Rebuild 2: Playtest and Playtomic
The Rebuild 2 main menu
The Rebuild 2 main menu may be the creepiest art in the game.

The Rebuild 2 playtest is over and was a huge success. I sent the test out to 63 applicants, and of those 45 played at least once and 21 sent me some sort of useful feedback (and get their names in the credits – thanks guys!). A couple shared their access despite being explicitly asked not to, but it was worth the risk and I had some security to impede ne’er do wells. So far my faith in humanity is intact!

Some testers were above-and-beyond awesome, playing lengthy games on multiple difficulties, finding all the endings and rooting out my many grammatical errors. They found dozens of bugs I’d missed, and helped me make Nightmare difficulty (now called Impossible) harder than ever.

Being fans of Rebuild 1, they weren’t as good at finding noob issues, so I did some extra tests with people who’d never seen the original. In person is best for this, although I find it nerve racking to watch people play my games. Like every other aspect of the game, the tutorial got an overhaul.

Stats broken down by day and difficulty
Playtest stats broken down by day and difficulty

I collected stats using Playtomic (formerly SWFStats), including the fact that a few games went 300, 500, even 800 days. That’s dedication!

Playtomic wasn’t ideal for such a small test. I broke down the survivors, squares, and food by day and difficulty, but when I added map size it all got out of order and became a wall of numbers. I needed more options to sort and filter, or download the data in an xls. I also logged any errors as custom metrics, but without room for stack traces all I knew was how often each error happened. Again, not what Playtomic was designed for, but it would have been useful.

What Playtomic does do well is analytics for published games, like Google Analytics but simpler and more game-centric. I wish I’d put something like it in Rebuild 1 so I could at least know how many plays that game has. 6 million confirmed on the big portals… maybe another 2 or 3 from the hundreds of smaller sites?

Anyway, with help from my army of volunteer playtesters, Rebuild 2 is now (just about) finished, and is off to sponsors for bidding. The process usually takes a month, so you’ll finally all be able to play the new game in September!

Until then, here’s a very brief Rebuild 2 trailer I cut together:

Rebuild Vancouver

I am currently playtesting Rebuild 2 for difficulty. I decided to write up a first-person account of one of my games and post it for your amusement. Note that I am no writer so this is essentially just bad fanfiction. Although it _is_ fanfiction for an unreleased game. It was a pretty intense three hour playthrough so the original write-up was pretty long. Sarah cut it down for me but if you are a particular fan of  tortured prose you can read the un-cut-down version here.

Also, minor spoiler alert.

 

I remember when this city wasn’t a smoking terror-scape. I remember when it was the city of glass, the most beautiful city in the world. When you could sip an espresso or a pint of beer by the water without some brain-hungry Zed trying to liberate your frontal lobes. This is Vancouver damn it! And it’s where we start again!

A few fellow survivors and I walled up a few blocks of the city and I knew there was an old science-lab a few blocks away. My plan was to rally all the downtrodden, scared stragglers to my banner and fight back against the zombie hordes.

As our struggling fort started to grow, an itinerant gambler stopped by to gamble for food. I couldn’t help myself, I was blinded by hunger and played with what little we had. Fortunately I was lucky with the dice and nearly doubled our meagre supply of rations and won a kitten to boot! I taught the kitten to ride on my shoulder and Mooch became very useful for recruiting survivors to my cause.

We were growing fast, and having trouble scavenging enough food from the surrounding grocers and 8-12 marts to feed everyone. I met an honest to god researcher named Rob earlier and he was keen to get to work. I set him on rigging up a radio to find more science minded people.

One day, while most of us were away scavenging the ruined city for sustenance, the zombies got into the science-lab. Jimbob Foster and “Faraway” Boyle were first to the scene. They acted bravely but Jimbob was overcome and eaten alive. “Faraway” was injured trying to fend them off with a Bunsen burner and sent to recuperate in an old hospital.

Heroic efforts to gather food farther and farther from the fort were keeping us alive. We were also bringing back some pretty interesting stuff from those missions. Julia Jenkins brought back a sub-machine gun from an old pawn shop, and later found herself a shotgun.

It took nearly a week to bring the lab back under control, then just as it was an old man with a thick Russian accent came to the doors of the fort. Dr. Bryukhonenko said he could do more damage to the zombies with science than we could with bats and rifles. He wanted our lab to himself though. Honestly, Rob wasn’t exactly a specialist before the world fell and I had more hope in this confident stranger, so I gave him the lab. Soon after that he demanded Nurse Betty to be his assitant. She wasn’t the most adept of Rob’s trainees, but she was definitely the best looking.

I was obsessed with drawing in new people. When my scouting parties found someone I’d take Mooch out there and talk them into my vision of the future. I may have played up the safety and comfort of the fort more than was realistic but if we were going to win back our city it was necessary.

We still couldn’t feed everyone and people were losing faith in my leadership. To keep morale up I ordered that a few churches on our borders be cleaned out and walled off.
I preached not of hell; it was evident for all that hell was real. Instead I preached of new cars and bad TV on a Sunday afternoon, of eating lunch on Granville Island and the functioning ski-lifts on Grouse Mountain. I made them yearn for what we had lost and slowly they came back to me.

While this going on I was getting odder and odder reports from Rob about what Dr. Bryukhonenko was up to. Rob said his methods weren’t safe or necessarily moral.
I didn’t care what methods the doctor used. As the zombies massed outside the walls I feared he was our only real hope.

The doctor often made odd demands, and the fort didn’t much like him. There were often strange noises coming from his lab but strange turned to disturbing then to terrifying. It was enough that people had to daily confront hunger and the zombies outside. That’s why when the lab exploded I was the only one who was devastated.

I sent Campbell and a few other soldiers in there to clean up. They found Dr. Bryukhonenko and Betty’s bodies in the wreckage but also the doctor’s notes. Devastated, I sent the notes to Rob in the vain hope he could make sense of the Russian scribbles.

I had no idea what to do now. There might be other options out of this. I could could try to start a government and make a proper city work despite the constant threat of zombies. I might be able to overpower some of the raiders and free us from some of the constant danger. There was an airfield in the city. I might have been able to wing myself and a few close survivors away to find… help… or a little tropical island somewhere. Someone might as well end up well from this escapade.

Then Rob came to me in the night. He said he’d cracked it! Bryukhonenko had found a cure. He said I didn’t want to know the lengths the doctor had gone to finding it. I’m amazed at what someone with no moral compunction can accomplish. Rob said the team needed ten days and three labs to prepare the cure. “Faraway” reclaimed the exploded lab.

I was on top of the world when Rob and his crew stated their work. We were 34 survivors now well fed, well trained, and well housed. We had the zombies at bay and soon this nightmare would be over. I wasn’t prepared for the zombie’s response. It was like they knew their time was near and they started massing into huge hordes and hurling themselves against the walls every couple of days. They took our farms, our police station and were eating their way towards the lab. At this closest of moments, when I saw my impossible dream finally falling into place the hordes of Zed were set to tear down everything we had accomplished.

Which brings me to today: May fourth, 2014. 103 days after I decided we were going to start anew. Today’s the day Rob said he’d be done. I can hear Zed moaning their request for our living flesh. I don’t have many healthy fighters to answer their request.

I hope to god Rob has found a better answer for them…

Rebuild 2: Guess who
The Dream Team
The Dream Team: Derek Yu, David Hellman, Tiff Chow, Steph Thirion

You really may have to guess, as the face modelling doesn’t always produce a perfect match. But I’ve been having fun putting my friend’s faces into the game with the FaceGen Modeller, then mix-and-matching their hair and facial hair.

Terrifying new art from EvilKris
Terrifying new art from EvilKris

The major components are all in, and I’m starting to slog through balancing now. In the end, some stuff still didn’t make it in, but Rebuild 2 is closer to what I imagined the original should have been. I hope you’ll agree!

I’ll probably do some private testing soon so if you’d like to be considered for test duty, please leave a comment on this post.

Edit: the playest is over, thanks everyone for helping out!

Rebuild 2: Progress Continues

EvilKris and I have been working hard on Rebuild 2. Skills and plots are in with about 30 other changes, and there’s another 20 to go. Recent additions include renaming survivors, saving in multiple slots, shotguns, helicopters, prostitution, and more kittens.

There are also new buildings and I tweaked the map art to use more gradients and textures. I’m still working on the blood bar; need to make room for more information up there. It’s still pretty similar but here’s how it looks today:

New buildings in Rebuild 2
New buildings in Rebuild 2

EvilKris is nearly done the new attack screen art, small illustrations to go with various events and possible outcomes. These will be in a kind of a comic book style, hopefully not too gruesome for the squeamish but showing a more realistic depiction of life in the land of the dead. He has more art on his blog.

EvilKris's attack screen vignettes
EvilKris's attack screen vignettes

A Northway tour of San Francisco

San Francisco
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

Yes, the Northways came back to SF for three months, which as Colin says fits us like a glove. We’ve got to move on to BC in July, but I’m already planning our next SF visit for GDC 2012. A friend asked us for advice on what to see and do in San Francisco, and listing out all the best places for him has made me start to miss the city already. Here are, more or less, our favourite things to do in SF:

If you’re going to be there on a Thursday, start by planning that day around the Academy of Sciences nightlife event – adults-only cocktails in an aquarium! That starts at 6:00pm in Golden Gate Park, so you can spend the day in and around Golden Gate Park. Start by taking the N Judah MUNI train (here’s a bus map), get off at Carl & Cole (great sushi for dinner there) and walk down to Haight & Ashbury and Magnolia’s brewpub for brunch because it’s never too early for a beer.

Stroll down to the park, check out the drummers on hippie hill, and make your way to the museums. Across from the academy is the De Young which has awesome creepy skulls and fetishes from New Guinea, and a sweet tower that’s free to go up with a view of the city. Nearby on 9th is the new Social Kitchen brewpub and Arizmendi which has delicious pizza and other baked yum you can pick up for later.

If you have time, come back to the park on a Sunday when they close the first half of JFK drive for people to ride their bikes (rent bikes at Haight & Stanyan). If the weather is warm (March-April is best; in July-August expect sunny mornings and chill windy afternoons), go all the way to Ocean Beach and follow the walking trails north through the ruins of Sutro Baths to Golden Gate Bridge. The trails continue east from the bridge along the water all the way to pier 49 but it’s a long way; better to head in to Geary to catch the 38 bus back. But first stop at the Russian importers for some sausage and poppyseed pastries. It’s always good to have snax for later.

I think Alcatraz is overrated and pier 49 is a tourist hell hole, but it’s worth going just for the Musee Mechanique. Then you can walk from there to check out the best parts of North Beach and Chinatown. Hike up to the base of Coit Tower then walk down the paths on the east side to Embarcadero. Follow that south along the water south to the Ferry Building which is cool in a yuppie kind of way, especially when they have the farmer’s market on Sunday.

In terms of museums the Exploratorium is my favorite, but it’s best if you can go to their monthly after dark event so you don’t have to share all the cool interactive science stuff with the dumb kids it was designed for. Colin likes the SFMOMA and YBCA art galleries just south of market near 4th, and there’s a comic book museum and other little galleries nearby that are cool, and free the first Tuesday of every month.

That’s it for downtown though. I wouldn’t bother with the area around powell, market, and union square because it’s just commercial tourist blah, and busy. Avoid wandering into the Tenderloin west of union square around 6th + market unless you’re looking to buy some crack or converse with crazy people.

The cable car museum near chinatown is free and cool, and if you must take a cable car, the California line is the easiest to get a seat on. You can take it to the end then walk down to Van Ness to hit up Tommy’s Joynt (or perhaps somewhere classier).

Take the BART to the Mission to find all kinds of good restaurants, urban culture and people speaking Spanish. Wander between 24th and 16th, Valencia and Mission st. It’s what I think of as the “real” San Francisco, and it’s a little grimy. It can’t be denied, SF is a stinky city and inhabited by a lot of homeless people. That’s part of the… charm? Head up to the Castro for a break; it’s much trendier and whiter and gayer.

If you have a car and can organize who gets to drink and who has to drive, our favourite outside-the-city thing is to do a day of wine tastings around the Russian River area to the north. It’s a couple boring hours on the highway to get out there but once you do the roads meander and the countryside is lovely. There’s a burger place called Mike’s At The Crossroads that’s great for loading up on grease first, and another brewpub in Santa Rosa for when you’re sick of wine. If you don’t want to go so far, buy some $5 wine from Trader Joe’s and have a picnic on the hills just north of the Golden Gate bridge (if it’s not too foggy – earlier in the day is better).

And of course before you go, take a look at what events are going to be on, maybe take in a concert or a play. I love a good street fair or craft fair, and then there’s Bay to Breakers, Gay Pride, LoveFest, the Folsom Street Fair (scary!), etc. SF likes to throw big, weird parties.

For those who might not know, we started a new development blog at NorthwayGames.com for game and work-related stuff. We’ll continue posting here again when we’re “abroad” once more in French Polynesia this fall.