Author: Sarah Northway

Rebuild 3: Main Leader Jobs

August was a busy month for Northway Games. I helped Rich and Colin launch Deep Under the Sky, a psychedelic arcade puzzler about alien jellyfish. It’s so gorgeous… just go watch the trailer for it then nab it on your iPhone before I remember to end the launch sale.

We showed it at CIGGRAPH in Vancouver, then Deep Under the Sky and Rebuild at PAX Prime in our first ever PAX booth. It was an unbelievable experience. I had no idea there were so many Rebuild fans out there! Every time I looked up, someone new wanted to know if I was the Sarah Northway, creator of Rebuild, and could they shake my hand. It was so – I want to say humbling, but it was the opposite of that. It was good, very very good.

Now that Deep Under the Sky is out, Colin’s coming aboard the good ship Rebuild to work on the programming and balancing. We haven’t properly worked together since Incredipede so this is going to be fun. Colin’s first task was to track down the memory leak, which we hope is now fixed in the 0.666 update. He’s also working on the new relationships system (one of the Kickstarter stretch goals), and on balancing happiness and fort policies.

In the new update I also added 60 new backstories (written by Stephen Gray), 11 survivor perks, and 5 new main leader jobs. I finally hooked up the Steam deluxe edition with 5 more main leader jobs for a total of 15 to choose from. Here’s an overview of how they work and what each one does.

All about jobs in Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville

The first thing you do in Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadsville is design your main character. She (or he) will lead your fort from humble defensive camp to glorious city-state. She’s your most important survivor: the only one (at least initially) who can learn any skill, and unlike the first two games, she can’t be killed.

Now comes one of the most important choices in the game: pick your leader’s profession from her previous life, back before the infection started. This determines her starting skills, equipment, and a fort-wide bonus that affects the whole game. Choose well!

Main leader starting professions in Rebuild 3:

Job	Skill	Equipment	Benefit
Politician	leadership	top hat	start the game with an extra survivor
Shop Clerk	scavenging	crowbar	25% discount while trading
Doctor	engineering	doctor’s bag	all injuries recover 1 day faster
Retiree	building	hammer	all survivors are +10% happier
Police Officer	defense	pistol	all firearms grant +1 defense

5 new jobs added in version 0.666:

Job	Skill	Equipment	Benefit
Priest	leadership	megaphone	start with a church and create more devout survivors
Hobo	scavenging	backpack	5 extra housing spaces
College Student	engineering	calculator	schools and bars are 25% more effective
Construction Worker	building	saw	half materials costs when building
Gang Member	defense	shotgun	no happiness loss from death or injury

5 bonus jobs for Kickstarter & Steam deluxe edition:

Job	Skill	Equipment	Benefit
Rock Star	leadership	guitar	earn faction respect twice as fast
Pizza Delivery Driver	scavenging	car and sword	start with the driver perk
Programmer	engineering	science book	start with a lab and 9 researched techs
Real Estate Developer	building	safety hat	all build missions take 1 day
Pro Gamer	defense	chainsaw	extra defense but all enemies are twice as powerful

These are of course subject to change during the beta as I discover which ones are pleasingly overpowered, and which are just too exploitable. The bonus ones are supposed to be a little crazy… probably not recommended for new players.

In a future update I plan to add extra perks for your leader that she’ll earn from major events in the campaign mode storyline. Once each city is suitably rebuilt (or escaped from), she’ll be travelling on to the next one with some select teammates, so the job you choose will be even more important. For now, these jobs add a bit of diversity to the skirmish mode and something new to try.

I’ll leave you with another picture from our PAX booth:

Rebuild backer Andy Moore with his zombie self on a banner at PAX Prime 2014

September 19, 2014

Rebuild: Android Beta

I said I wasn’t going to make a big deal out of it, but here I am tooting the horn: you can now play the Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville beta on your Android phones and tablets!

How to get it: preorder the full game from rebuildgame.com
includes Windows, Mac, Android & Steam keys too.

But wait, don’t get TOO excited. It’s still slow, unlikely to run well on anything that costs less than $300 or is more than 2 years old. I’m rather thrilled at how much better it is now than a month ago, but there’s a long way to go.

Colin using Rebuild as a stylus… to play Rebuild.

In my career of porting PC games to mobile (all 4 years & 4 games of it), the hardest part is always graphics optimization. It’s given me a renewed sense of wonder for games like Assassin’s Creed and the Elder Scrolls (which Colin and I were respectively binging on last month). How do those games look so amazing when I can barely drag 20 flat buildings around the screen without losing 10fps?

Obviously engine plays a big part in it, and Adobe AIR (aka Flash) is known more for its ease of use than its speed. But the other big part is, I imagine, the thousands of man-hours spent making sure every last drop of system resources is used optimally. Mostly it’s about CPU vs RAM. Lots of little moving parts need more CPU power. Fewer bigger objects requires more RAM. Hit the ceiling on either and your framerate plummets or your app crashes. So if you’re wondering which new tablet to buy, MEMORY DOES MATTER. And I mean Random Access Memory, not what people call storage space on iPhones in their Orwellian desire to confuse language and oppress free thinkers.

Post apocalyptic religious leaders can have any hairstyle they want.

Anyway speaking of binging on games, I’ve been playing a lot of Rebuild this week. Well, I do that every week, but it’s easier now on my phone because I’m less tempted to stop every 5 minutes and tweak some variable. I played a whole game with no scavengers, which was successful thanks to trading with Gustav & the Pharmacists. Even though you have to wait for stock to replenish now, you can horde resources and sell them at a huge profit when a faction is desperate enough to pay double. Haggling is less punishing now so I ended up with a leader who was a part-time trader, part-time preacher.

For the next big update I’m going to focus on getting the rest of Stephen’s events in, working on the happiness system, and starting campaign mode where you’ll be moving from village to town to city.

(Adam’s handiwork. I think the one in the middle is Adam himself!)

Colin and I are still exploring Super, Natural British Columbia this summer, which is honestly the most perfect place on earth between about July 10th and September 3rd. Check out our recent roadtrip photos with our rad 80’s Porsche.

July 21, 2014
Rebuild Combat Enhancements

Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville has been live on Steam Early Access for about a month. Time for the first major update! It’s doing very well there, with sales already matching the Kickstarter funding, and an entire third of players are buying the deluxe edition. I <3 you guys!
The Update

The first monthly game update just went live after some vigorous testing by forumgoers. It adds a new attack system where you get a couple options that may improve your combat odds before you roll those die… but they often come at a price.

See here for the full version 0.632 changelog.

These guys are going to mess up all your well laid plans
I also added a new type of zombie: the mobile zombie mob. You may remember these guys from Rebuild 2: they appear from offscreen and make a beeline for your fort, giving you a few day’s warning to get your defense in place before they hit your walls like a storm.

And I’ve been tweaking the difficulty, because according to reports people are being Impossible, and that’s just plain wrong. In the new update, soldiers are now 30% less effective, and there are nearly twice as many hidden zombies spawning everywhere. But because I just can’t be that cruel, I also reduced the chance of death early in the game, and added a chance to be injured instead of dying to starvation.

Where are we now?

I’ve also put in numerous bugfixes, tweaks, new sounds and other tidbits. All this has been possible thanks to the peaceful and refreshingly uneventful environment here in rural British Columbia. As you may know, Colin and I have lived in some interesting places since we gave away all our stuff and started traveling 4 years ago. We spent last winter in Argentina & Brazil, but decided this summer that we should see some more of our home province. So we’ve rented a house in the mountains about an hour east of Nelson, a town well known for its hippies and marijuana farms. The property we’re staying on does have a small commercial herb farm… but it’s the other kind of herbs.

It is crazy full of wildlife out here. We saw a muskrat, a marmot, and a beaver on our first day out. Practically petted the beaver, and I’d never seen one outside of a zoo before. We’ve woken up and, from our bedroom window, while lying in bed, watched a black bear ambling through the forest. Herds of deer graze regularly just outside the window where I work. Chipmunks, squirrels, snakes, and raccoons – the real, natural kind that live in the woods. Today on a hike up at Kokanee Glacier park we even startled a baby grizzly bear (one of Colin’s most feared animals)… but we didn’t stick around to meet her mama.

June 13, 2014
Rebuild 3: Steam Early Access on May 16

Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville is set to go live on Steam early access next Friday. That means the beta’s about to begin and you can all play it! I’ve been waiting for this day for about, let me see… about fourteen months!

Beta? Why isn’t the game finished yet?

Lovely new mission icons for the things you can send survivors to do,
several of which were not, *ahem*, exactly in the original design doc

Yes, it’s been longer than expected, and I’m cramming more content into this game than I imagined when I first set out. But I was playtesting Rebuild 1 and 2 last month for the Survivalist Edition bonus content, and was shocked at how clumsy and simple both games seem compared to Gangs of Deadsville. This is, like, a real game we’re making here.

For Early Access launch I’ve decided to raise the price of the game from $10 to $15. So turns out all y’all pre-order-ers got a good deal. One more missed marketing opportunity on Rebuild’s road to success.

Okay, so why early access?

Just ask my awesome alpha testers. I’ve been sending them monthly builds since last November, and their feedback has affected everything from the UI to difficulty balancing, making me rethink survivor skills and zombie attacks. They’re even helping us write random events. Let me tell you as soon as I have a spare minute I want to add Steam Workshop stuff so you can mod the game.

There will also be a direct-download version for Kickstarter backers and anyone who preorders through the official site, and an Android beta build later this month. But Steam’s a more public, mainstream store, and I’ve found the Early Access community surprisingly cool and forgiving with other beta games I’ve played.

I’ve been developing this game in public since the beginning, and though it’s been extra work (my stuffed inbox for instance), the motivation alone has been worth it.

Speaking of that inbox…

Community Managementarianism

I do need some help in this department, since I’m about to go from hundreds of playtesters to thousands. So I’m bringing on my good friend Jack Shirai (@Roshirai) as Northway Games’ new community manager. He’ll be haunting the forums as Roshirai, posting here about Rebuild’s development, and taking my place at all the tedious political luncheons that we game developers are often forced to attend.

One more week to go. Wish us luck!

May 9, 2014
Rebuild 3: The Tech Tree

My first pass at a research tree in Google Docs
In Rebuild 3, engineers won’t be the silly white-lab-coated scientists of earlier games. They’re gonna have to get out there and get dirty.

“Tech” isn’t even the right word for what they get up to in those labs. Most of the things you’ll research in Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville are pretty mundane… Irrigation, for example, is a matter of digging ditches to bring water to your farms, because city water and sprinklers no longer work reliably.

They’ll be designing medical training programs, rigging up generators to power electric fences, organizing more efficient night watch routines… and of course pulling zombies apart to see what makes them tick. Come to think of it, that may still require white lab coats and safety goggles.

Earlier versions of the tech tree in development.

In Rebuild 2, research was in three linear paths: getting more food, defending against zombies or recruiting and keeping survivors happy (also towers in the mobile version). The Rebuild 3 tree is 3x the size and more meandering. You’ll be hard pressed to research everything in a single game, so choose your path wisely.

I decided to tie more lategame abilities into the research tree so you could unlock things gradually as you play, for example the ability to craft traps, medkits and fireworks. Policies, building upgrades and workshop missions all need to be unlocked via research now before they’ll appear in the game.

Other research projects improve your fort defense or reduce your casualties in one way or another. You’ll definitely want a few of those as the zombie hordes start to build up outside your walls.

Research tree as it appears in alpha version 0.53 (temp art)

Getting your first lab will be harder now because you can’t build them initially (you need to research that of course!), but you’ll usually start near one you can reclaim. Events in the game also give you a chance to build labs, and even to get research for free.

One of the problems in Rebuild 1 and 2 was that you’d run out of thing for scientists (now called engineers) to do. With this much larger research tree, plus a new mission to craft items in workshops, they’ll have plenty to occupy their time inside the fort. Hopefully enough that nobody will send them out to shoot zombies or scavenge or any of that dangerous stuff.

God forbid they get their white lab coats all dirty!

April 6, 2014