Zombie Cannon Attack
I've mentioned my new project a few times already. I think I'm finally far enough into the development process to feel comfortable going into a little more detail. The project's working title is Zombie Cannon Attack, as this is a pretty good description of the gameplay it may well end up as the games actual title too, but we'll have to see.
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| A zombie in a cannon, (allegedly) preparing an attack |
Zombie Cannon Attack sees you assisting a mad scientist as he attempts to conquer the world (or something) by sending his Zombie Test Subjects against the terrified inhabitants of a small town somewhere, presumably as a test run before moving on to the major cities of the world. You do this by firing Zombies out of a cannon so they can attack and infect the population, hopefully creating a full blown rampaging zombie horde that can sweep all before it. The gameplay combines aspects of throwing games such as Toss The Turtle or Learn To Fly with side-scrolling endless runner type mechanics.
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| The upgrade shop, where the mad scientist upgrades your zombies for points because something something plot. |
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| All very interesting I hear you say, but will your game feature goths defending their town by throwing bottles at zombies? Well... |
Mobile Issues
Zombie Cannon Attack was designed from the start to work on mobile unlike my other project, Super Endless Kingdom. So when I started testing on mobile last week and found I was getting around 4 frames per second(fps) with nothing happening onscreen, having mostly had a solid 60fps on desktop browsers, that was a pretty major problem. I spent a few days refactoring code and redesigning the games core functions, on the plus side I ended up with a game that's can now theoretically go on forever without getting slower but on the minus side I had to strip out the Tilemap I'd spent a few days learning to use early in the dev process and just go with a background colour and sprites sitting on top. This got me up to 15-20fps on mobile, which was still not good enough. On a hunch I then forced the game engine to use the Canvas instead of webGL and suddenly I had 40-55fps, a huge improvement. It still drops to 30 on mobile during busy points so there's more work to do, but for this sort of game 30fps is still playable.
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| Is it a bird? No it's a zombie, you must have funny looking birds where you come from mate. |
To-do list
As well as improving performance I still need to add sound and a titlescreen. I also want to add an achievement/medals system, expand the upgrade shop a little and add obstacles to impede the zombie hordes, but I'm trying to keep the feature list as light as possible so I can launch pretty quickly. Once these features are added I'll concentrate on balancing the gameplay and polishing the graphics. It'd be really nice to have at least a beta launch this month but that might be a stretch, development always seems to take longer than anticipated so it'll be ready when it's good enough to release.
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| These Army guys certainly are tough, I wonder what this Rampage button does (mwuhahahaha) |
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