Category: Development

Rebuild 3: Developing the Art Style

Hi everyone! I thought it might be fun to take a deeper look into Rebuild’s new art style and why we’ve made some of the decisions we’ve made so far. Just a quick heads up on who I am, My name’s Adam Meyer and I’m the lead artist on Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville (Being Kickstarted now!). So if you love what you’ve seen so far, then thanks! If you don’t? Then tough luck! Haha, seriously though, there have been some concerns raised about the new art direction and it not being as gritty or as realistic as Rebuild 2. Completely valid complaints, but why did we go this route? I’m glad you asked! Here are a few reasons why we went with the more cartoony look that we ultimately settled on. Caution, made up words ahead.

1. Marketability: I know this one won’t be popular. But the truth is that to get this great game in even more hands, it needed to appeal to more casual users. Okay, now I got the tough one out of the way.

2. Visibility: Because the game is going to be on mobile phones it ‘s extremely important that you can quickly recognize what you’re looking at. Characters, buildings and interface all needed to have enough exaggeration in them that they would be nice and clear with the limited screen space. Realistic stuff tends to kind of blend together when scaled down.

3. Usability: At the end of the day, clean vector objects like this take up much less space than their raster cousins. So the game will download/install faster, and the graphics scale easily so they look just as good on different screen sizes.

4. Consistency: One of the things Sarah expressed as a concern when starting this project was the lack of consistency in Rebuild 2. You had these realistic characters, title screen, and interface. But the map was filled with these very cartoony buildings. So above all, everything had to match. I also felt like there was a lot of humor in the game. Dark humor maybe, but humor non the less. So that was probably my main reason for developing the look the way I did. It just felt to me that it was the style that was most consistent with what Sarah was writing.

5. Lovability? There are going to be hundreds of survivors in this game and every time you send one out to ransack the local All-Mart, we wanted you to fear for their lives. With this many characters you can imagine how they might all start looking the same if they were realistic. I mean most people have pretty similarly shaped heads. (I’m not looking at you Jay Leno!) Anyway we didn’t want you to come down with a case of face blindness so we decided to make the characters more iconic so you not only would know who was who, but you’d care about them in the process.

Now you know the reasons, let’s have some fun and compare apples to oranges. But first, a quick look at a few different rendering styles I tried out on the buildings.

Here we can see that while most of the game is more cartoony that Rebuild 2, the buildings actually will be grittier and more detailed. Dead bodies, cracks in the buildings, broken windows, and generally more post apocalyptic looking.

This image really shows how we tried to find a balance in the new character designs. Somewhere between the first game’s stick figures and the second one’s realistic characters. Just for some nostalgic fun you can check out Sarah’s original post about the new art style for Rebuild 2. I noticed alot of the comments in there preferred the originals more cartoony style. Haha. So we’ve come full circle now.

Interface comparison. It’s hard to tell in this pic, but the interface blends much better with the map this time around.

Even though we went a completely different artistic direction for the new game, I’m trying very hard to pull from the prior games. For example, the giant red moon and city in the background found it’s way into the new logo.

I hope you’ve enjoyed us pulling the curtain back on Rebuild’s new look. Thanks to everyone for your support!

October 18, 2013
Going Indie with Sarah Northway

Hardcore Droid invited me to write an article about my rise as an indie game developer for their series on game jobs. In it I talk about education, travel, and my experiences as an indie so far.

I’m an independent game developer. Independent from publishers, independent from bosses, from 9 to 5 work schedules and commutes and possessions and national boundaries. Since I went indie in 2011 I’ve lived in 15 countries and released five games, including the post-apocalyptic strategy series Rebuild.

I know my experience isn’t the norm but if you’re keen to do the same I can tell you the steps I took to get where I am now.

Step 1: Love Games

In 1988 I was 8 years old and saving up for my first big purchase: a NES with a light gun, Duck Hunt and Super Mario Brothers. One afternoon of smushing goombas and I was hooked for a lifetime. Forget TV and books (or God help me, sports or makeup). Give me my video games! In my awkward teens I got deep into the vast open worlds of pc games like Sim City, Civilization, the Elder Scrolls and Might and Magic. Through them I learned how to navigate DOS, connect soundcard drivers and write batch scripts. I loved computers because they were full of little puzzles and let me play games but I knew the games industry was a very exclusive club of brilliant and hard working people. I believed if I was ever lucky enough to become a game developer, that video games would lose their magic and the last thing you’d want to do after working on games all day would be to play one.

I was wrong…

…read the rest on Hardcore Droid

September 7, 2013
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: 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: Survey Says

First: there’s a new Rebuild 3 survey out – take it now!

I started a survey back in November 2012 asking fans of the Rebuild series what they’d most like to see in the next game. It was advertised on the Rebuild 3 ideas wiki which at first was mostly visited by players from Kongregate, and later also mobile players. I collected the first 100 responses after a few weeks, then the full 1500 after six months.

1. & 2. Demographic

The most surprising fact to me was that the results from the first 100 were mostly within 5% of the results of all 1500. The only variation was that later respondents were more likely to own the mobile version and pay more for Rebuild 3. No shock that these things correlated, but what else did? Do those people who’d pay more want something different? Well it turns out… no. They all want the same things in Rebuild 3:

3. Play style

Most people (66%) play Rebuild 2 until they get every building in the city. I’m more inclined to stop after the first ending or when I know I’m going to win, so this is good to know.

4. Art

The consensus is that the art should be more polished, and bloodier is better. This latter might be because I called the other option “cuter”… but at any rate this is the only place where I’m going against fans’ wishes and instead making the art less gritty and gruesome. This is a) because I want to and b) to appeal more to new players who might have been turned off by the creepy art in Rebuild 2.

5. Complexity

Almost a no-brainer. Fans want more complexity and more numbers. Me too!

6. Stories

While everyone can agree that Rebuild 3 needs more random events, they’re split between wanting more funny or more serious. Well… more of both it is then!

7. Combat

It surprised me that 45% like the combat from Rebuild 2 just fine – I personally thought it was a little dull. 33% are interested in seeing it go more tactical, which works for me because I’d like to take it halfway there. I’m this out: zombies that approach and attack the fort as usual, but you can see and preemptively attack them or shore up defenses where you know they’re going to hit.

8. More of what though?

Everyone wants new buildings and events, but nobody cares about new endings. Makes sense if most people play until the whole city’s saved. This works for me; I’m thinking of taking alternate endings out entirely and showing (very simple) cutscenes for major achievements instead.

9. If you had to choose…

Overwhelmingly, if fans had to choose between deeper fort-building strategy, better combat, bigger cities, more events, or better graphics – they’d pick deeper strategy. Second comes more events/plots/endings and both will I provide!

10. Put a price on love

Believe it or not, I was pleased to see only 40% of fans wouldn’t think of paying for a Rebuild game. I know most of them (75%) have only ever played the free Flash versions of Rebuild, and I assume as with all surveys there was a bias towards respondents with more spare time than money. Of those who would pay for a downloadable pc version, the average was $10, which sounds fair to me.

Of course I’ll still release a free version of Rebuild 3 which will be lighter in content and bells & whistles, but won’t cut off halfway or do other annoying demo things. I’m still super nervous about backlash from either those who pay then find out it’s free, and those two don’t then find out they’re missing content. But for the most part people on the ideas wiki have been supportive about it.

And heck, maybe I’ll reach a totally new group of people with this game who’ve never even heard of Rebuild before. With that firmly in mind, I go to do my fans’ bidding.

June 4, 2013