Mario Chuman

Zombie Season

Description

Defend the town of Redwood, California from a zombie apocalypse in this wave based co-op zombie survival shooter.

Read the book. Play the game. Fight the undead.

 

Summary of Contributions

Initial Brief

When Home Base was built, it was created upon years of experience of creating cross-platform games. Games that directly tied into the stories of books and offered an experience to enhance the lore or world. Home Base itself was more of a general Scholastic hub, so this element of our team’s games was put on the back-burner. 

Not for very much longer. Our team had secured a division wide initiative for “Home Base Original Programming”. Books that would be built from the ground up to tie into Home Base and feature characters and stories that would enhance the experience of both the book and the game. And we scored a big zombie book, Zombie Season, as our first HBOP.

Teams and Responsibilities

Our team was divided in two for this initiative. One half was to work on the “Island” game, the hub and multiplayer metagame aspect of Zombie Season. This half was led by Rebecca Bennett and Andera Lowery. The other was to work on the minigame that would tie in directly to the metagame. I was in charge of the latter, a game that would be called Zombie Survival Run.

Truth be told, by the release of the Zombie Season game the results of my work was minimal. The game had a late game paradigm shift to instead be featured on Roblox instead of Home Base, and the team shuffled around. I was involved with design meetings and playtesting for the final product, but most of my work went into preproduction and was unused. However, the story of Zombie Supply Run and the overall Zombie Season metagame is an interesting piece of history and reflects the incredible design skills of our team.

Metagame Design Philosophy

The plan for the metagame was ambitious and achievable. The idea was when players arrived at Zombie Season Island, they were asked to pool in resources with the community to stop zombies from destroying the island. These resources would be gained by exploring the island, interacting with NPCs, and playing the featured minigame: Zombie Supply Run. 

Originally the idea was to only reward players with community resources through Zombie Supply Run, but metrics indicated that players loved interacting with NPCs and we wanted to reward players for engaging with the characters. Additionally, this gave less skilled players an additional outlet for gaining resources and contributing.

Obtained resources could be spent on catapults and moats to protect from the waves of zombies. Catapults were cheap and effective, but would expire after a wave was over. Moats were expensive but lasted for several waves. Surviving waves would reward players with lore keys that would tell exclusive story content that would expand the book and lead into its sequel.

While this was the most ambitious game we had pitched and it took several weeks to iron out the details: reception was glowing. The design mockups created by Rebecca Bennet were amazing and our playtests went over extremely well. Initially the decision making was done through a simple card game incarnation. But once the math started becoming more complex, I created a simple prototype using Javascript to test out the pacing and difficulty of the game. The metagame, the most difficult aspect of the initiative, was going over well.

Minigame Design Philosophy

On my team, I led the design for the minigame: Zombie Supply Run. Our team was inspired by Vampire Survivors and wanted a simple game that would grant an easily translatable resource export into the metagame. 

Considering the bulk of the design attention was onto the ambitious metagame, I felt the appropriate angle was to make Zombie Supply Run as simple design wise as possible. One of my biggest inspirations for design is Mark Rosewater of Magic the Gathering fame, and one of his philosophies is asking “how little do I need to add” so I decided to put that into practice.

Instead of completely redesigning the Zombie Survival formula, I asked myself “how little do I need to add to establish this as having a Zombie Season identity?” I came up with the following answers

  • The player should be themselves as they’re the one collecting resources. This means the lose state can not be death.

  • The weapon of choice in the Zombie Season universe is waterpaks and they’re uniform.

These two starting points led to huge branches of designs that opened up design changes that really gave Zombie Supply Run its identity.

In Vampire Survivors, once the timer runs out, players are met with certain death as a strong “hard stop” to their gameplay experience. For Zombie Supply Run, once the timer runs out instead of dying “rescue” would arrive. Players were then asked to run to the extraction point to be rescued: Left 4 Dead style. However, more risk inclined players would be rewarded for not immediately being rescued as once the timer runs out that’s when the hordes of zombies would be more plentiful and the rewards would be more plentiful. The failstate would not be death, but instead have someone else rescue players and as a penalty lose significant amount of resources obtained. The reason why it wasn’t zero resources obtained would be because it would punish players seeking to contribute to the metagame and I discovered from previous minigames that putting time into a game only to get absolutely nothing is a great way to ensure they never play again. And for the metagame to work, we want all players to feel like they’re contributing.

For the weapon of choice, this would mean that all players would start out with the same weapon. And “leveling up” would mean that players would be granted upgrades that they can choose from for their waterpak such as a circle shield or a triple shot. This would be in stark contrast to Vampire Survivor’s choices of weapons and powerups. As the budget for this initiative would mostly go to the minigame, I wanted something easier to playtest and be technically easier to achieve, so this worked out nicely. That it gave players a sense of ownership over their waterpak was a great bonus.

Conclusion

I was involved with interviewing prospective teams for both projects and development was soon to begin before the paradigm shift to feature the game on Roblox instead, changing the scope and design completely. While players unfortunately never got to see the original vision of Zombie Season on Home Base, I am incredibly proud of the teams that I worked with. The new version on Roblox kept elements of the original design of the metagame such as cooperatively spending resources to defend Redwood from waves of zombies and continuing the lore of the book. The game released to over 250k impressions with a 70% rating on Roblox.