The Burn Zombie Burn World Tour Competition finished on November 2nd. We’ll be announcing the winners soon, so watch this space!

With Halloween around the corner, MSNBC have done a nice bit of coverage for games that fit the Halloween mindset. What’s rather cool is that Burn Zombie Burn was featured. Anyway, the video is linked below so feel free to have a gander.

Following on from our previous Home space trailer, the wondrous Mark Jagger has produced a new video to show off the new Halloween themed costumes available (as well as the cool statues you’ll be able to buy for your apartment). As always Jagger has a good sense of humour with these things. Enjoy!

Not that long ago we launched a cool Burn Zombie Burn Home area. It’s been quite popular and we’re planning on doing more with it. We also did a funky trailer for the Home area too but it seemed to get lost amongst the undead throng. In any case, we’ve finally managed to upload it (in HD no less). Enjoy!

Well slap me sideways and call me Mary. 2 weeks gone and 2 weeks to go for the Burn Zombie Burn World Tour Competition and the scores have been flying in and flying high.

Right now, as you can see from the table above, Mr/Mrs ‘therealfire’ is in the lead with a staggering score. Even the top five have made my, once proud, dev score look quite woeful. Damn you! *Shakes Fist*

BUT the competition is not over! you still have until the 2nd of November to get a score up and win a trip of a life time to Paris and Egypt and runners up some cool BZB artwork. So come on guys whip out your shotgun and poke it in a zombies face (you know you want to).

If you didn’t click on the links above the Comp info and rules are found here and leaderboard is found here.

Happy Zombie slaying my D6 Chums

For our fans in the US, you might have noticed a rather interesting link at the top of the “What’s New” section when you booted up your PlayStation 3′s today. This is to promote the Burn Zombie Burn World Tour competition.

The rules are simple; score as high as you can in Secret Lab on Freeplay before November 2nd. Whoever comes first and has a valid US PSN account gets a lovely holiday, specifically to visit the eerie Catacombs of Paris and the magnificent Valley of the Kings! The remainder of the top ten scores will receive exclusive artwork from the team here at doublesix.

To check your status on the leaderboards, the Secret Lab Freeplay board has been uploaded to a web based leaderboard for the duration of the competition. If you need any pointers on how to play the level, as it’s quite tricky, then we have a helpful video on our YouTube channel in case you get stuck. Good luck!

When we initially started Burn Zombie Burn a couple of years ago, we wanted the game to look special, unique and quite comedic. The zombies had to look quite simple and stylized, as we wanted to have as many as possible on-screen at once. That’s why we went for a low detail, cartoony approach. So here are some of Burn Zombie Burn’s original concept sketches. Enjoy!

A recent competition, over on the official PlayStation site came to a close not that long ago. The winners either nabbed a PlayStation 3 for their efforts or a t-shirt if they were the runner up (seen above). Naturally, we’ve decided to include the names of the winners below for posterity.

Winner:

• lucamig (Italy)

Runners- up:

• a_rosz (Poland)
• Caibert (France)
• Chelsea23 (United Kingdom)
• Komond_Deckard (Spain)

So we are working on another patch for Burn Zombie Burn! The main reason for the patch is to support the upcoming downloadable content, but we are also adding some cool features in for free. One of the coolest is a brand new mode “Survival”. The idea from it came from one of those Friday afternoon experiments. This particular Friday I was wondering if I could make some sort of extreme mode where just staying alive was hard never mind scoring. “Survival” was born from the experiment.

One of the original versions of Survival had all the zombies spawned on fire, max speed and also with massive damage modifiers. This turned out to be way too extreme. After the designers sat down and balanced it, the game mode is still a struggle but at least playable. Currently (and there is a possibility that it may still change) the mode starts you much later in the level script. Code wise this was not hard to implement at all, in fact my experimenting created lots of work for the designers and almost none for me. A win-win situation I do believe.

Obviously there is some code to support the mode, we had to add in new leader boards for the mode, and some small frontend tweaks to allow the player to choose the mode. These linked in with other frontend changes being made, but that’s a topic for a different diary entry.

This being a first diary entry, I’m going to use it as an excuse of being shorter than future ones.

Mark Sinclair
Technical Director