This will be the first of many updates to come over the next several months and years. We've been hard at work on our new title Zpocalypse Tactics for the past 9 months. There have been slow times and fast times, particularly since September and we've already gone through a number of iterations of the game. Zpocalypse Tactics is a game based off our boardgame IP Zpocalypse, of which there are a number of different products and plenty more on the way. I've wanted to make a digital game based of the Zpocalypse franchise since I first joined up with the team back in August of 2012, not too long after GBG finished up their first Kickstarter for the original Zpocalypse game. I started off helping them put together a small app that could be used to play the boardgame, with some added enhancements of music. Once we launched that around March 2013 we started looking at our next steps.
We started off thinking of just making another app, keep it really simple, 2D and basically a direct port of the boardgame. So we started our design doc and one of our earliest design concepts:
While we were off to a good start, I really wanted to do something a little bigger that would have a wider impact than just directly translating the physical game to a digital medium. So I started to work on the team until I convinced them we needed some extra help to get this done! So we started putting together a small team. I've recruited for indie projects before and as luck would have it my previous experience paid off two fold. First, using previous methods I found our awesome programmer Chris. Second, through previous projects I recruited for I reconnected with our character artist Kieran.
We started work, still building up on mostly a 2D, direct port front. We were making solid progress getting the basics of a turn based, grid managed game going.
We finally agreed that we could move into the realm of 3D and really expand on the game making it its own entity and not just a port of the board game. So we started blocking things out in 3D.
Soon after, as fate would have it one of Jeff's friends was let go from their job in the industry and had some time to help us out. This is when we started to see some really good progress and the world made it's first transition into full 3D.
At this point we were really on our way getting base systems programmed, building out the level and adding to it. We were starting to get in characters and animations. Of course, we weren't without issues.
However, we continued to progress, define our vision and move forward. We found a great concept artist, Mitul who started helping us define a unified vision of the environment and UI. One of our biggest decisions to date was moving away from the turn-based gameplay to a real-time system, which did put us behind a bit as we had to re-code some of our core systems and completely trash our first UI concepts.
Luckily we've gotten back on track and we are ramping up for a lot more production ahead.
We are planning out a bigger demo area, looking to the future with our plans for randomization and detailed event systems, planning character creation and progression and how that impacts gameplay, designing models and tools to enhance the game through development and potentially after release and many more things. This is just the start and we have lots more to go but we are ready for the challenge and look forward to building a solid community that can help us make this game great!
As with our other projects we want to make this an open experience with our fans and we welcome your questions and input!
