Balance Issues!

Now that there are finally scores coming in using Game Center, I am more easily able to judge the relative difficulty of each level. I am beginning to suspect that the 300,000 points to unlock the next level may be a little to high...

Get it now!

Okay, update 2.5 is now fully available for download on the App Store!

I have already claimed the top scores on the new leader-boards. See if you can beat me!

Whoops!

I was messing around on iTunes Connect and seem to have accidentally hit the the "Release" button...So I guess the new version is coming out today instead!

Pending Developer Release!

Well, it is now 10:00 EST and Have Car? Kill Zombies! just passed its review and is now waiting for me to release it. I think I will launch it on Wednesday, exactly one week before Halloween!

Waiting

Well, shucks.

The version that I submitted has now been waiting for review for over a week. I guess everyone is releasing updates around Halloween? I had really hoped to launch the update this Wednesday at the absolute latest. Here's hoping it get's approved in the next two days!

Tough Call...

Well, it is officially one day past my deadline. Here is the changelog for the update I'm sending to Apple later today/night. Sadly, I was unable to get everything done that I had planned for this update:

Have Car? Kill Zombies! V.2.5

•  Twitter Integration
• Game Center Leader-Boards
• Complete overhaul of the menu system including:
• Audio
• Graphics
• Tap based menu navigation
• Updated and improved city level:
• New gaphics
• Better concept/level design
• All of the levels are supposed to be difficult/impossible to earn a gold medal, but the old city level was just poorly designed. I really think I fixed it, it's actually fun to play now!
• Added new level, "Trains":
• "2nd" level of the game, it is set in the desert and features trains that will intermittently cut across the screen, disrupting the player and killing everything in their path! Fear the trains!
• One of the main reasons why this update has less content than I had envisioned is the trains on this level. They seem simple enough when you see them in the game but, mechanically, they took absolutely forever to program. I really like the way that they turned out though.
• Added new level, "The Mine":
• This is the final (3rd) level of the first, desert themed, set of level/world. It's main feature is limited visibility. A majority of the level takes place inside a mine that is very poorly lit. Fear the darkness!
• Mechanically, this level was pretty simple to implement. Every time I drive though a "dark" section of the mine, I find myself holding my breath, hoping I don't hit a human. What's that you say? Why doesn't the car have working headlights? Maybe you should have thought of that before you started crashing into hundreds, if not thousands, of zombies? Headlights aren't indestructible you know...

That's about it. There are a few other "under the hood" changes but those aren't really worth noting here. Also, despite what I said in an earlier post, the game will be staying at the old price of $0.99 until the next, next update when I add the other 3 new levels I had envisioned for this update.

Thanks,
-Cody Johnson

Tweet It

We can post to Twitter now, but I'm not thrilled with my current implementation/ player interaction in that process. Once this is done, everything mechanics-wise will be done for the next update and I can spend the rest of the time building as many new levels as I can!

Game Center

Wow, Game Center is great!

I'm currently the number 1 ranked player on all of the maps. We'll see how long that actually lasts once other people can post their scores.

Still hard at work on the next update, working hours upon hours each day trying to have everything ready for the aforementioned release date. It might still be possible...

Way Behind

Well, it's working. All of the groundwork required for Game Center is now implemented! But I am now super behind schedule on some of the other aspects of this update. Everything should still be all set for the 17th of October, but I will delay it an extra week if I can't get everything working the way I would like it.

I've given it a lot of thought

Well, as I said above, I've given it a lot of thought:

With the release of the next update, I will be raising the price up to $1.99.

The latest update should be available on the AppStore on Wednesday the 17th of October. The game will continue to be 99 cents until Monday the 22nd.

-Cody

New Menu! Before and After!

Hmmmmm...actually the image is more like "After and Before".

Semantics.

The little Zombies animate and march across the screen!

More to come soon! Check back for a video sometime later this week!

Top 5!

Woohoo! We are listed in the "Top 5 Zombie Apocalypse Games for iOS" at appsontapp.com!

Check it out!

http://www.appsontapp.com/top-5-zombie-apocalypse-games-for-ios/

Super Busy! Massive Update!

Well, I just completed a new level for the game, and it is by far my favorite one yet.

It ranks in difficulty somewhere above the "Suburbia" level and just below the "City" level.

This next update is going to be ABSOLUTELY HUGE!

Currently:

• At least doubling the current number of levels
• New, improved graphics
• More sound effects and an expanded soundtrack
• Tweet your scores
• New gameplay mechanics
• And, last but not least, chances are "good" that I will have GameCenter integration included in this update as well

The current goal is to have the update live on the AppStore at least a week before Halloween!


Back to work!

New Forum! (well, sort of)

Here is the link to the new forum! The old one will be deactivated in the next couple of days.

Bear in mind, the "new" forum is still under construction. Some of the graphics/textures aren't swapped out yet.

http://havecarkillzombies.forumotion.com/

New Look!

I hope everyone likes the new look!

Now I just need to redo those forums...


-Cody

Twitter

In preparation for the "Twitter Update" I created some twitter accounts. You should follow them!

Me:
https://twitter.com/Cody_J_Dev

Have Car? Kill Zombies!
https://twitter.com/HC_Kill_Zombies

First Review!

Hey! It's been a while since the last blog update.

The first review for the game went live yesterday!

http://www.appsontapp.com/have-car-kill-zombies/

Check it out!

The first bug!

Well folks, here it is. The first bug/error/glitch I have discovered within "Have Car? Kill Zombies!"

(Don't worry, it's nothing "major" :D)

When posting your score to Facebook, if you (or anyone) views the post using the iOS Facebook App, you won't be able to see the actual score. The post is still visible, and whatever message you type to go along with the post is still there, but no one can see your score.

The score is still visible on the actual Facebook website.

I'm about 85% sure that I already have the solution for it (I just need to test it) and it should be fixed with the updated in 2-3 weeks.

-Cody

Free Stuff!

Let's make this interesting!

The first 10 people to sign up on the forums (Click Here!) and send me (Cody Johnson (Dev)) a personal message, on the forums, will receive a promo-code good for one free copy of the game! Make sure you say "I want my free copy!" or something similar somewhere in the message!

Enjoy!

-Cody

Wow, kinda...bland?

I hadn't realized (read "thought about") how utterly bland and boring the front page of this Dev-Blog looks. Let's add some color:

As always, BUY IT!

-Cody

It's Alive!!! (Again)

Well, Version 2.0 went live on the app store today. So get out there and buy it/updated your old version and enjoy!

-Cody


Hmmmm...It would probably help if I posted a link to the App Store Page...

BUY IT!

Sweet Release

Well, there it goes. I just submitted Version 2.0 to Apple. It's all in their hands now.

-Cody

Oh wow!

Ha!

In looking over the last long post (a slew of good news) I realized that I completely forgot to mention the most important good news of all!

Once I started adding some of the artwork to the game, the performance took another major hit on my iPad 1. Resolute in my desire to get the game working on all versions of the iPad I went back and did even more performance tweaking. That's when I discovered it.

4 of the variables in my path-finding algorithm were set to about 5X the value they needed to be. E.G. the paths were being smoothed way, way, too much, the game was set to expect upwards of 200 "agents" who needed their paths found (only 35ish agents will ever occur in game). Upon setting these values back to where they were supposed to be, the game suddenly runs flawlessly. It even runs so well that I was able to cut all of my GenCheck code from an earlier update. Features will no longer be disabled on the first generation iPad.

 I cut my RAM usage in half. It went from using around 120MB+ on the iPad (and subsequently crashing) to barely using more that 50. Of course, this was before I added all of the art and sound, but even now, with all of the art in the game, it only goes above 80MB when you are posting your score to Facebook.

What's that? I forgot to mention that too? Damn!

You can post your scores to Facebook. There, I said it. I spent a lot of time getting that to work for this update so everybody better do it at least once!  : )

I will have twitter integration with the release of the next update scheduled for 2-3 weeks after this major update/relaunch goes through.

So yeah. Back to work.

-Cody

Looking pretty good

Well, I finished and implemented all of the art yesterday and just spent most of today composing a new track or two for the game. Things are looking pretty good for meeting my Friday deadline!

-Cody

A Slew of Good News

As of 10:00 PM (EST) last night, the game officially entered in-house beta! This means that the gameplay/mechanics are more or less fully developed (save for a few minor tweaks and balance) and I am now focusing almost entirely on polishing/creating Art and Audio for the next week before the game's update/release.

I am extremely pleased with the current gameplay. It is very skill/twitch/reflex based and it is super difficult to achieve a gold medal on all but the first level. Just last night I spent upwards of an hour and a half attempting to get a gold medal on the second level and, as of this posting, I have yet to do so. And I enjoyed every minute of it.

Now, to some people, that might sound like the game is simply to hard, or not properly balanced. I would disagree, the game is difficult without being frustrating or unfair. There is a very simple set of rules and the player is only every capable of performing one of two actions: turn left or turn right (relative to your current position). You crash into an obstacle? You lose. Run over a human? You lose. Go off screen? You lose. Run over a zombie? You score points, boost your combo meter, and your speed increases. That's it. One life to make a high score, earn a medal, and hopefully unlock the next level.

Every action (menu navigation and gameplay) is controlled by swiping up, down, left, or right. You use up and down to navigate the menus, right to accept or select something, and left to go back. When controlling the car, if you were traveling "up" you would swipe left or right to turn left or right. If you were traveling "right" you would swipe down or up to turn left or right. Basically, you swipe anywhere on the screen in the direction you want to be going. In testing, this control scheme worked really well with with high speed, reflex based, gameplay (when compared to buttons, tapping, or a joystick).

If you read some of the earlier posts, you will find mention of a planned "Upgrade Shop" and potential power-ups/pick-ups that I had been thinking about including in the game. Well, I'm not thinking about it any more, they're not in the game.

As stated above, I really like the gameplay the way it is. The shop, in early trials, proved antithetical to the gameplay as it is currently. The game became far too easy when you could buy extra lives, higher starting combo, decreased speed-up amount, etc. When I had two plus lives, it became insanely easy to score a gold medal on all of the levels. So I scrapped the shop (and pick-ups) to preserve the skill-dependent, challenging, gameplay.

And yes, as stated above, my current goal is to have the update shipped off to Apple for approval on or by Friday the 10th. It's going to be a busy week!

-Cody

Forum

Well, here it is, the link to my token "free crappy forum" dedicated to all things HC?KZ!

Please excuse the current color scheme.


http://havecarkillzombies.boards.net/index.cgi


-Cody

Whoops!

Forgot to post the screenshot yesterday.

Frame for the game, with some (animated in game) static

I spent most of yesterday reworking some stuff from the aforementioned crash. Spending today working on a menu system and optimization.

-Cody

Crash and Burn!

Hurray for random crashes and losing data you thought you had saved! I now have to go back and redo some of the Object Pool coding I worked on over the weekend. I'm not really sure how a crash can just randomly wipe out chunks of my project, but here's hoping it doesn't happen again!

Anyways, feeling frustrated and not wanting to go back and re-code those sections again, I spent most of today on artwork. I'll have some new screenshots tomorrow that really showcase the new artistic direction the game is taking (still 8-bit). I'm really liking it, and I hope you all do too!


-Cody

Pooling: Part Deux, the Sequel

Admittedly, looking back, my previous post wasn't that clear. With the new Pooling system the game runs fine. The memory issues are only occurring on the 1st Gen iPad that I use for testing. The 1st Gen iPad only has 256Mb of Memory. HC?KZ! uses, on average, around 100Mb (iOS likes to crash once you start using half the available memory). Since memory has since doubled with each release of a new generation of iPads, the game, in it's current state will run flawlessly (I'm assuming) on both of those devices.

Because of this, I spent just about all of today building a function that will check which generation of iPad is being used (1 or greater than 1) and then modifying the number of Zombies and other things that will be appear in the game.

So, to surmise: the game is now "playable" on all iPad generations. We''ll see if that's still the case once I start getting rid of the placeholder art and adding music and sounds to the game.

Pooling: Part Deux

Well, after a ton of work, I finally have the "pooling" system incorporated into the game. It runs much, much, better. Except for the fact that my RAM usage is now through the roof and it keeps crashing after about a minute of gameplay.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

Pooling

So, I currently have just about all of the game's major systems programmed in and "working". All that's left is to build all the menus, GUIs, art, and music. Oh yeah, and optimization.

Currently, the game creates and destroys objects in a very free manner. The problem, however, is that creating and destroying objects requires a huge (comparatively) amount of device resources (memory, processor, etc). So there is a bit of a problem where, due to this additional performance hit, if you are trying to swipe to control the car, the gesture will not be recognized, nothing will happen, and you will crash into a wall or house or whatever.

So as it stands, the game is coming along pretty well, but it is looking like I will most likely need to rework one of the main systems to use Object Pooling. Whatever that is...

Work in Progress

Well, work on Have Car? Kill Zombies! is going pretty darn well. In the time since the last update I have:

• Updated to a gesture (swipe) based control scheme for the car
• Programmed new zombies that wander around until they are close enough to a human, at which point they begin to chase the human
• Path-finding AI for both humans and zombies to navigate through cluttered terrain
• A few other gameplay functions and features that are of little worth mentioning

I am very happy with this progress. Programming the controls and the path-finding and other behaviors is arguably the most difficult/time consuming part of the process for me. Now, I can focus down the rest of the gameplay systems and dive into the art and sound. 

Oh, and here is some first-draft art for one of the levels:

First draft of the "Suburban" level.
The game is currently treading the line between 8 and 16-bit at the moment.

That's about all the news I have for now.

-Cody

Back in business!

Well, now that I'm all graduated and everything, I have moved to working on this project Full Time. Yep, that's right. It's currently my job to make/re-make this game into something really fun and totally worth playing. I will literally be spending around 8+ hours a day working on this, and other projects once it is re-released, for the foreseeable future.

On that note, Have Car? Kill Zombies! is being reworked from the ground up. I am tearing everything down and starting over pretty much from scratch.

Included in this are:

• Better sound and music: I really like the original 8-bit track I created for the game. So I have decided to create/remix a bunch of new tracks as well as revamp all of the in-game sounds to maintain this theme.

• Graphics: On the subject of theme, the graphics are being completely overhauled as, you guessed it, 8-bit. Looking back, the original (terrible) graphics didn't match at all with the music. Since the only thing I am keeping from the original is the music, it makes sense that the graphics will be redone to match that 8-bit theme.

 

• Gameplay: The big one. Gone is the rinky-dink little joystick in the bottom right corner. You now control the car by swiping in the direction you want to travel. I haven't yet decided whether or not I will limit the car to those 2 movement axes (up down, left right) or if it will maintain some of it's current freedom of movement. There is a good deal more that will be changed/added regarding gameplay, even I don't know the full scope at this point in time. Look for another post dedicated to gameplay sometime soon!

That about sums it up for now. I think I should probably get back to work.

It's been a while!

Hey, just thought I would post an update. It has been a little over a month since the last one.

Last time I talked about updating Have Car? Kill Zombies! Sadly, I have not been able to devote anywhere near enough time to working on this project, who knew your final semester of College would be so busy?

I would just like to reassure everyone that I am still in fact working on this game and will have an epic update ready sometime around mid-June/ early July.

Until then I thought I might share some renders from one of the projects that are currently preventing work on HC?KZ!

Scene involving the character and a lava/lighting/other materials test

Same scene, different angle, fixed lighting

Well, that's broken...

Just finished adding the new multi-part humans/zombies to the game and, as expected, performance took a major, major hit. At the previous human and zombie cap (15 and 45) the game was using 108% of the iPad's processor power and only running at about 4 frames per second. After lowering the numbers to 5 and 15, the game regains an acceptable frame-rate.

I'm done coding for the day.

Tomorrow I am going to spend most of the day trying to optimize the performance with a target of 30 zombies and 10 humans on screen at once. If I can't reach at least this number, I am going to have to scrap the multi-part zombies. The old zombies and humans will still be receiving new textures, and  I will make it so that zombies are simply made out of two parts, heads and bodies. The arms and legs will likely stay attached to the model and I will remove all physics operations from them. I guess the iPad 1 just isn't powerful enough to manage 360 rigid bodies at once. Go figure.

New Zombies!

That's right, we have new zombies/humans! With a complete textural overhaul as well as multiple detachable body parts! This also means 6 5 times more blood particles! Now if only I could figure out a way to make them color the ground as they land... Despite what I said in an earlier post this graphical update will be going live before the "Upgrade Shop" update.

With this update there will also be a complete overhaul of the control system as I have received feedback that the controls weren't clear and or fun enough. The main change is the removal of the forward and reverse direction on the joystick. The car will now be constantly going/accelerating forward, you will only be able to steer left and right. That's right, no brakes. I feel that this adds to the "arcadey" feel of the game and makes it much more hectic. The intent of the original version was that the car would never stop moving so it now seems counter-intuitive to have given the player the ability to stop/reverse.

Oh, and there will also be some form of mute button so that you can listen to your own music while you are playing. I'm not sure at the moment if I will be able to mute sound effects and music separately or if I will just have to toggle all sounds for the time being.

Old Texture

New Texture Sheet

Oh, and lasers...maybe, maybe not, we'll see. 

Super Lasers!

As always, if you are reading this, and have $0.99 to spare, buy the game?

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/have-car-kill-zombies!/id501357751?mt=8

The Future!

With the first day's sales numbers trickling in and the possibility of people actually visiting this "Dev-Blog" I figured it was as good a time as any to give some brief insight into the future of "Have Car? Kill Zombies!"

Some features to look forward to in the coming week/s:

•  Gameplay - A few new gameplay features:

1. The main feature of the first update (as in the first update will ship as soon as this feature is complete) is the addition of an in-game upgrade shop. I'm not talking about in-app purchases or micro-transactions. While playing the game, you will earn points/currency that you can spend to upgrade various aspects such as car acceleration, human spawn rate, human hit-points, etc.
2. Story Mode? After I have implemented the upgrade shop and the better zombies (see below) I am tossing around the idea of adding a story/campaign mode. However, this is a very low priority. The game is intended to be a quick, fun, arcade game that you can pick up and play for 5 minutes at a time and a story mode just doesn't really seem to fit in with that model.
3. Power-ups: Either bundled with the Upgrade Shop update or shortly thereafter I am planning on adding power-ups that the player can pick up.

• Mute button - I can't believe I left this out of the first version. In the next update you will have the ability mute all game sounds. *facepalm*

• Better Graphics - The graphics will be updated bit by bit over the course of several updates:

1. More backdrops
2. Better icons (if that's possible)
3. Better Zombies: Originally cut for performance reasons, the zombies (and humans) were made up of several different pieces (arms, legs, heads, torso) and would "explode" if you hit them hard enough. As you can imagine, this multiplies the number of objects on screen by a factor of 5 which really slows down the game. I've been working on optimizing some sections of code and balancing the number of units on screen at any given time. This is one of the main updates that I am hoping to include within the first couple of weeks.

• Sound - So far, I've heard mostly all good things about the music and sound effects. However, I am working on some new tracks to go with the new backdrops mentioned above.

Launch Day!

After 4 hours short of 7 days, Have Car? Kill Zombies finally left the "Waiting for Review" period and went under review by Apple. Literally 10 minutes later, the app was accepted and is now live on the app store!

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/have-car-kill-zombies!/id501357751?mt=8

Pick it up today for only $0.99!



 

Version 1.0.1

Welcome to the support site for "Have Car? Kill Zombies!"

Version 1.0.1 will hopefully be going live on the Apple iOS AppStore in the next couple of days.


Feel free to post any comments, questions, feedback, suggestions, etc.

Title Screen