Author: Sarah Northway

Rebuild 3: Kickstarter in October

Rebuild 3 Kickstarter from October 1 to Halloween!
Now that Kickstarter‘s available to us Canadian devs, I’m setting up a crowdfunding campaign for Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville, to help pay for the game’s art and music.

This will be your chance to show support, preorder the game, and get your hands on some exclusive goodies like the Rebuild Board Game (designed by me!). Best of all, this will be a chance to get your name or face in the game and guarantee your place in line as a beta playtester.

Perhaps you have some opinions you’d like to share in this survey?

I’m kind of addicted to funding games through Kickstarter. I love that it helps small teams mass-print awesome board games and film amazing movies. It’s also become a thing to crowd-fund video games since Double Fine opened the floodgates. When it comes down to it, crowdfunding has become a convenient way to preorder games while getting some cool shwag in the process. It’s also a good way for us devs to get the word out and gather a community together. I’ve had a fair bit of success with the Rebuild 3 wiki, but I know there are more people out there who want to be a part of making Rebuild 3.

The campaign will be a lot of work, and there are some hitches (like distributing iOS versions). But I’m excited to be a part of the whole crowdfunding deal. More info soon!

Oh – and here are the results of the second Rebuild 3 survey. The most interesting fact was that of the 58% of people who have Steam accounts, a third of them ONLY buy games that are on Steam. And 37% of the (mostly Kongregate) players said they’d rather pirate than buy it when it comes out. Sounds about average to me. :)

August 30, 2013
Rebuild 3: Plus one Sara

Remember the farm blight that you had to research pesticides to prevent..?

We’re adding another artist to Team Rebuild 3: Sara Gross (aka Two Bit Art). She worked with me last winter on Word Up Dog, my whimsical hiphop spelling game that nobody played and whatever, I know y’all are just here for the zombies.

Sara will be working under direction from me & lead artist Adam Meyer, starting with illustrations for the copious random and not-so-random events of Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville. Here are a few samples from the new game:

Sara’s twerkin bunnies. Will you decide to eat them, or keep them as pets?

It won’t all be bunnies and happyfuntimes I assure you. Yes, there will be blood.

Sara’s best known for unfinished indie games and her beautiful webcomic Menagerie. You can follow Sara on twitter, check out her sweet draws on tumblr and occasionally you can even watch her live while she draws Rebuild 3 characters.

August 27, 2013
Rebuild 3: Genders for Everyone!

It’s a delight every time I add a new piece of Adam’s art to the game. Today the new survivor “coins” got a makeover. In Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville you’ll be able to start missions by dragging and dropping these little portraits instead of scrolling through the long list of survivors.

After watching the newest edition of Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs Women in Video Games I am acutely aware of the lack of female characters in the current build. The survivors are a bunch of strong-jawed white dudes right now (well, except that one guy with the face mask), but rest assured there will be diversity.

Adam’s getting started on the women just in time. Here he is sketching one of the possible sets of features and clothes for the new “tall and strong yet still feminine” body:

Next he’ll trace over the whole thing in Illustrator and add color. Like the men, there will be 3 female body types in Rebuild 3: the hungry waif, the buff & curvy, and my personal favorite the “big momma”. No doubt she has the best scavenging skills of the three and I can imagine her kicking ass with some sort of BFG or flamethrower.

August 2, 2013
Rebuild 3: Maptastic new cities

Temp art for Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville showing new rivers and oceans. The walled-in blueish areas are the forts of NPC factions.
I’m adding some exciting new features to the cities in Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville.

Well exciting to me, since playing with the map generation code is pretty fun. There will be coastlines where you might find a boat to help you escape the city, and rivers that make great barriers because zombies can’t cross them. Zombie mobs have to do some pathfinding to get around now. I know zombies shouldn’t be that smart, but it’s pathetic to see them bumping into a river over and over.

A typical small, square city from Rebuild 2
Oh and cities aren’t square anymore. One of the best strategies for Rebuild 2 / Rebuild Mobile was to beeline for one of the corners and build your fort with two safe sides – useful but not realistic. The new cities will be round and unevenly shaped, with denser urban areas in the center and farmland around the outside. Your fort will usually start in a balanced area, but some maps might be all farms, all suburbs, or all downtown core.

Map creation command line output. ^ are forests, ~ means water, Xs are forts and the numbers indicate urban zones.
The cities in the main campaign mode will use predetermined random seeds, which means you won’t be able to keep restarting until you get a layout you like. For better or worse you’ll be stuck with the same city for however many tries it takes to save it.

I’ll also include a skirmish mode where you can jump into a city with a random seed and whatever settings you want just like in Rebuild 2 / Rebuild Mobile. Giant size, easy difficulty, winter, with a coastline and two rivers? You got it.

Zooming out on a new GIANT sized map
Yes and I’ve finally added zooming, which honestly you’re going to need with some of the new giant sized cities. They average around 1000 squares, whereas in Rebuild 2 the max was 256.

That oughta keep ’em busy.

July 24, 2013
Rebuild 3: Paper dolls

Adam’s been busy making mix & matchable characters for Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville. They remind me of the digital kisekae dolls I used to collect. We’ll have thousands of unique survivors by the time he’s through, from cops to road warriors to half-starved hipsters and every hybrid thereof.

They’ll have unique personalities too: some are greedy, some lazy, others heroic or ridden with guilt. The longer you know them, the more their backstories will be revealed.

I’m adding a second inventory slot, so survivors will be able to equip both a weapon and a tool. I haven’t figured out which slot chainsaws go in yet…

The three male body types: skinny (does he look familiar?), bulky, and heavy. The third type will be rare – staying overweight during the zompocalypse isn’t easy, and you probably don’t want to know what they’ve been eating.

June 24, 2013