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