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[Tuism]

Hiya!

So excited to show you guys this! :D We made it in three weeks (so far) Why?

So, one day last week me and my partner in crime Loet (epic name right) were supposed to be working on Rocketto on the Friday evening, and we got inspired by all the hype around Flappy, and we wanted to learn from it - that is, to make a game really quick (we budgeted 2 weeks) (of course it's going longer than budgeted XD) with minimum scope, but to leave time to polish the crap out of it, and put it out to market. So we brainstormed around for an idea for a tiny-scope game, and this is the result - Dead Run.

TL;DR: Web build:
Alpha: http://zombie.loet.me/
Beta: http://www.tuism.com/deadrun

Dead Run Devlog: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=39088.0



gameplay video:






It would be great if you could play the game first before reading on, I'd love some fresh-from-scratch feedback!

Web build: http://www.tuism.com/deadrun


Some focussed questions:

1. Does anything confuse you?
2. Do you wonder about any relationships between things in the game?
3. Do you see the relationship/difference between the zombie and humans without being prompted?
4. Does it feel too hard/too easy?
5. Does it frustrate you? In a good way?
6. Do you see the difference between the shotgun and the baseball bat, when which is used?
7. Anything else at all? AT ALL? :D


The game is about: (Again, please play the game first!!!! XD)

The game is super simple. It's a runner.
You have one control - tap to attack. You have a shotgun and a baseball bat.
There are zombies. Kill them.
There are civilians. Don't shoot them, you'll rescue them. Some of them will give you shells.


Finishing off:

As of yesterday we've put in three weekends on it (I'm not a full time dev and as such time is tough to get), and we're going to try to put in this week to polish - that's sound, the right juice, the right instructions, the right everything - we want the play to be as absolutely smooth as possible.

What you see here is currently the work of 2 weekends, the results of the last weekend hasn't been incorporated yet because the build is unstable, though there are some new stuff to see, in my instagram videos:

Day/night cycle:
http://instagram.com/p/kxQYIxN1cX/

Flash mask:
http://instagram.com/p/kt7Y6FN1fv/

Disco zombies:
http://instagram.com/p/kc4KBdt1cq/


Hopefully you've played the game already before getting to read this, and you've let us know what you think - there are some obviously broken bits like the score not counting at the end of each game, and we've skipped the title screen for now (the game isn't called "Get Ready" ) but other than that, we're looking for any and all feedback on this!!


Right now these are the changes we are implementing into the next build:

1. Much more juice. Much much more. Zombies' heads come off. Particle blood. Day/night cycle. Etc.
2. We've added a "cooldown" to the bat attack to prevent spamming.
3. There will be possible scenarios of two zombies/civvies appearing in close proximity
4. Hats! Unlocked by various achievements.
5. The attack will default to the bat swing instead of the shotgun. Bat range will cause the use of the bat.


Thank you thank you! :D

 

[Udderdude]

Pretty fun and simple.  I kept killing Michael Bay, but I didn't feel bad about it.  This may need to be changed.

[Tuism]

Thanks! Yes the variety in the civvies you could mistakenly kill is being upped There'll be a whole crop of possible deaths hahaha

Here are some videos of some additions not in the current build:

http://instagram.com/p/kxQYIxN1cX/
http://instagram.com/p/kt7Y6FN1fv/
http://instagram.com/p/kskAP2t1Z5/

:D

[FloatingCoder]

Just played a bit, played more then I though I would which is a good sign. I played before reading the rest of the post, and here's the answers to your questions...

1. Does anything confuse you?
Had a hard time telling the zombies from the people. I know it should be a little hard as thats part of the point, but the flailing humans look remarkably similar to the zombies.

Took me a minute to figure out why someone was chasing me...

The shotgun and ammo was weird, discussed more below.

2. Do you wonder about any relationships between things in the game?

3. Do you see the relationship/difference between the zombie and humans without being prompted?

The first ones I saw where fairly obvious, humans standing, zombies doing the zombie walk. Then as noted above, some really confused me. I didn't like the "what! that was a human? It didn't look like one" feeling. If it was the more obvious ones and I just got it wrong, thats fine, but when I can't quite tell in the short amount of time I have to look at them it bugged me.

4. Does it feel too hard/too easy?

Felt fine other then the issues noted above. Sometimes it felt like the gaps between something appearing was a little to long.

5. Does it frustrate you? In a good way?

A little, some good, some bad. reacting wrong when I can tell what the thing is is a good frustration, not being able to tell the difference enough was a bad frustration.

6. Do you see the difference between the shotgun and the baseball bat, when which is used?

Took a few games to realize I even had a shotgun, then the ammo thing really confused me. Took a few times of running out to see the ammo in the corner, then a few more games to see it sometimes reloaded. Wasn't till I read the whole post that I figured out I get more shells from some people, after laying more then a dozen rounds.
 
7. Anything else at all? AT ALL? :D
I like the idea, has promise. The window where you can hit with the bat seemed a bit off, but I'm not really sure why. Sometimes it seemed I hit it in plenty of time, but still the zombie got me first. Could be my imagination though.

Also, the first zombie you smack when the game starts, but doesn't count toward your score seems odd to me.

Thanks for sharing!

[Tuism]

Thanks for playing! I'm going to try answer stuff without giving away too much, because any confusion from the player's part is the game's fault A new build is incoming... time permitting...

1. There are distinctions between the zombie and humans, but I'm not going to say more than that for now. I guess I need to spell it out in-game.

The people chasing you thing - that's also something I need to spell out for people, it seems!

3. As above, I'll clarify it more. Time to add in more prompts!

4. The gap will reduce over the length of the game, we're also adding in more difficult "formations"

6. We're tweaking the shotgun so it only fires when you have something in front of you, the rest of the time it'll default to the bat. That seems much more intuitive.

7. We've tweaked the attack to happen faster - there was a piece of animation that made the attack feel slow.

As for the score - it's once again a communication issue from my side, I'll not elaborate more, but instead hope you see the next version improved


Thanks thanks!! :D

[srslypretentious]

1. Does anything confuse you?
Not really, there where a couple of things (like which are zombies, and which are friendly) that stumped me at first, but I feel that the learn by failure aspect is very effective.
2. Do you wonder about any relationships between things in the game?
Biggest thing that was stumping, and irritating me is that I could not figure out at exactly what range the bat will actually hit the zombie, and felt that it was changing between plays. This did not happen every time, but sometimes it feels like it changed (not sure if this is by design). Then again, it could just be me sucking at these types of games.
3. Do you see the relationship/difference between the zombie and humans without being prompted?
I didn't at first, but after a couple play-throughs I figured out what to look out for, or rather just to look more carefully at the spawns. It's not like they are approaching so fast that you cannot get a good look at them. If you plan for the game to pick up speed later I can see how it could become a problem though.
4. Does it feel too hard/too easy?
It's hard, but in a good, challenging, way.
5. Does it frustrate you? In a good way?
Oh hell yea, I was surprised to find myself playing it over and over, thinking "just one more, I can do this", which, as I understand it, is what you are going for.
6. Do you see the difference between the shotgun and the baseball bat, when which is used?
Yes. Although there where a couple of times when it tried to fire the shotgun, but the zombie was within bat range, and I died.
7. Anything else at all? AT ALL? :D
It's a really fun game (in that *flips the table* sort of way) and very impressive both visually and mechanically for the time frame it was created in.
P.S. I really enjoyed repeatedly killing Michael Bay 

[Tuism]

OK guys, unfortunately we were not able to get a beta iOS build out due to some performance and framerate or something issues (and time), but in the meantime, here's a beta WEB build It's hosted on a different location than the previous one so do take note:



Beta web build: http://tuism.com/deadrun/

Changes:

1. All the spiffy pretty day/night cycle stuff


2. Zombie head juice


3. Misc communicative juice


4. The swing out is WAY faster
5. The game's harder with the inclusion of... Something. You'll see. But not much yet
6. Delays and things work properly now
7. Basic instructions!
8. You'll notice... decorative elements They'll be earned and have certain effects come the final game.
9. Various other things.
10. Player will use the bat unless there's something to shoot, where it'll attempt to use the gun.
11. Bat-spam removed.

Known issues:

1. Difficulty ramp is still to be tweaked, will get harder, at the same time give the shotgun a better reason to exist, hopefully. I'd talk about it but it feels like it's better tested than talked about.
2. Pause causes crash in one scenario. Don't find it
3. Achievements still need to be added.
4. Sharing to be implemented (only works from iOS)


We're almost there! Last mile is always the hardest, really... Thanks for all your input!

Enjoy the beta! :D

Beta web build: http://tuism.com/deadrun/


One last thing:

As we're nearing the finish line (last 90% of time spent on the 10% of the stuff), we want to ask you guys' honest opinon on monetisation. Should this be a $0.99 paid app or a free with ads?

The original plan was to make something quick and toss it out as free with ads as an experiment. But with research and reading I find that there are two points of views to this all:

1. These days free apps fall into two categories - crazy IAP things or throwaway Flappy clones. That means the perception of free apps fall under those two categories too. The original intent with free with ads was never to "mint it", but more to try and reach a big audience and gauge response. But if the impression of free apps are poor, then even before it gets into people's handsets it's already gonna be labelled as being an unworthy game. Thoughts on this?

2. If going as a paid app, we'll drop the ads naturally, but the barrier to entry is higher. Even though a dollar is not a lot at all, we're now competing against other dollar games like Cut the Rope, PVZ (even if IAP infested), Bad Piggies, etc, which obviously out-trump us. Obviously the app store doesn't work like that, with only the top games getting all the attention, but is it worth trying to play in that arena with such a delicately small offering? I do think that going paid ups the perceived value of the game and may get it more attention than if it were free.

Overall, rather than a money-making exercise, this is more about learning how the market works, an experiment with real results, however it goes. We'd rather maximise it one way or another (exposure mostly), so it would be great if you could help us with valuable insights!

Thanks!

[Quicksand-S]

This is pretty cool.

-I love how the starting tap/press actually does something in-game. It's also a good way to show a new player what the range of their bat is and how fast it swings.
-I love the random hats. The nyan cat one caught me completely by surprise. Awesome.
-I like that you have a day/night cycle in the game.

I only really had a few smallish issues.

-Not having control over which weapon is being used can be frustrating sometimes. It seemed too random, and a few times my character pulled out the shotgun when in melee range and got killed. What would make sense to me for the shotgun is that a tap close to the character would be melee and a farther tap would be for the range attack.

-The shotgun never seemed particularly useful/necessary. If an enemy comes on screen, it's safer to wait until they get close than to try to pull out the shotgun at range and hope that it fires before they reach me.

-The one time I managed to fire at something before it reached me, it didn't have any effect.

The bat works great, though. Cool game.

[Ooops]

Excellent little game, provided some small mistakes are corrected.

I really enjoyed the graphics: very cool black character silhouettes, nice background, great animation. My only complain would be the checkerboard design of the underground, whcih doesn't really fit with the rest.

The sound design is simple but perfect in its oppressive mood.

I loved the different hats. They could make great incentives to progress, so why not tie them to achievements? (please don't make them in-app purchases...)

I have had problems with the difficulty, on the other hand. I have been killed every time two zombies were coming in close succession. no matter how fast I mashed the space bar, it was never fast enough and the second zombie would kill me every time. Very frustrating!

Apart from that, I found the game too easy, with too much downtime between "events".

If you can fix the difficulty problems, I think it has the potential for being a great one-button game.   

[Gnarslogge]

This game was fantastic!  I'm judging by the shape of the screen and the 'tap' that it's going to be released on the appstore?  Anyway, I could see a difference between zombies and humans, I knew how to use the different weapons, and it was frustrating (in a good way).  GOOD JOB!

[Tuism]

Hey guys! How appropriate for dragging this thread back from the dead

First, thanks for your inputs @Quicksand-S, @Gnarslogge and @Ooops! It was very helpful!

Dead Run is nearing release! Yeah it's been far longer than it should have been, but many things have changed, and now my new company Twoplus Games will be releasing it in December.

You can play the latest version online at http://www.playdeadrun.com



All comments welcome! :D

[Tuism]

Hey everyone!

Dead Run has been launched on iOS! It's now available on the app store (since last Sunday during Ludum Dare 31... That was an unintentional collision of dates!)

Here's the youtube trailer (is there any way to embed this?)





iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id914928184
Official site: http://www.playdeadrun.com
Press page: http://twoplusgames.com/press/sheet.php?p=dead_run

Enjoy! And...

[Power2ThePeople]

The game is good because of the game mechanics, game-play and the artstyle. The reason why I said that this game is good to me personally is because of each run I do I want to do better than both but when I see my friend playing your game he is much better than me  but the game always makes me feel like I should run another.

       

[Tuism]

Thanks so much for your kind words! :D

I love that that's what you appreciate about Dead Run! It's definitely one of the things we wanted to convey - it's such a simple skill, but it's definitely difficult to master, so you can always get better at it by just practicing I love that about it

[Ooops]

Yup, engaging, nice pick-up-and-play game.

One thing that needs improvement is that it takes too long between the moment I die, and the moment I actually play again. I think you only need to display the "kill zombies, not humans" animation the first "run" each time the game is launched, or at least let people tap/click to skip it.

[Tuism]

Thanks for your feedback! The kill zombies not humans animation can be skipped by just tapping *if* you haven't killed the previous first human. What we found out is that if we didn't force people to watch that when they've killed the first human, then they'll just never read it and never get it.

Unless of course there's a bug forcing you to watch the animation even if you didn't kill that first human, are you experiencing that? It's skipping as intended on my device.

[lolololol]

cool game, like the art style a lot good job so far