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

Those lovely people over at PS3 Attitude interviewed us about the upcoming “In Space” DLC and patches, as well as various other things too (including the next planned DLC pack). With any luck, the closer we get to the “In Space” launch, we’ll have more cool things to announce in the coming weeks.

We’ve been featured on the official PlayStation blog today, talking about our Burn Zombie Burn themed Home space as well as the upcoming “In Space” DLC (the trailer for that is shown below). For those interested, there’s also a nice interview over at IGN with Dave Dow, a creative lead at doublesix, with him talking all about the new Home space.

The US patch (v1.02) for Burn Zombie Burn finally goes live today, so sorry for the delay on that, but this also means that the global online leaderboards are being wiped. However, do not worry as you can still re-upload your high scores stored locally on your PlayStation 3.

The challenge we set in our last podcast has been resolutely won by Markus Tiihonen from Finland. With a suitably epic score of 14,131,216 Markus managed to attain that on the first challenge in Burn Zombie Burn without using fire. Well done!

We’re still working out his prize but we endeavouring to make it as awesome as we can. Below is the video he submitted.

Stay tuned for our next podcast challenge!