Author: Sarah Northway

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
Rebuild 3: Books and comic books

This month Stephen and I are hard at work on the random events and stories of Rebuild 3. We just passed short-novel length (say Chamber of Secrets) and are plowing on towards Goblet of Fire. Of course, you’ll never see all the events during a single game. Some of them relate to a specific faction, and even the biggest game map only has 4 of the 12 factions. Plus Gustav the trader of course – he’s everywhere.

We’re also doing a fun little project on the side: a short promotional companion comic with EvilKris, the artist for Rebuild 2. It’s a day-in-the-life story of a trade deal gone wrong, using characters from Rebuild 3 and Kris’s grungy horror art style (best known from his Insanity series – he’s working on a third one!).

The comic will be posted online, and I may give out printed copies if I show the game at PAX Prime this year. I’m happy to be working with Kris again; his corrupt environments and gruesome corpses delight me… in a stomach-turning kind of way.

Panels from EvilKris’s in-progress comic:
Zombies… walkers… we call them gankers.
Dara from 1337cREw with her bike.
Forget cars; everyone will ride bikes in the zombpocalpyse
Muscle from the Pharmacist faction. The one in the front scares me the most. You’ve got to be pretty nuts to use a meat cleaver as a weapon.
You probably don’t want to know what that head is for.

The next alpha build will be out at the end of February, then I’m planning to focus on tech, resources, and zombie attacks during March. At that point the base game should be close to feature-complete and hopefully ready for Beta around the end of April. It looks like I’ll have to push release back to Summer 2014, but every person who pre-orders will be able to play the beta in May.

Writing this game has been more stressful than I’d expected, so I’m super grateful to all the fans, Kickstarter backers, and to the alpha testers on the forums for your help and support. You guys are the greatest! I’m making this game for you. :)

I’ll leave you with an alpha teaser from Espen of No Studio, featuring the Rebuild 3 music:

REBUILD 3 @LPHA from thehiddenfortress on Vimeo.

February 24, 2014