Page 2 starts here: , look for Page 1 post next to this reply Another game that did quite a few things right was Shadowgun Deadzone, which is a FPS online game - they have a subscription service that you pay for and become a VIP player to get 2x the income of coins and experience for example. Another game that did monthly subscription for example Order and Chaos online. The thing with these games is that they give strong discounts for 3,6 and 12 months and players who are addicted or liking the game one day sign up on a whim for 6 months or more and as mobile games often show: players suddenly quit in 1-2 weeks or months and the developer has the benefit of the extra income. Another strong example is a IOS MOBA called Heroes of Order and Chaos: they offer a in game loot wheel and one of the unique characters you can win there is called the Gambler. It is a better than average hero and the only way to get him is to win him in the loot wheel, players can use in game currency or IAP to try to win him and I can tell you from experience many many many players spent at least $40 trying to get him. That is something for you to consider. This game also had up to 100 player max in one guild, so the social aspect of it and grouping availability was great as well as guild vs guild rankings etc. If a clan gets strong they can perhaps start or take over their own city, name it, pick its location, defend it, build it up or lose it to another clan? Just saying, lots of room for growth with that. Block Fortress: one of my favorite developers Foursaken Media allows players to make their own maps and share them. This alone could add to your game infinite re playability. ----------- Now that I gave you some feedback on features that WORK and MAKE MONEY - let me take a moment and talk about your game World Zombination. I honestly cant see how this game will work to keep the player base considering the seemingly "same thing over and over". Let me explain: it seems quite predictable so far, you see a wall, you summon strong anti wall unit, you see unprotected ranged enemies- you summon runners, you see protected range enemies you summon ranged units. To take a page from my above suggestion, perhaps you can allow a "hero" zombie unit sort of like a General or Hero if you will, and allow us to play skills and equip this unit with items, allow them to be leveled up and have epic visuals for their skills. The other part of this is having some type of "random" element to each match - not just a pre-made "face unit 1 at same spot 1 on this map every time" , instead allow some type of randomization, and random enemies who spawn during the fight to offer some type of challenge. Allow other players to jump in randomly into your game and offer a live challenge/more resistance. For example a human player can que for "interception of zombies" and they would be joined into a game where zombie player seems to be destroying a human, the joined player would then be able to deploy his own troops strategically and try to turn the tide. Same for zombie players, they could join and offer assistance to losing zombie players. As i mention above in the Foursaken Media Block Fortress, user created content is the way to go if you want to ensure continuous stream of content that doesn't tax your development department. For example to make the game less predictable and repetitive: Humans should have a type of "city building" offline aspect where they can slowly build up various buildings, something similar to for example Clash of Clans. These buildings then get used when you are attacked by another player - random map perhaps puts various buildings in various places so its NEVER the same map. Now your barrier can have upgraded spikes so it does some damage? Nice. How about fire barrier, allows u to % chance burn some zombies that attack it? Nice. Ice slick, that has chance to either trip a zombie, or allow them to slide across quicker - fun and nice. Things like that. So far you show very few units - this is a concern of mine because you need enough variation to keep things fresh. Players usually give a game only 30 seconds -1 minute to see if they are interested! You really need to have a heart pounding and interesting/active/fast paced tutorial or you risk losing many players before they give your game a chance. You absolutely should not launch the game if you do not have enough variation to keep players interested the first 1-2 hours of playtime. Unit skins? Different visuals that do not influence pvp games as its only visual. Perhaps add bigger map games where its not just 1 player vs 1 more player, but a map that has 3 zombie players starting in bottom and 3 humans on top. Allow for built in voice communication and chat and plan accordingly. I would also suggest the humans be put on par with zombies by offering a "extermination mode" where humans actually invade zombie territory just like zombies invade humans, except in this mode zombies are defending "or counter attacking" and humans try to push in and exterminate them all. Otherwise right now you see a huge imbalance as zombies are RTS and active offense while humans are only tower defense based. An interesting aspect that might work well in this game is "kill activated skills" something similar to Black Ops FPS, where by getting enough kills you unlock certain skills you can use. I do hope you put a nightmare, hell and extreme challenge mode so it is actually NOT easy to win everything. Perhaps add a fast forward option like in games like Field Runners, I have to admit the action seemed a bit slow in the demo for my own tastes. Lets be honest some games can give you an adrenaline rush, adrenaline rush is addictive - you want to offer a stronger adrenaline rush, then add fast forward mode. More action per minute = always good for some players. There could also be a "auto" option for those of us who can play a little at work so we can afk ish farm coins and exp. Just a suggestion. In the demo it seems for that map anyhow you only have 1 "start" spawn point... this seems to be very limiting, what if a player wanted a bit more strategy and spawn from another location? You would have to actually look at the map before you make a decision which side to attack from and this would be pretty easy to implement? Perhaps make the zombie move animation more fluid, it seems a bit choppy and unrealistic as it is now. I realize you already have certain models in place but the zombies should each move in a better way so its not quite so jittery and rigid. The video of the game for example has this giant zombie stop before he smashes a butterfly? I thought he was going to eat it but he didnt - This is another concern of mine, this game seems to be aimed at very young kids. Could you not push the whole "PG" rating by offering more blood and gore? Darker levels for petes sake, not all sunshine etc. A interesting example is for example plants vs zombies: it offers night time, fog, etc levels. For a zombie world fighting type of game i would hope you offer dark and sinister zombies with blood and gore and darker destroyed environments. So far it all looks like Sim City, no fires, no blood on the sidewalks, no corpses, no trash, its just sunshine and perfect environments with zombies that seemingly will not even hurt a butterfly... really, enough of the whole child friendly gaming, if need be make it a parental lock option to turn off blood and gore, but for the rest of us who are not children offer us a more adult experience, a zombie eats brain, it kills - its a fight for the survival of the planet, where is the destroyed environments and cities in ruin? Need more of that, much more. On that topic, more female characters/zombies would be in order because so far i see only 1 single female. What about zombies that climb over obstacles? That would be fun, especialy if they jump down and survive if they jump on a enemy but if they jump down on hard surface they get broken legs and move slower. Throwing zombies, they pick up their adjacent enemies and throw them forward would be fun too. Perhaps one of my biggest concern about your game being successful is something I touched on before: is it going to be repetitive/predictive? For example right now I do not see myself running that first mission more than once, because it is so predictable that once i beat it once i would never have any inclination to do it again. You really must think about this if you want to have a successful game that has some longevity and can hold onto their player base. (Add new difficulty levels would be one way to alleviate this) Perhaps a daily login bonus or wheel of fortune type spin, example of a good wheel is a game called Heroes of Order and Chaos and a good game example of a daily login bonus working well is Armed Heroes. Armed heroes also has fishing for example which you can do for about 7 hours while afk every day. Something to consider if you have your players in game on the free version of the game that has advertising banners once in a while. That might actually be a profitable thing to consider, some type of in game crafting that you can do while afk but the ad revenue can keep rolling in. I do hope you guys simplify the game by having only one currency, for example like Combat Monsters did. I do hope you share my email or parts of it with your whole development staff so you can all perhaps get some ideas and feel free to email me back Best of luck and looking forward to your game. This is page 2 of this post - look for page 1 above or below this one depending on your forum settings.
^^ Dark and gory is cliche. I like that they're trying to do something different and give the zombies personality. It's unique
Don't have time to reply to everything yet but I like the idea of the climbing and throwing zombies. I don't like some of where your going though to me it sounds like you love f2p games and spending cash on loads of IAP and if this were one of them I'd likely delete after minutes. I prefer games where I pay one price and get the whole game, of course IAP can just be in game currency or skins ect to personalise your team. There's so much you can do with IAP to make it unobtrusive and not make the game pay to win. Can't comment much on gameplay yet obviously I'll have to see how it unfolds but so far it doesn't look like it'd get boring quickly to me, I would certainly love my own hero unit though to level up and pick skills from a talent tree so each persons can be different and changeable skins or something? The game looks great as it is though I just love having something to work on and build up. I believe it would make pvp more interesting though with a hero : ) hard to balance though spits fair.
We are going to release first on iOS (iPhone and iPad) and Android. The beta will start in iOS and then probably have Android soon after that. We are still figuring out how to release the game on PC (through Steam or something else).
You can see the progress of the game on our Twitch stream. Each Wednesday we do some live development and it varies from art to engineering to design. On Fridays we go through everything new that has been added to the game. It is a bit raw because the game is still being built but it gives a behind-the-scenes look on development. One of the big reasons we share this stuff is to get feedback from players that are interested in helping us build this game.
I am Seth from the videos above and I work on World Zombination. I responded to ChaosProdigy via email but wanted to post it here as well. This will be more than one post because it is long. I would love to hear what people think about not only the game but the goal we built the game upon: creating great team based game experiences. Here is my response part 1: Hi ChaosProdigy, Thanks again for all this feedback. If you want to post this response into the forum thread for others to read, go ahead. I have never played Emross Wars, Chronicles of Merlin, Combat Monsters or Champs Battleground. I will be picking those up this week. I have played Book of Heroes, Solitce Arena, Armed Heroes and Heroes of Order and Chaos. The game we played the most of as a team was Book of Heroes, and mostly because of the way it handled things like chat and group raids. That is some of what we are trying to bring into World Zombination. Since I have not played many of the games you listed I can't really comment on the feedback relating to them other than it sounds like good advice and some things that we are already doing. We are still a bit far from a beta release, but I think it is best to breakdown the game for you and then answer each one of your points directly. The best place to start is with the goals we set out to achieve by building this game. When we started Proletariat we sat down and discussed the type of games we wanted to make. Something that really resonated with us was the fact that the most fun we have ever had playing games came when we were doing 40-man raids in MMOs or playing team death-match in an FPS. There is something about coordinating with a team to reach a goal that we loved. The sad reality is that we cannot devote hours of our time each night to gaming like we did many years ago, and so few games focus on making a great guild/group/team based experience. That is what we wanted to build in World Zombination. World Zombination is made up of three main parts. The first is moment-to-moment gameplay, the second is the world map and the third is unit and army management. I will walk through each on in detail. *Disclaimer: the game is still very much in development so this is not the final feature set and there could be drastic changes before release Moment-to-Moment Gameplay - Infected Each faction plays differently. The zombie faction, known as the Infected, has a reverse tower defense or real-time strategy feel. Right now we have only a single mission type, which is city invasion, but we plan to have more. The mission is set to last 4 minutes and players must destroy all enemy objective buildings and all human defenders in that time to get the maximum resources in return. The strategy for players is around which units to bring on the mission, which spawn point to choose from (each city has 4-8 different locations), how to deploy the horde (it can be split over multiple spawn points) and then when to use the special units. We should have some new screenshots available soon and I will share some that show map layouts so it is easier to get a better feel for the strategy involved. Moment-to-Moment Gameplay - Survivor The human faction, known as the Survivors, plays like a fixed path tower defense game. Players need to keep their objective buildings alive for 4 minutes and actually send a few zombie waves early in order to get the maximum amount of resources possible. Humans are smarter than zombies so they have better AI. Players will place units into squad points and each unit synergies differently depending on the other units in the squad. For example, if i put several Lumberjacks (guys with chainsaws) in a squad with Gunfighters (short-range units), the Gunfighters will actually get into formation behind the Lumberjacks so they can be protected. The strategy for players is on which units to take on the mission, which squad points to place the units, which units to place in the squads and which squad points to reinforce once the waves start coming. I know it is hard to just describe gameplay, but if you and/or other members of the TA forums are interested I can setup a special Twitch stream sometime this week to just walk through gameplay to help make it more clear. Also, players do not play head-to-head in the missions. These are currently always done against a computer generated opponent. The competition comes in at the world level as you will see below. World Map World Zombination is built to be a massively multiplayer game. Everyone, regardless of location or platform, will see the same world map. This world map is populated with an array of potential cities currently available. Each battle is won by scoring victory points in the mission listed above this. The battles in the game currently come in a variety of flavors: Solo Battle - This battle is always available and effectively works as single player progression Solo Conflict - This is an event that pops up where players work by themselves to win enough missions to win the battle Guild Raid - In this battle a guild officer or leader can start it and the entire guild can work together to win the battle Guild Conflict - Similar to a guild raid but this happens as an event on the World Map so players cannot choose when it starts Guild vs. Guild - This is where to guilds compete over a city in an attempt to take control of it getting good rewards and a buff for the entire guild World Conflict - These are the massive events where everyone in the game can participate. The rewards are big and players are ranked individually and by guild Guilds and players must decide where they want to focus their attention. Each conflict is only open for a limited time and players in the same guild get a boost from working together so it is important to coordinate. This is the key piece we wanted to achieve. We want players to be texting each other telling them to login and go do a mission in Paris because the guild is so close to winning it. We want it to feel like you are working together as a team but you are not stuck waiting to be online synchronously at the same time, just in the same timeframe. These Conflicts and Raids will last anywhere from a few hours to a few days.
Here is part 2 of my response to ChaosProdigy: Unit and Army Management At the end of each mission players get a new unit. Players can also get new units as rewards from things like Conflicts on the World Map. This units can be combined to level them up and make them more powerful. Each unit has three ranks where they become vastly better and are given a new perk. Choosing which units to level to match your specific play style is the key piece to this part of the game. We have about 15 base units per faction in the game right now with different varieties of rarity expanding this number greatly. Here are a few of my favorites: This is the Lumberjack, he does AOE damage to all units nearby and can take a beating. The Surgeon brings dead human units back to life. Very handy. The Outlaw does high damage at short range and can pierce armor. Titans are armored Brutes that shrug off most damage types. The Deliveryman runs at enemies and explodes, especially good for clearing melee units but also good for dealing with walls and buildings. The Puddler spits a short-ranged attack that creates a puddle. Any human standing in the puddle will take damage over time. So those are some of my current favorite and we plan to launch with many more units than we currently have in the game.
Here is part 3 of my response to ChaosProdigy: Now I will try to address your thoughts on the game from what you have seen so far. Hopefully what I listed above sounds good. I honestly cant see how this game will work to keep the player base considering the seemingly "same thing over and over". Let me explain: it seems quite predictable so far, you see a wall, you summon strong anti wall unit, you see unprotected ranged enemies- you summon runners, you see protected range enemies you summon ranged units. To take a page from my above suggestion, perhaps you can allow a "hero" zombie unit sort of like a General or Hero if you will, and allow us to play skills and equip this unit with items, allow them to be leveled up and have epic visuals for their skills. The other part of this is having some type of "random" element to each match - not just a pre-made "face unit 1 at same spot 1 on this map every time" , instead allow some type of randomization, and random enemies who spawn during the fight to offer some type of challenge. Allow other players to jump in randomly into your game and offer a live challenge/more resistance. For example a human player can que for "interception of zombies" and they would be joined into a game where zombie player seems to be destroying a human, the joined player would then be able to deploy his own troops strategically and try to turn the tide. Same for zombie players, they could join and offer assistance to losing zombie players. As i mention above in the Foursaken Media Block Fortress, user created content is the way to go if you want to ensure continuous stream of content that doesn't tax your development department. We spent a considerable amount of time building a map generation system that will procedurally generate maps based on a criteria given by a designer so that players never play the same map twice. We have considered doing some amount of user generated content but we wanted to keep the game very streamlined and not have a base building aspect like so many other games. Also, we have discussed a hero unit many times and it is something we are still considering. For example to make the game less predictable and repetitive: Humans should have a type of "city building" offline aspect where they can slowly build up various buildings, something similar to for example Clash of Clans. These buildings then get used when you are attacked by another player - random map perhaps puts various buildings in various places so its NEVER the same map. Now your barrier can have upgraded spikes so it does some damage? Nice. How about fire barrier, allows u to % chance burn some zombies that attack it? Nice. Ice slick, that has chance to either trip a zombie, or allow them to slide across quicker - fun and nice. Things like that. I think this is mostly covered in my above response, but I should also mention we have different types of barriers in the game and we have discussed doing environment obstacles but have not tackled them just yet. It might be something that we do coming up if we feel that the gameplay does not have enough variety. So far you show very few units - this is a concern of mine because you need enough variation to keep things fresh. Players usually give a game only 30 seconds -1 minute to see if they are interested! You really need to have a heart pounding and interesting/active/fast paced tutorial or you risk losing many players before they give your game a chance. You absolutely should not launch the game if you do not have enough variation to keep players interested the first 1-2 hours of playtime. Like I mentioned above we have 15 base units per faction in right now and we plan to launch with many more, probably close to double or triple that. Unit skins? Different visuals that do not influence pvp games as its only visual. We plan to do this, especially for very rare or unique units there will be visual variety. Perhaps add bigger map games where its not just 1 player vs 1 more player, but a map that has 3 zombie players starting in bottom and 3 humans on top. Allow for built in voice communication and chat and plan accordingly. We do not do PvP on mission right now and we will probably not do this for launch. However, when I discussed the moment-to-moment gameplay above I only discussed the one mission type we have in the game right now. We are planning to do some more mission types that will add some variety. I would also suggest the humans be put on par with zombies by offering a "extermination mode" where humans actually invade zombie territory just like zombies invade humans, except in this mode zombies are defending "or counter attacking" and humans try to push in and exterminate them all. Otherwise right now you see a huge imbalance as zombies are RTS and active offense while humans are only tower defense based. We started out the game thinking we would want to make the gameplay symmetric, but we have actually come around to liking the fact that the factions play differently. It allows players to choose a type of gameplay they enjoy. An interesting aspect that might work well in this game is "kill activated skills" something similar to Black Ops FPS, where by getting enough kills you unlock certain skills you can use. This is an interesting idea and something we have discussed a bit. When talking about a feature like this we were thinking it would be some resource you get during the course of the mission that will let you go into a Powerup Mode and have all your units do something cool. I would be interested to hear more about what you like about this feature from Black Ops. In Call of Duty you get this by getting a good streak and being skilled, the problem is that it makes people who are already losing lose even more. I do hope you put a nightmare, hell and extreme challenge mode so it is actually NOT easy to win everything. It is easy to complete a mission, it is very hard to get all the possible resources, especially at the high levels.
Here is the final part of my response to ChaosProdigy: Perhaps add a fast forward option like in games like Field Runners, I have to admit the action seemed a bit slow in the demo for my own tastes. Lets be honest some games can give you an adrenaline rush, adrenaline rush is addictive - you want to offer a stronger adrenaline rush, then add fast forward mode. More action per minute = always good for some players. There could also be a "auto" option for those of us who can play a little at work so we can afk ish farm coins and exp. Just a suggestion. We have a fast forward button in the mission so you can accelerate the mission if you placed all your units. In the demo it seems for that map anyhow you only have 1 "start" spawn point... this seems to be very limiting, what if a player wanted a bit more strategy and spawn from another location? You would have to actually look at the map before you make a decision which side to attack from and this would be pretty easy to implement? Yes! We have more than one spawn location and it adds a good bit of strategy. Perhaps make the zombie move animation more fluid, it seems a bit choppy and unrealistic as it is now. I realize you already have certain models in place but the zombies should each move in a better way so its not quite so jittery and rigid. The video of the game for example has this giant zombie stop before he smashes a butterfly? I thought he was going to eat it but he didnt - This is another concern of mine, this game seems to be aimed at very young kids. Could you not push the whole "PG" rating by offering more blood and gore? Darker levels for petes sake, not all sunshine etc. A interesting example is for example plants vs zombies: it offers night time, fog, etc levels. For a zombie world fighting type of game i would hope you offer dark and sinister zombies with blood and gore and darker destroyed environments. So far it all looks like Sim City, no fires, no blood on the sidewalks, no corpses, no trash, its just sunshine and perfect environments with zombies that seemingly will not even hurt a butterfly... really, enough of the whole child friendly gaming, if need be make it a parental lock option to turn off blood and gore, but for the rest of us who are not children offer us a more adult experience, a zombie eats brain, it kills - its a fight for the survival of the planet, where is the destroyed environments and cities in ruin? Need more of that, much more. On that topic, more female characters/zombies would be in order because so far i see only 1 single female. The game is not targeted at kids. There is plenty of blood but we try to keep it a little cartoony. This is not a horror game, our zombies are not walking corpses but more like monsters. If you look at the Puddler above you can see he is certainly not a character we would put in a child's game. The feel of the game is not a dark outlook on the future but more like Mad Max where people are dealing with the apocalypse and surviving. That is why we try to keep it interesting and bright. As for female characters, we actually have many. Here is my favorite female zombie, Lady Fingers. What about zombies that climb over obstacles? That would be fun, especialy if they jump down and survive if they jump on a enemy but if they jump down on hard surface they get broken legs and move slower. The Stuntman zombie can actually leap walls. We have some burrowing zombie types planned as well that will be able to go under obstacles. We considered having the units slow down if they were injured but it didnt really play out the way we wanted. Throwing zombies, they pick up their adjacent enemies and throw them forward would be fun too. I don't want to ruin anything, but we have a zombie type called the Strider that we will release some information on in a few weeks and I think you might like it. Perhaps one of my biggest concern about your game being successful is something I touched on before: is it going to be repetitive/predictive? For example right now I do not see myself running that first mission more than once, because it is so predictable that once i beat it once i would never have any inclination to do it again. You really must think about this if you want to have a successful game that has some longevity and can hold onto their player base. (Add new difficulty levels would be one way to alleviate this) You will not play the same map twice, and as you progress in the game and start fighting in new cities there are new city layouts and encounters that occur. It will not be the same feel at all. Perhaps a daily login bonus or wheel of fortune type spin, example of a good wheel is a game called Heroes of Order and Chaos and a good game example of a daily login bonus working well is Armed Heroes. Armed heroes also has fishing for example which you can do for about 7 hours while afk every day. Something to consider if you have your players in game on the free version of the game that has advertising banners once in a while. That might actually be a profitable thing to consider, some type of in game crafting that you can do while afk but the ad revenue can keep rolling in. This is a great idea, we will likely have something like this in the game. I do hope you guys simplify the game by having only one currency, for example like Combat Monsters did. We are trying to keep the currencies as simple as possible to make it easy to use and understand. Right now we have two different currencies, but they have very clear uses. Hopefully this is helpful. Thanks again for taking the time to send this feedback and I am looking forward to hearing what you think about the game now that I have given more of an explanation.
Very interesting reply and love hearing more about the game, excited about extra units and the gameplay and I really do love all the graphics and images I see. So I know about all of the online and multiplayer and I agree other than having a friend sat next to you those are the best gaming experiences working as a team, but are there things we can do single player while not online or will everything require a connection? I'm happy your considering hero units at least and when you mention activated skills I take it you mean your thinking instead of activated skills per unit activated skills as a player? If you've tried Supercells latest with Boom Beach you have a gunship which gives you activated skills there are a few to chose from but you only have a certain amount of energy to use them so much use them strategicly to help in your goal. Something similar could work well where the player only has a set amount of power to use each mission, on boom beach you do generate a bit more by destroying buildings but then as you said if a player is winning it'll just make it harder for the losing player that way. But the first bit sounds good.
Wow where do I sign up already? Kidding it's done, this looks like it could be something really special!
We are currently experimenting with some activated skill ideas. It is tough to balance to make sure the game does not become too action/twitch based but still has some amount of high-pressure decisions. My current favorite prototype mechanic is the ability for certain special units to gain an activated skill when they hit a certain level and it become usable only once per mission.
Obviously I can't comment never having played but that also sounds like a good idea to me to keep it balanced but then you need to also make sure it's not oh he used his ability already I haven't I'll win now. Did you also look at player activated abilities as an option? Like dropping a mine or emp or anything really..just limited to how much power you have to use them.
Ouch thanks for posting it chaos but he posted it too if you check back a little bit. Thanks for emailing questions and such though I'm eager to learn more about the game.
We are thinking bout scheduling a live stream for early next week with some designers talking about the game and showing the current state. Would people be interested in that?
