I’m really excited to share a game I’ve been working on for the past 12 months - “Zombie Tales”. It’s been a long road and I’m really happy with where the project is at but there is still a long road ahead to get Zombie Tales to where I want it to be.
I have released it on iOS and I guess I’d think of it as a beta release. I really needed to get it out in the world to see what people would be building and gathering feedback good and bad. Zombie Tales has been available for 3 weeks now and over 160 maps have been shared!
I’m still updating and refining the game and I’m hoping to create the feeling of Left 4 Dead with a similar community of maps builders. Thanks for looking!
Zombie Tales is a first person zombie shooter for iOS. You can create and share your own zombie shooter maps, browse and download user created levels. Play and up vote you favourite stories. All from the palm of your hand.
Game play features:
3d FPS gameplay.
Console style twin thumb pad controls.
Simple tap to shoot accuracy.
Multiple weapons to unlock.
Ragdoll deaths.
Editor features:
100s of assets to use all included NO in-app purchases.
Change the sky and fog conditions.
Add zombies and a safehouse to complete the level.
Take an in game screen shot to show off your map.
Sharing features:
Once created and completed during play testing you can upload you map.
In your zombie diary you can access the Zombie Tales network to browse and download your friends maps.
Once you’ve survived a level you can vote it up or down.
This is a screen shot of the level created and the level editor.
Hey this is pretty cool! I’m downloading it right now! But Question… Why Free? and why don’t you have some kind of Monetization? Are you just a Hobby Game Designer or Something? This is really cool, awesome new idea for you to give away for free!
Yeah I’m totally a hobby game dev. The only reason I started making this is because there isn’t anything like this available on mobile, if there was I’d be playing it instead of building it.
I’m a big fan of Left4Dead and their map building community but I’ve got a day job and young kids so my days of sitting in front of my console for hours are over. I’m trying to recreate that combination of user created maps and zombie killing on mobile. Because thats the only gaming I get in these days.
So the maps are intentionally small so the gameplay should be about 2-3minutes per level but there should be lots of levels to play through.
It’s not the best looking game on mobile and it does drop frame rate if the level is overly spammed with zombies but I’ve been enjoying creating and playing so I’m really happy with where its at.
It will be going paid $2.99 on 1st December but I have got a free with adds version coming on Dec1. So make sure you tell your friends to try it because the current version will become paid.
This is a great idea, I love it! My only critique would be: you should really try and make that framerate better (maybe remove realtime shadows and add blobs to zombies?)
Hola! It’s me again, I hope the dev sees this. How did you manage the map uploading / sharing / downloading? Are there any assets or services or did you build everything from scratch? Thanks!
Well sorry for the late reply. It’s pretty much a year later… But this might help anyone trying to create a level sharing game. This is the basic overview of how I made the level editor.
Step 1. I created a map reading and writing script that saves a large text string to player prefs that represents the level. A simple example would be that a string that contains only 1s and 0s. When read in sequence the 1s are a solid block and the 0s are an empty space.
Get that working first. I use an elaborate array of text that gets save as a string.
Step 2. Send the text string that represents your level to an online database that you host. Most service providers give you MySQL databases for free. Learn a bit of php while you are at it. I adapted the HiScores php script, so insted of saving a high score I saved the text string that was a level.
Step 3. List the online levels in your unity app. You will use the www calls a lot for this. And you will need to create php scripts you host on your server to handle this. But it is similar to retrieving a high score table.
Step 4. Load a level from the data you retrieved. If your reading and writing scripts are working in step 1. This shouldnt be a problem.
There is a whole bunch of other stuff like uploading and sharing screenshots. But I could write a book the whole process. So I’ll just leave it at that.
Good luck. And if you have any questions. Try me on Twitter. I usually respond within the week as opposed to a year.
