final Final Build?

Eat brains
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/79375019/GAM395/zombie_survival_final%20(1).zip

New Build

New Build

What Hath Science Wrought

Importing both the Civilian and Neckbeard models into Maya appears to have caused some sort of nightmare-fuel teleporter accident.

Anas Azmi Week 5 & 6 Update

Sorry for not updating for ages. Back to the point, things I did for these 2 weeks:

• Made animations for the ending cutscene
• Started making the cutscene to introduce the plate-throwing mechanic
• Made animations for neckbeards munching without a care for the world
• Made animations for neckbeards running away panicking
• Made the one-armed surgeon (and animated him)

Things I'm planning to do next week:

The one-armed surgeon, BugStyle.

• Finish making the plate cutscene

Most of what I made these last 2 weeks are the result of the Funny Jam we did 2 weeks ago. Hopefully, we'd be able to make Survival Zombie much funnier thanks to it.

Although, starting last week, I've been busy with the service learning course, so now I have less time to work on this game.

New Build

NEWEST BUILD

Change Log 4/25/14

Change Log 4/25/14

Added:
-A new eating mechanic where the player has to constantly click on the left mouse button to completely eat an NPC
-The plate mechanic has been re-introduced albeit it a much better fashion
-Possibly fixed a game breaking issue with the neckbeards dying to their own gibs when you are eating them making the player be stuck in an infinite loop
-Populated the cafeteria with the new environmental models
-Populated the janitor close with the new environmental models
-A better cut scene for the elevator scripted event (new animation and sound effect)
-Minor level geometry adjustments

Known issue:
-Game might break if you try to eat the cafe neckbeard when it is hit by gibs causing the neckbeard to be destroyed in the process before you could actually eat him. Press F1 to force restart the game.

4/25/14 Build

4/25/14 Build with Plate Mechanic

Anas Azmi Week 2 & 3 Update

Things I did the last 2 weeks:

• Remade the animation for Zedna eating the neckbeard
• Made animations for the neckbeard and the civilian tripping & getting up
• Made Zedna's animation for the elevator cutscene
• Remade the Not Food texture for the walls
• Made the plate that would be stuck on civilians when they are hit with a plate

Things I'll be doing this week:

• Make Zedna's animation for aligning her victims to face away from her
• Make a cutscene showing a kid wearing a plate with a zombie face drawn and getting attacked by neckbeards for it

The last 2 weeks were pretty rough to me. First, I hurt my feet to the point that I couldn't stand (and consequently couldn't come to classes & the meetings; took about 5 days to recover). Next, I went to DC the weekend before last (there's an event I had to attend). Lastly, I caught fever on Monday last week and was stuck in bed the rest of the week (again, missed several meetings). As a result, I couldn't get much done.

A More Populated Janitor Closet

Today Andy worked on populating the janitor closet with Nathans recently created environmental models

Janitor Room Screenshot 1

Janitor Closet Screenshot 2

Update 4/19/14

Change log 4/19/14
-Neckbeard in the cafe scene is now edible
-Added TV News Cast sound in the TV Room
-Fixed the timing issue with the Elevator scripted scene
-Spawned gibs can now stun and kill Neckbeards
-Various small bug fixes

Know Issues:
-Sound is still having problems playing for the civilians in the cafe room
-Sound is still having problems playing for the Neckbeards in the gauntlet room
-Can't think of anymore off of the top of my head at the moment

Build 4/19/14

Updated: Flying Gibs

Updated Alpha WITH GIBS

Build

Flying GIBS

GIBS are now flying everywhere. EVERYWHERE!!!!!

also bug fixes :P


Build

Most Recent Weekly Build

This week. Cary and I did bug fixing and level editing tweaks. And as in his previous posts, a gib system has been implemented. Gaze in awe at random bits flying everywhere as you eat people's brains!

Most Recent Build

Most Recent Build With Distraction Zombie Plate Throwing Mechanic

Changelog 4/11/14
-Fixed the poof particles
-Fixed the elevator door animation in the cafe
-Fixed the scripted TV room
-Added zombie plates to all of the civilians

-Moved audio source for the choir sound to the febreze bottle
-Added gibbing system
-Various tweaks to particle effects

Known Issues:
-AI could get stuck in obstacles
-In game sounds could not be playing correctly on the NPCs
-Also some of the audio sources have a wide range which could be heard from halfway across the map (i.e. random choir noise or the elevator music)

GIBS GIBS EVERYWHERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There be Gibs and They be MAGIC.


Normal

Mask Area

Alpha 0.08

Fixed a critical bug crashing problem.

Normal

MaskTesting

Alpha 0.07

We have another new build for you.  We're trying to hit on a mechanic that is inherently funny - for this one, we're trying out a way to put Zombie Masks on civilians, distracting neckbeards and allowing you to escape.


The main level is available here.

And, as always, please leave your feedback here.

Anas Azmi Week 1 Update

Things I did last week:

• Made a new brain model
• Animated the new brain model
•  Made a script to swap wall textures to Not Food when Zedna is hungry
• Made wireframe versions of the spray bottle and the elevator for highlighting

Things I'm planning to do this week:

• Remake the wall textures
• (Possibly) make particle textures
• Make environment models
• Make gibs

We're back in action! We did a lot of playtests, and we got lots of good feedback, so we're going to change our development plan accordingly. One of the things we're going to fix is the fact that our game mechanics aren't funny, and we're implementing some wacky mechanics that, hopefully, we can show in our next build.

4/5 - The Player Feedback Build

We've got a hot fresh build up for all of you. This week we've been working on systems that provide feedback and direction to the player.  Try it out here and tell us what you think here.

Open Alpha now online!

We've now finished the Alpha build of our game.  Play it here, and please fill out our player survey here.  Thanks!

Anas Azmi End-of-Quarter Update

Zedna eating the med student's brain.

Things I did last week:

• Modified the animator controllers to make it easier for programmers to read and use.
• Redid all of Zedna's animation.
• Textured the janitor's cart.
• Finished making the air freshener bottle.
• Textured the walls.
• Textured the floor.
• Textured the ceiling.
• Textured the counter.
• Textured the table.
• Made adjustments to the civilian's animation to make it look like he's struggling against Zedna, who's eating his brains.

In summary, what I did this quarter:

The air freshener bottle.

• Modeled, textured & animated Zedna.
• Modeled, textured & animated the civilian (and made a script for civilian customization).
• Textured & animated the neckbeard (he's modeled by Nathan).
• Modeled the siren that appears on top of the neckbeard when he's in alert mode (and learned to take advantage of backface culling in the process).
• Made a script to test the animators (although only I have real use of it for now).
• Modeled & textured the air freshener (although we did have a placeholder model that looks pretty decent, considering it's not textured).
• Textured the janitor's cart (it's modeled by Nathan and Brian and animated by Nathan).
• Textured the walls (they're modeled by Nathan and Brian).
• Textured the tables (they're modeled by Brian).
• Textured the floor (the model is just a primitive plane object from Unity; it was used for level design before).



Zedna pushing the janitor's cart, which is essentially an
infinite air freshener (until it breaks).

• Textured the ceiling (the same as the floor).

This quarter was a quarter of discovery for me. Even though I started out as a programmer who happens to know how to model, I eventually grew up to become, according to Cary, one of the key members of this team. Although I had experience modeling (mostly in Blender), texturing, rigging & animating, my animations were pretty horrible before. Throughout this quarter, I learned about

• UV sets (each set means different UV maps in Unity)
• transparency texturing (and how horrible that went)
• double quaternion rigs (which means that animating a rig wouldn't make some parts of the rig paper-thin; I took a whole day figuring out how to get around this problem using the default setting before I found out about double quaternion rigging)
• rigging an object only to some joints (before I found out about this, I had problems with parented objects stretching to creepy levels when it isn't supposed to)
• weight painting (which was originally found out as a way to do what double quaternion did before I found out about double quaternion)
• backface culling (and how I could use it to emulate glass-covered lamps)
• multiple materials on one object (allowing customizations of each instance of the object by code (although I couldn't make the customization show outside runtime))
• texture tiling (so I don't have to tile a texture just to make the size right)



The hospital cafeteria.

• art prototyping (it's to show Allen what I've done for this game, but I definitely learned something, because I've never been in a team as anything other than a programmer)

I'm looking forward to doing more work in this studio, even if that's as early as the upcoming Play Jam, which we're going to in order to present Survival Zombie.

Alpha Build

Alpha Build

https://www.dropbox.com/s/58167j9h88sagno/Zombie%20Survival%20Alpha.zip

Web Player

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5319485/Alpha%20Build/WebBuild.html

New Build!

We have a new build up for all of you to start playing around with.  Try it here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9v8dTEFahq9UV93c0F1TmcyV1U/edit?usp=sharing

We've got the first half of the main level in, as well as Anas's animations, some stand in textures, and a fair number of our environment models.  It's still rather unfinished, but we're very interested to hear your feedback!

Anas Azmi Week 8 Update

What I did last week:

• Rigged the neckbeard
• Animated the neckbeard
• Integrated the neckbeard's animation into Unity
• Made a test file for the animations

What I'm planning to do this week:

• Make the Febreze model
• Resolve any art bugs
• Finish any unfinished model

I personally think that, due to the neckbeard being animated last, he might have the best animation quality out of the three characters, which might just make him stand out even more. I may remake the models of the other characters, or I may remake Zedna's texture, since I'm thinking that her texture is a bit bland.

Over the rest of the quarter, I most likely will take over the work of another member of our team due to complaints from the rest of the team. I'm not sure about next quarter, though.

Programmer Update - Rodolfo Gomez

For the past two weeks, these are the things that were implemented programming wise from my end:
-Particle effects for Zedna getting hit
-Particle effects for Zedna eating Civilian NPCs
-Particle effects for the Febreze bottle
-Interfacing the Febreze bottles onto Zedna upon pick up
-Helped Cary with trying to debug the Neckbeard/Civilian wandering AI
-Implemented the combo eating system for Zedna (She would move faster after eating a Civilian's brain and it would increase the more she would eat, the combo meter would go down after not eating)

Level Progress

With the help of the wonderful Andy Misek, I've been making a lot of progress laying out our main level - one full floor of Have Mercy Hospital.  This will be the first playground-style level, after a few tutorial levels.

Anas Azmi Week 7 Update

Things I did last week:

• Textured the neckbeard
• Made a script to customize the civilian's colors (Want an alien civilian? No problem!)
• Added Zedna's name tag (which I forgot before)
• Animated Zedna (save for one more clip)
• Made an animated siren model

Things I'm planning to do next week:

• Animate the neckbeard
• Make the neckbeard's clothes customizable
• Make a model of the Febreze bottle
• Extend the civilian's customization to include textures

Possibly because the neckbeard's textures are the most detailed out of the characters so far, he became easily the best part of our game right now. This came out of a need to make him wear a plaid shirt and jeans pants, while I took shortcuts when texturing Zedna, and skipped texturing altogether when making the civilian. I'll keep this in mind, although the civilian's customization extension will be secondary to animating the neckbeards and making the Febreze model.

When making the siren, I made use of backface culling, which in most graphics engines is used to lighten the graphics workload, since I had problems with transparency before. When making the siren, I reversed the normals of several faces, namely the faces of the inside parts (although the lights were made separately, and so don't need to have their face normals reversed) and the red glass. The result is a siren that's not completely see-through, but still has its insides visible. I got some good feedbacks from it.

While animating Zedna, I ran into some problems. Due to my loath of the zombie genre in the past, I couldn't picture how a zombie would normally move, or even stand for that matter. This is despite me having watched several zombie shows and played some zombie games. The result is animation that I think is a bit wonky and unnatural (although the latter may be caused by Zedna being inhuman but still looks human). I'm thinking of making changes to it, but that's also secondary, since I did get the feel of Zedna having problems moving across.

Cary Update #2

I added the change so there is a lunge range now.  The player can also stop eating by pressing a button.  The AI got improved a bit but still buggy.  There is now a eating duration instead of instantly eating a person.  The models for neckbeards change if a hunger point is reached.  The neckbears now stop a player from eating if they collide with them.  Added sound code is now sounds play when they are supposed to.

Andy Update

After this week, many more sounds were added and there is more of a variety played at random. Also I did play testing on multiple mechanics and was able to come up with what people find fun and tedious about our game at this point in development.

Next week I want to get in the other sounds I have record, record a female to be zedna (right now we have a male, and it sounds funny, but I think to say true to making the character female, we need to record a female), and more play testing with revamped testing level. Also it was talked about starting to move assets into the level block out.

Neckbeard is textured!

Anaz finished off the Neckbeard model, and he did a wonderful job!

Shoutouts to Bob over at High Voltage!

Anas Azmi Week 6 Update

Things I did last week:

• Made minor physical changes to the civilian model
• Removed transparency from Zedna's model
• Rigged the civilian model
• Animated the civilian (in progress)

Things I'm planning to do this week:

• Finish animating the civilian
• Texture the neckbeard's model
• Animate Zedna

Yesterday's class, we got some positive feedback thanks to the whole game progress having sped up by a lot this last week. For that, I can say that I'm glad.

Regarding the civilian's animation, I've finished most of it, but I haven't exported it to Unity. Therefore, this, along with setting up Mecanim (and possibly a short script to change the civilian's material texture/color), will be part of finishing the civilian's animation.

Last weekend, I, who have been avoiding anything remotely gory, tried playing Left 4 Dead 2 for the first time with my housemates. To be honest, it was a fun experience. I was certainly repulsed by the amount of gore I created (especially when using melee weapons like a katana), but the fun I had, thanks to the feeling of teamwork (and the fun in pretending to be a samurai, to be honest), made up for it. Although, in my opinion, this game can't really be called a zombie game, just because there are zombies who, although admittedly made the game more fun, resemble monsters more than humans, when zombies were technically human before. Because of that, the game felt less like Counter-Strike (in the sense that you fight against humans rather than cannon fodder) and more like Doom.

Anas Azmi Week 5 Update

Things I did last week:

• Fixed texture problems with Zedna's model
• Made the civilian's model
• Made the Febreze bottle's model (in progress)

Things I'm planning to do this week:

• Finish modeling the Febreze bottle
• Make some adjustments to the civilian model
• Animate the character models

Apparently the problem with Zedna's texture mapping is that, if you have multiple UV sets in Maya, you can't select which one to export, and Unity only reads the first one. Also, transparency seems to be working differently between Maya and Unity, so I'll remove the transparency in Zedna's model.

As for the civilian model, I made him to have separate materials for each of his components. This is so it's easy to customize him in Unity, so that we can make what you can essentially call palette swap. In addition, during yesterday's class, I received feedback on the model's shape, so I'll be fixing that this week.

Another component of the class was the feedback we got from our presentation. We were told that it's not clear yet what makes this game fun, so we should make that clear in two weeks. After some discussion, we decided that, along with implementing the blocked-out level in Unity, we would animate the character models, as right now, the level feels lifeless (although, admittedly, it's a barebone sandbox). I'll at least start working on that. I may pass the Febreze modeling to someone else, though.

This week, I didn't watch or play anything zombie-related, but I might as well elaborate on one particular game that caught my interest, which is Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc. The game is best described as a combination of Persona 4, Ace Attorney & Battle Royale. It's about a group of high school students with extraordinary talents who are trapped in Hope's Peak Academy by a sadistic robot bear named Monokuma. In each chapter (at least, those I've played), Monokuma essentially forces the students to kill each other by providing motive. Each chapter starts with the player having free time, which is used to socialize with other students a la Persona 4. Then, once a body is discovered, the player will take some time investigating before being taken to the courtroom, where all the students debate to decide who's guilty. After all, voting on the wrong guilty party would cost them all their lives except the real guilty party, who would then be released from the school, and if they voted right, only the guilty party would be executed. 

I like Danganronpa for its strong detective mechanic, which would feel like any Ace Attorney game, but thanks to a well-written plot and a time-based gameplay during the trial session, you would definitely need to work your brain in order to solve the case. Unlike many mystery media though, this game, courtesy of the sadistic Monokuma, shows just how the guilty party is executed (each execution is specially made based on the guilty party's personality), and that makes this game stand out from series like Ace Attorney or Case Closed. In short, this game makes fun of the mystery genre by not giving the reader/player satisfaction from solving the case, and instead blames the player for voting on the guilty party (although the player would die otherwise). I think that this is one way Survival Zombie could have made fun of the zombie genre, which is by not providing the player relief after killing all the zombies.

Finding the Fun

Today was our milestone for a first playable build.  You can play with the sandbox level here. 

Controls:
WASD - Lurch
Tab - activate mouselook
Left mouse (on NPCs) - Charge at and eat an NPC
Q - Febreeze yourself to blend in with the humans.
Feedback is appreciated!

Our faculty advisor, the esteemed Allen Turner, observed that right now we don't have quite everything we need implemented to begin playtesting for fun.  A lot of what makes our game fun relies on jokes, which aren't present in this level, and our 'chase' mechanic, which isn't quite recognizable as a toy yet.  In the coming weeks we're going to A.) Get the game to give enough feedback for players to engage with it as a toy, B.) Get crazy (Things like spawning absurd quantities of Neckbeards) to figure out what the most engaging mechanics are, and C.) Adding in some of our humor in the form of sound effects.

Its Hard to move when you're part of the floor

Added Map limitations to the wander search

Febreze Working/ Wandering Working (may be buggy go test for me)
Look in inspecter for variables for designers to edit all relavent variables are there
THEY MUST BE SET OR IT WON"T WORK (no prefab built yet if needed ask).

Fixed and made chasing and targeting work

Fixed the chase
Added Chasing paramaters
Neckbeards chase when they can see her or shes within a distance(distance is changeable in inspector, Default is currently 10)

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Current State of the Game

Current state of the game as of 2/14/14.

Andy's Late Update

Hello all,

Don't want anyone to think I'm slacking, only forgetting to post blog posts. Since last post I was able to do a few hand drawings of the level design. The first one didn't meet the needs we needed so after talking over the idea with the group, went with a new design. In our last meeting, a few things were changed and I was able to get into Unity and do a 3D block out of the level. The 3D block out is now on Trello to take a look at.

Also, after looking at the level design, as a group we sat down and came up with more level oriented jokes. This is because many of our jokes were post hospital jokes that we weren't able to use in the hospital. A comedy game has to be consistently coming at you with new jokes and witty banter in order for the player to continue playing the game. This way helpful because it gave me more of an idea on how we were going to use certain parts of the level to teach the player as well as make a joke of the situation.

Recording for sound is beginning now as well. It was originally going to start before class on Monday, but due to illness, I had to bail on a couple friends. In the end this works out, because in the meeting, we talked about more audio jokes we would be able to do. My list of sounds I need to record quadrupled as well as giving me many ideas on where I want to go with it. Music is very soon to follow.

Rodolfo Gomez Update - Hunger Mechanic Implemented

Things I have done this week:
-I worked on the hunger mechanic for the game
    -Player gets hungry over time
    -Once player has reached certain threshold for hunger mechanic, they die.
    -Player can eat civilians to restore their own "health."

-Uploaded all of the models that were on Trello onto the Perforce server

Anas Azmi Week 4 Update

Things I did this week:

• Contributed to brainstorm meetings (which resulted in, among things, a female main character)
• Suggested ways the team would split its workload
• Made a generic humanoid model to make it easy to make other character models
• Made Zedna's model (with some issues)

Things I'm planning to do next week:

• Fix problems regarding Zedna's model
• Make models of:
• the med student
• the civilian (not sure if we'd have multiple civilian models)
• Make a model of the air freshener
• Get everything art-wise ready for our first playable prototype

This week, we focused on getting our gears moving after 4 weeks of planning. Since I've volunteered myself to become the 3D artist for this team, I was elected as the lead artist of the team. This week, I was tasked on making Zedna's model.

I got everything done for the model (except rigging and animation), but I had an issue with UV mapping. The image on top (which admittedly isn't perfect) is the render image of the model in Maya. I used one texture for the body, and one for the eyes. Here, the textures are nicely mapped save for a few places. However, the same model imported into Unity (this is a test scene for my own use) didn't get any texture mapping through. As a result, the model simply tiles the textures as if they're not mapped. I speculated that the issues came from either me using GIMP instead of Photoshop, or from the model's normals being not properly set. Regardless, I'll solve this issue throughout the next week. Hopefully, I'll learn some pointer I'll need to keep in mind when making other character models.

Neckbeard Modeling

I'll be working on the model for the Neckbeard, the main antagonist in our game.  I'm tweeting my progress over on my personal twitter.  Check it out!

Rodolfo Gomez Update - Chasing Mechanic Implemented

Today I worked on creating the chasing mechanic for our player zombie. The player would have to click on a civilian NPC where the player would then automatically move towards the civilian NPC and "eat" them.  Our plan was to have the player click and automatically goes towards civilians in such a fashion that it turns into a sort of "pinball game" effect. Adding to the humor of our game.

The video below demonstrates this mechanic.

Week 4 - Pitching and Production

After shaping up our design, we gave our pitch presentation (available here).  After that, I set up our tasks on Trello, and everyone's gotten down to business on producing content for Survival Zombie.

One of the more interesting problems we talked about was gender.  Our original design called for male Neckbeards, and left the gender of the civilians unspecified.  We won't have time to make multiple civilian models, so we were faced with a tough decision: do we want all the women in our world to be helpless zombie-chow, or do we make the civilians male and have no women whatsoever?

The 'answer,' as such things often are, was that we were asking the wrong question.  As such, I'm proud to announce Zedna, our new, female protagonist.

Anas Azmi Week 3 Update

Things I did last week:

• Helped suggest changing the game's camera perspective from first-person to third-person
• Suggested Kingdom Hearts-like camera perspective and/or HUD (we ended up going HUD-less though)
• Suggested grim background music to go along with cartoony sound effects suggested by Brian
• Brought up ideas to bring innovation to the game, none of which were agreed upon (although we did look into Is This a Zombie?, the anime series I watched last week)
• Made concept art for the player zombie (thus helping the team make the pitch presentation for today's class)
• Started watching Highschool of the Dead

Things I'm planning to do this week:

• Present the pitch (specifically the art aspect)
• Get input from the class
• (If needed) change our game for something better
• (If our game went through without problems) Start making models if everyone agrees with the concept art
• Start making the art prototype
• Get as many art that I need to do as I can
• Continue watching Highschool of the Dead
• Watch Warm Bodies & Shaun of the Dead

I've been talking about making models since the first week, but I figured that making models without a clear direction is pretty hard, and I also have to think about the possibility of the game getting scrapped, since we're still in the pitching stage.

I mentioned watching Highschool of the Dead (shortened to HOTD) because, first and foremost, I'm an anime fan (it should've been obvious after reading last week's post though). Secondly, it's because HOTD depicts realistic zombies and a zombie apocalypse setting. I think this is the only anime series with that setting, but I may have been mistaken. The only problem I have with this particular series is the fact that it's Not Safe For Work because it has nudity.

Also, I plan on watching Warm Bodies due to the fact that it's a different take on the zombie genre, and also due to the existence of comedy elements in the movie, something we're aiming to achieve in Survival Zombie. Since much of the focus in the movie is on the zombie main character, who knows, we might get some inspiration from it.

In addition, I also plan on watching Shaun of the Dead because it's a parody of the zombie genre, and also because we got some inspiration (particularly the looks Tedward/Zedward, the protagonist, has) from it. We might even get some gag inspirations from it, thanks to it being a parody.

Rodolfo Gomez Update - FPS View for Player

    I wrote some code that dealt with the player view. It is in a first-person view (we might however change it to have a third-person view instead) where the player can move around with the simple WASD keys and can jump using the space bar. I also added a limit as to how far the player can look up and down without the camera being flipped upside down.

Player view as the zombie (WIP)

Added a limit as to how far the player can look up from the camera

Andy Update

Last night I was able to type up my idea of the game in the format of the pitch. I suggested some hiding and movement mechanics as well as the art and sound style of the game. It appears we will be using the art and sound style I suggested as well as keep a few of the smell mechanics. Nate came up with a much stronger movement mechanic that would make the game more unique and enjoyable that we are to go with.

Our pitch was written and agreed upon by the entire group which we nailed down a cohesive image of what we want the game to be moving forward.

Anas Azmi Week 2 Update

Things I did last week:

• Contributed ideas for making Survival Zombie funny
• Showed the zombie's concept art to the team
• Participated in the Global Game Jam along with the rest of the studio
• Watched Is This A Zombie?
• Watched Is This A Zombie? of the Dead (in progress)

Things I'm planning to do this week:

• Make more concept art
• Make a generic humanoid model
• Learn making sprites (in case we need them)
• Finish watching Is This A Zombie? of the Dead
• Do more zombie research

The team didn't do much last week in terms of Survival Zombie because we all participated in Global Game Jam 2014. Nevertheless, thanks to the Game Jam, we learned a lot about our strengths and weaknesses as a team. Personally, I learned that I can make use of my talents in drawing, which I used to make 2D animations (and masks) in the game we made at the jam, CIX. I also learned that, in pressure, I tend to focus on finishing what I have to do before I relax (even if I get so tired afterwards I can barely use my hands).

Last week, I've been watching Is This A Zombie?, an anime series that aired on 2011 and 2012. This series is about a high school student who was killed and revived as a zombie, and how he lives as one without revealing this fact to normal people. This series is interesting in the fact that it doesn't stay in the stereotype of zombies being mindless people who can only grunt and do nothing but eat brains. The protagonist, Ayumu Aikawa, knows that he's a zombie, and takes advantage of it by exerting strength up to 1000% of what humans can do. Of course, since his body is human, using strength beyond 100% takes its toll on his body (one example being his arms breaking when he used 150%), so he had to use magical garments that increases his body's endurance. One other weakness Ayumu has while being a zombie, which is also covered by the magical garments, is the fact that he dries up when exposed to sunlight (the fact that he's seated by the class window doesn't help). As a result, he had to wait till sunset to go home.

I think that we can refer to Is This A Zombie? to make zombies that're different from their stereotypes. Although Ayumu barely acts like a zombie, so copying him would most likely make the player character simply a human that can't die, instead of a zombie.

Anas Azmi Week 1 Update

Sorry I'm late. Anyways...

Things I did in Week 1:

• joined this studio
• gave ideas for the game
• gave ideas for the game title
• gave ideas for the game's comedic scenes
• made concept art for the zombie (may need lots of improvement)
• made concept art for the studio's logo (I haven't shown this to the others, but I will as soon as I'm done making them)

Things I'm going to do in Week 2:

• join the Global Game Jam
• start making the base model for zombies and NPCs
• research more on zombies (includes watching zombie films and anime & playing zombie games)
• contribute in establishing this studio's identity