Hi everyone,

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the next feature I’m working on for the web version of Class 3 Outbreak is adding the ability for the map author to choose an objective for their map. As I said in my post on the forum, based on everyone’s feedback I decided to start with the following:

• Default objective is to kill all the zombies (and infected).
• Get to a location, which is a building selected by the map author, requiring all currently controlled civs to be inside the building, and none of them to be infected.
• Rescue a person from a building chosen by the map author, with the doors locked until the first controlled civ walks through a door. The person to rescue will be randomly selected from the named civs, and they are rescued when they become controlled (ie another controlled civ walks close enough to them).

I’ve just released a minor update which adds the first of these, ie the default objective.

So now if you manage to kill all of the zombies, instead of nothing happening, you’ll see a win screen!

You might recognize this image as some of Jay’s artwork from the original Class 3 Outbreak, where it was used as the end screen in survival mode.

With the default objective it’s not enough to just kill all of the zombies. If any civs are infected (either living or dead), you need to wait for them to turn into zombies so you can kill those as well. To make it easier to track how you’re going, I’ve added the number of infected to the stats displayed at the top-left of the screen.

As well as being able to win the map, it’s now also possible to lose. Before the game would just fade out and nothing would happen, but I’ve now added a screen when you lose.

As an added bonus, if you’re not in the mood to play again after losing, you can just watch your zombified corpse roaming the map for a while if you’d prefer :)

Also in this update I tweaked the text at the beginning of the game to hint at the default objective of killing all the zombies.

I figure on most maps (especially the 2000+ which are already on the world map, most of which probably still have the default infection settings) the default objective of killing all of the zombies will be close to impossible. It will probably be primarily future maps where the map author has intentionally chosen this objective from the available options (and possibly made a smaller more manageable outbreak) that killing all the zombies will be an achievable objective. So I figured the starting text should just hint at the goal of killing all the zombies, rather than demand the impossible :)

Finally, as an added bonus in this update I added a random map button to the top-right of the world map:

The random map button will take you to a map randomly selected from the maps featured on the world map. This feature was recently suggested in the forum, and it received some support from others and also it seemed like it would be pretty simple to add, so I figured I might as well.

If you notice any bad maps while you’re browsing maps randomly, let me know via the contact page or in the forum, and I’ll remove them from the world map. Thanks!

Next up I will be adding the first real objective to choose from, ie getting all survivors into a building. The default objective took much longer than I’d expected, mostly because I haven’t had a lot of time recently as I’ve been busy with a bunch of personal stuff. Hopefully the next update will be a bit faster! Also, I’m going to continue to tinker with Zombie Outbreak Simulator on iOS, to see if I can find a way to bring back Google Maps.

cya,
Saxon