‘Tis the season of zombies, horror, and also pumpkins, which there are a surprising number of here in South Africa, I think it’s like the national vegetable or something. To celebrate, Rebuild is on sale!
You can pick up Rebuild Mobile (aka Rebuild 2) in the Humble Mo(BOO!)ile Bundle with five other creepy as hell Android games and pay whatever price you want. Then hide under the covers and play Five Nights at Freddy’s until you’re too scared to sleep.
This weekend, Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadsville will also be 25% off on Steam Early Access, so now’s your chance to get into the beta if you haven’t yet.
Colin and I are now settled in Cape Town for the first half of winter (their summer). Colin’s going to spend it kiteboarding on the endless, beautiful beach and I’m going to put my head down and work. This is what I’ve said every month for the last year, and does it ever happen? Rarely. Life is just too full of distractions to spend it crunching, I guess. That or I’m paralyzed with fear that I’m going to screw up this wonderful, already successful game somehow because I don’t truly understand why people like it.
Let’s hope it’s that first one.
Version 0.69
So October’s version 0.69 (hahah… yeah) was big on balancing and increasing the importance of happiness and faction rivalry towards the end of the game. It’s still not right; with so many random elements I’ve got to do a helluva lot of testing to know if I’ve made something too easy or hard, and I’m trusting a lot of that testing to the community. I’m not sure if I’ve told you this lately, beta testers, but I love you. You’re great.
I also included Adam’s final versions of the faction leaders, which are really fun and make me want to write them all some new events. I’ve decided every faction will have a special requirement before they’ll ally with you (in addition to needing 75 respect). Like, the Luddies want you to have a lot of farms, the Government wants you to make ammunition for them, the Pharmacists want you addicted to Bath Salts etc. I’m looking for more suggestions.
Also making it in are the start of relationships, the Kickstarter stretch goal chosen by popular vote. Survivors assigned together will gradually become friends, which gives them a happiness boost if they spend enough time together. They can even fall in love and get married. And yes, there are same-sex relationships too.
Sometimes people just don’t get along, and they hate to work together. Force them on missions together too often and it could end badly. Don’t miss the warning signs!
Next month we might see children finally make an appearance in the game. Colin’s helping me brainstorm how they’re going to work right now. It’s pretty swell having him on the team!
Banner for our PAX BoothAugust 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.
Brandy bear was born for this role
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
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!)
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.
These guys are going to mess up all your well laid plansI 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 interestingplaces 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.
‘Tis the season of zombies, horror, and also pumpkins, which there are a surprising number of here in South Africa, I think it’s like the national vegetable or something. To celebrate, Rebuild is on sale!
