Tag: Rebuild

  • Rebuild: Android Beta

    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 PC, Mac, Android & Steam keys too.
    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.
    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.
    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.

    (I think the one in the middle is Adam himself!)
    (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.

  • Rebuild 3: The Tech Tree

    My first pass at a research tree in Google Docs
    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.

    techtree_v2  techtree_v3  techtree_v4
    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)
    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!

  • 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.
    Zombies… walkers… we call them gankers.
    Dara from 1337cREw and her bike. Forget cars; everyone will ride bikes in the zombpocalpyse
    Dara from 1337cREw with her bike.
    Forget cars; everyone will ride bikes in the zombpocalpyse
    Thugs from the Pharmacist faction.
    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.
    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: Alpha of Deadsville

    Nearly all the buildings are done - recognize that tech company in the middle?
    Adam’s new buildings are nearly all in – recognize that tech company in the middle?
    We’re a couple months and four versions into Rebuild’s early alpha test, and so far so good! Of the 1500 people in the alpha, 500 have logged in, played 3000 cities, and found more bugs and typos than I’d care to think about.

    The forums are hopping, with insightful gameplay discussions and some great suggestions I’m desperate to squeeze in the game. Release date wise… we’re starting to fall behind, but there will be a very playable beta in a few months for backers and anyone who preorders. If you missed the Kickstarter, you can still get into the early alpha if you preorder the $25 deluxe edition.

    Meet the pig farmers. What happened to his legs???
    What happened to Farmer Bucket’s legs?? I needed temp art for the leaders so Sara’s character sketches made it into the game…

    I added factions yesterday with version 0.44. Finally! These are the “gangs” from the game’s name after all. They’re in there in all their temp-art glory, hitting you up for protection money, selling “meat” of dubious heritage, and raiding your fort if you piss them off or just look like an easy target.

    That's more like it: Malik from The Riffs
    That’s more like it: Malik from The Riffs

    You can also trade with them, which will soon be invaluable when I drastically reduce the resources you can scavenge for in the game and create new resource sucking policies (a gun isn’t much good without ammo, and johnny’s gangrenous leg ain’t going to heal itself without proper medicine).

    The faction events are still pretty barebones, but Stephen and I have been working on a heap more content which I’m hoping to get in this month along with fort-wide policies. So much to look forward to!

  • Rebuild 3: Relationships & Kids vs Seasons

    I’ve gotten back surveys from most of the Kickstarter backers, and those that I haven’t heard from will be getting a poke today. But I have enough data now to announce the stretch goal vote winner. We were deciding between either adding Relationships & Kids to the game, or Seasons. And the winner is…

    Hold on, first let me tell you about the Alpha test that started today.

    The first of the zombie Kickstarter backer images.
    The first of the zombie Kickstarter backer images.

    The Alpha Playtest Begins

    Backers of tier $15 and up, plus anyone who has preordered the $25 deluxe version of the game from http://rebuildgame.com have been invited to playtest the first very raw version of Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville. If you should be one of those people but didn’t get the email, let me know.

    It’s an exciting, and terrifying, and sad and joyous occasion for me to finally share this game, which I started just over a year ago when I first set up http://wiki.rebuildgame.com and asked fans for suggestions. Of course none of them said “let us drag survivors’s faces around” or “how about realtime”, which is why I need to test these things first and get some feedback. I’ve been coding the game for six months, which makes it half finished. I hope my alpha testers keep this in mind; things are going to improve with each alpha release!

    Featuring zombie-tier Kickstarter backers.
    Featuring zombie-tier Kickstarter backers.

    Relationships vs Seasons

    Okay, now that’s out of the way, let’s get back to the vote. So, I already added Seasons as an update to Rebuild Mobile last year. It’s neat: snow blankets the world in the winter so you can’t farm. Saving up enough supplies to survive until spring is a big deal, and starvation results in some desperate measures. Snow and rain effects. Also, Santa Claus.

    On the other hand, I only have a rough idea of what I’d do for relationships. I was playing King of Dragon Pass and there was this string of events about a feud between two families. I loved that it kept coming up, these old enemies causing trouble for eachother. Why shouldn’t Rebuild have enemies, people who are made miserable if forced to work together, who drive the fort apart with their disagreements until a trained Leader can reconcile them. And the opposite: friends who get a boost from being together on missions; brothers who show up side by side and stick together until a tragedy forces them apart. Lots of opportunities for events with tough choices and ways to make the characters feel deeper.

    Then the children. After seeing The Road, I thought Rebuild’s lack of kids was pretty conspicuous. Sure they’re mostly useless, they’re always needing protection and rescuing, but they’re such a necessary part of any story about the fall or rebirth of civilization. Kids are what it’s all about… and this from a 34 year old who doesn’t want any of her own. I don’t think you’d see kids on the map, but they’d appear in the scrolling lists so you could check their progress. Maybe I’d find a way for you to watch them grow up and become useful members of society… or maybe they’d be more like pets, just making people happy they’re around. Either way, another good opportunity to generate events that make you care about the lives of the people in your fort.

    I honestly couldn’t choose between the two myself, so I made backers decide. And they voted for…

    Oh wait I have more pictures to show you first.

    Is that... a boomerang?
    Is that… a boomerang?
    This is how I feel about malls, too.
    This is how I feel about malls, too.

    I’m not sure which one’s my favorite, but the boomerang in the neck is a forerunner. More coming soon!

    The vote, for reals this time

    I was going to tease you one more time by talking about the t-shirts, but nah, let’s get on with the show. Winning the stretch goal vote by 998 votes to 720, backers chose….

    *** Relationships & Children! ***

    I was a bit surprised after the fuss made about it before, but the people have spoken and the majority rules. People want to see friends, feuds, and little ankle biters being terrorized by the undead. Hopefully in good taste.

    Cheers everyone and see you on the forums!