Zombie Empire builder

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4 comments, last by polyfrag 11 years ago

I love time wasters on my phone and tablet. They get me through my day. I have a fondness for the empire building games that are free to play. They let me build amazing cityscapes and intricate layouts that are only limited by my imagination and my patience (those damn timers). There is just one thing missing, Zombies! I was hoping to make a game where the player takes on the role of a survivor who discovers the shambles of a camp, and as he rummages for supplies he meets a young woman who is the only survivor of the camps previous inhabitants. Shes asks the player to rebuild the camp and survive the oncoming hordes. Will the player go for a Woodbury-esque town or a heavily fortified stronghold? the player can send survivors out into the wild to find supplies and possibly discover other survivors for the camp. There will be several resources for building including food, water, energy and valuables used for trading. You can team up with friends to trade and help each other or find players to attack and pillage. survivors will have their own stats and can be equipped with weapons either found in game or bought. This will help you as you fight the zombie hordes and any players snooping around. I was hoping to get funding from Kick starter as a friend got his projected fully funded that way. How much would this cost on average and who would be needed for the Devolpment team? Any ideas, or feed back is greatly appreciated

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I was hoping to get funding from Kick starter as a friend got his projected fully funded that way. How much would this cost on average and who would be needed for the Devolpment team?

You should ask these questions in the business forums.

Thanks i posted there as well. Is there any feedback on that idea or suggestions to make it better

I think that the "sandbox-zombie-survival-scavenging-and-fortification-building" game is one of those "holy grail" game ideas which many designers will have considered at some point. Another example of such a design is the "sci-fi-open-universe-do-whatever-you-want-exploration-trading-and-combat" game.

To be completely honest, I think that these grand ideas are not difficult to come up with. These themes are so popular in books, movies and TV that there is an almost endless supply of tropes and genre staples to mine for inspiration, and so the ideas for potential features and scenarios flow easily. We all remember classic zombie survival scenes like raiding a store for medical supplies, searching for a suitable building to hide in, building fortifications, being forced to leave to make supply runs, building improvised weapons etc. Many of us will have argued with friends over a few beers about the best post-apocalypse survival strategy (FYI I firmly believe in the approach of using a boat / offshore platform as a base, with fishing and occasional coastal supply runs...).

There are positive and negative sides to this. On the negative side, many people will have had similar ideas, and the scope of a dream zombie survival game idea is usually so vast that few materialise. On the other hand the audience is totally receptive to such ideas - the themes are embedded in our culture; people are waiting for somebody to nail the zombie survival genre, and the game which finally does this has the potential to be a big hit. I think that the closest and most in-depth attempt I have seen so far is probably http://projectzomboid.com - have you played this?

Therefore I think that the challenge in designing a game like this is not in coming up with an epic list of features, but almost the opposite. The challenge is to refine and prune the endless set of features down to something which is manageable and practical to implement, while retaining the essence of the experience. The challenge is being specific about how you want controls, combat, inventory/resource collection, base-building etc to actually work. What is the minimum set of features which would be required to capture the essence of your idea? Can you give examples of how the player will actually interact with the game and control their character?

1. How much would this cost on average and who would be needed for the Devolpment team?

2. Is there any feedback on that idea or suggestions to make it better

1. This is a management/production question, which is why your thread was moved to Production & Management.

2. This is a game design question. Please don't ask game design questions in the Production & Management forum.

Back to #1. Depending on the scale of your game and the platform, and whether it's to be multiplayer or social, or just singleplayer, it could cost anywhere from half a million to five million or up. You need the usual staff: programmers, artists, audio, production, testing, marketing, business. You might want to read up on the business aspects of games - get a book (like Introduction to Game Development), subscribe to GamesIndustry.biz and gamasutra. Get a job with your friend's kickstarter project and learn the business from the inside...

-- Tom Sloper -- sloperama.com

Sounds like a hard to accomplish multiplayer game for phone.

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