As I mentioned in my last blog post, the first update I’m working on is adding infection settings to the editor. So instead of your map always using the same infection settings as every other map, you can choose the settings which make sense for your map.
I thought I’d post a quick screenshot of how the infection settings are coming along:
In my dev version I’ve built the UI which you can see in the screenshot, and the settings are also being saved and restored with the map. I now need to include the settings when the map is published, and then make the game itself use the modified settings. So I’m probably about half-way there at the moment.
If you’ve been playing Class 3 Outbreak or Zombie Outbreak Simulator for a while, and keeping up with what we’re doing, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve been extremely quiet lately. The last major update on our blog was back in April, just after we released Zombie Outbreak Simulator for iOS, with a minor post at the beginning of May when we released v1.1 of ZOS for iOS with support for 10 maps. Our last post on our Facebook page was back in June, and we haven’t posted much on our forums in ages.
So what happened, and where did we go? Were we bitten by zombies? Were we kidnapped by government operatives seeking our expert knowledge on simulating potential zombie outbreaks?
Here, finally, is an update of what we’ve been up to. Followed up with a big announcement of where Binary Space is going next!
At the end of May we released Zombie Outbreak Simulator Free for iOS. By default a single map was enabled, with limited infected options. There was a single in-app purchase for $0.99 to upgrade to the full version, enabling all 10 maps and all of the options.
In June we released an update to ZOS on iOS which added the ability to drop bombs on the unsuspecting hordes (and unlucky civilians).
On the 11th of June 2012 at Apple’s WWDC keynote, Apple announced iOS 6. One of the major features announced was that Apple were replacing Google Maps with their own new mapping platform. We had thought this might happen at some point – there had been widespread speculation that Apple were going to replace Google Maps, since Apple had been acquiring a number of mapping-related companies.
At the time we were working on the bombs update. We finished that off and submitted it to Apple. While we were waiting for it to be reviewed, I downloaded the developer preview of XCode and iOS 6, to test ZOS.
This confirmed that Map Kit, the Apple API which ZOS was using to work with Google Maps, had switched to Apple’s own maps. I checked each of the 10 maps supported by ZOS. At the time the quality of the images at all 10 locations was worse than Google’s – ranging from “not as good as Google” to “really bad”, to even having random static at a couple of locations. Also, none of the locations were available in high enough resolution to be able to zoom in to the level at which ZOS is played. For example, here’s a comparison of how the Netherlands map looked on iOS 5, and with the developer preview of iOS 6:
To be fair to Apple though, their release notes did say “Map data will continue to evolve – only a limited amount of high-resolution satellite imagery is currently available”. By the time iOS 6 was due to be released (rumoured to be mid-September at that point), maybe the image quality would have been better. But we couldn’t exactly bet on that happening. Plus, even if Apple’s imagery was great, it was still different to Google’s. For the couple of maps which were recognizable, the imagery didn’t line up with the walls, trees etc that we’d edited, and which did align with the Google maps – which would have meant re-editing those maps somehow.
I tried asking Google if they were planning to release their own new native API for iOS. If they were going to release something before iOS 6 came out, maybe we could just switch over to it. Their response was “we can’t comment on what our future plans are”.
With no other options available, we figured we had to remove Map Kit, so remove the currently-Google-soon-to-be-Apple maps. Rather than leave ZOS to die when iOS 6 was released, we decided we’d buy some aerial photos, and just embed them directly in the game. We had already bought one map of Leicester England from Bluesky for the original C3O, so we bought another map from them of Coventry England. Huge thankyous to nearmap.com for also allowing us to use some of their aerial photos for three locations in Australia!
We tried to find some aerial photos in the US (as most of our sales of ZOS for iOS have been from the US), but we were unable to find anyone who would sell us aerial photos of a good enough quality.
Embedding the photos into the app instead of using Map Kit to download them as needed from Google increased the size of the app considerably. I didn’t want the app size to increase too much, or else it might become too large to download over the mobile network in a reasonable time. So we decided to reduce the total number of maps to five.
We released the update in mid-September, a few days before iOS 6 was due to be released.
That was over two months ago – since then it’s been basically radio silence from us. What have we been doing?
Mostly, Jay and I have been taking a break, and having lots of discussions about what to do next.
We started porting ZOS to iOS around August last year, and that work required me to rewrite all of the code, but we were able to reuse a lot of Jay’s original artwork. So during that time Jay had much more available time than me, and so for the last year or so Jay has been working on another game by himself. I resigned from my job back in July, so I’ve been enjoying an extended holiday, spending more time with my family, which has been great! :)
In amongst this Jay and I have been discussing what to do with C3O and ZOS. Our games have been dealt a few blows recently. As I described in my last blog post, Google announced that in September 2014 they’ll be switching off the Flash API for Google Maps which we use for the web versions of C3O and ZOS on class3outbreak.com. The web versions of the games will die then, unless we spend a considerable amount of time rewriting them in JavaScript. And then Apple’s release of iOS 6 forced us to remove Google Maps from ZOS on iOS. We wondered whether we should retire C3O and ZOS, and move on to something else. We spent a bit of time prototyping a different game idea, but didn’t get far.
In the end, Jay and I have decided that we’re going to split up, and go our separate ways. It’s been over three and a half years since we first started working together on C3O and ZOS, and while we’ve worked together well, we’ve come to realize that we have different ideas about the types of games we’d like to build. Jay is going to release the game he’s been working on for the last year or so under his own new company name. And Jay has agreed to let me take over Binary Space – we’ve come to an agreement where I’ll gradually buy out his share of the company over the next several years.
So what am I going to do with Binary Space?
Despite the obstacles which Google and Apple have created, I’m going to continue development of C3O and ZOS. I think the games still have potential. Despite being unfinished, our web versions at class3outbreak.com still get around 30,000 visitors a month, and have been played a total of over 3.2 million times since first release. And despite being more of a toy than a game, ZOS for iOS has been downloaded by over 100,000 people. And across them all, we’ve gained over 9,000 fans on Facebook. So, I think there are many people out there who still like these games, and I’d like to find out what I can do with them if I keep on trying! :)
Last year more smartphones were sold than PCs, with smartphone sales growing by about 60%, tablet sales growing by about 270%, and PC (desktop, notebook and netbook) sales only growing by about 2%. Although the PC is far from ‘dead’, mobile seems to be the place to be at the moment. So I’m very keen to keep developing for mobile platforms.
However, the major problem for mobile apps is ‘discovery’. With over 700,000 apps on Apple’s App Store as of September, and Google Play also hitting 700,000 apps about a month ago, it’s extremely hard for apps to get noticed. Many apps struggle to get anywhere, and the vast majority of apps probably earn very little. ZOS has done reasonably well on iOS, with over $20k of sales from over 100,000 downloads since we released in April. I think the main reason is that we already had a lot of people playing our web-based games, which we could promote the iOS version of ZOS to.
So what I’m planning is a two-pronged approach: continuing to develop both the mobile and web-based versions of our games. While we’ve earned some revenue from ZOS on iOS, we’ve earned very little from the web-based versions of C3O and ZOS. So by continuing to develop for mobile I hope to continue earning revenue to help support Binary Space. And by continuing to develop the web version of C3O I hope to keep up a steady stream of players who might be interested in buying the mobile version.
One thing I want to do is build a stronger link between the web and mobile versions. There are about 2000 maps featured on the front page of class3outbreak.com, but the iOS version of ZOS only has 5 maps. What I’d like to do is make it possible for the iOS version of ZOS to play all of those maps which are available on class3outbreak.com. This was something that I always wanted to do with ZOS on iOS, right back from when we first started working on it, but we decided to start small and just support a single map at first. After the initial launch we decided to take it in stages, first increasing that to 10 maps. I had hoped to eventually extend that further.
The removal of Google Maps from iOS 6 put a dent in these plans. However I’d like to keep trying to get it to work. There is no official Google Maps API for iOS any more, but it is possible to use Google Map’s JavaScript API in a web app on iOS. What I’m hoping is that I can build some kind of hybrid web-and-native version of ZOS for iOS, which will allow it to use Google Maps again. This will probably be tricky – this was one of the approaches which I originally experimented with and discarded because it was too slow, back when I was first trying to get ZOS to work on iOS. However I have some more ideas that I’m going to try. I think it will be worthwhile if I can pull it off, as it will allow the games to build off each other – people playing the web version can make more maps for mobile players to play, and people playing the mobile version will have a reason to play the web version if they want to make a new map.
After that I’d like to keep adding further updates to ZOS on iOS, to help keep it interesting. However it will probably always remain as a kind of ‘toy’, just an amusing LOLfest to pass a bit of time :) In the longer term I’d like to also release Class 3 Outbreak on iOS, to bring some actual gameplay with controllable units to iOS, but that will be a fair way in the future.
At some point I’d also like to try producing an Android version of ZOS. Since announcing that we were building ZOS for iOS, we’ve had a number of people ask for an Android version. I’m not sure if this will be possible – as I’ve found on iOS, getting thousands of zombies roaming around over a map at a decent speed is tricky. Google does have an official Google Maps API for Android, but it doesn’t support satellite images without labels, which is what ZOS needs. Ironically, the current version of ZOS on iOS (with just 5 embedded aerial photos) should be able to be ported to Android without much problem, as there is no mapping to worry about. So I will probably start with that, and then see how it goes from there. When I ported ZOS to iOS, I wrote most of it with fairly standard C++ and OpenGL ES, with a relatively thin layer of iOS-specific Objective C at the front end, to interface with the maps and the iOS UI. The C++ and OpenGL ES back end should be able to work on Android too, so it should be less work to port ZOS to Android than it was to port it to iOS the first time. However it still won’t be a small amount of work, so it will be a while before I’ll have time to start experimenting with this. One of the reasons we initially started on iOS before Android was because the general opinion is that apps usually earn more on iOS. This article from a year ago found that iOS apps earned about 4 times as much as Android apps, although this more recent article from a couple of months ago suggests iOS may only be about 50% higher than Android. The only way to find out what ZOS could do on Android will be to try it! :)
Then there’s the web version of C3O. It’s been forever since we last released an update for it – way back in August last year when we added shotguns. I’m going to start working on updates for the web version again, and the first things I plan to do are centred around giving map editors more control over their maps. At the moment all games use the same infection settings, which were tuned by Jay to feel okay for an ‘average’ suburban map (and the settings can only be changed in ZOS). The first thing I want to do is give the map author the ability to choose the default infection settings, so that you can choose what makes sense for your map.
Currently your starting group of survivors always starts right in the middle of the map, which was just the easiest thing to develop first. Instead I’d like to add the option for you to choose the spawn point for your survivors.
At the moment the game has no objective – you start with some survivors, and have to try to avoid the zombies, but otherwise there’s nothing in particular to do. I’d like to add the ability for the map author to choose an objective. Over time I’d like to add several different objectives which you can choose from, with the ability to change the relevant parameters. For example these might be to survive for X minutes, or to get to location X, or to rescue person X from location Y, and so on.
I’d also like to extend the game from being about a single map each time, so map authors can create a ‘campaign’ across multiple maps. So you could create a collection of maps where once you complete the objective on one map, you can progress onto the next map. Eventually you might also be able to carry your team of survivors from one map to the next.
On top of these kind of editor controls, the actual gameplay itself could do with some more features, like the ability to find and use more kinds of weapons and equipment, equipping your team, forming survivors into squads, building defences, survivor skills, and so on. Maybe there will be other types of people you can find to help your group of survivors – like police or military.
At the moment you need to play out an entire game in a single session. As the game gets more complicated I’ll need to add in some kind of way to save your progress, so you have a persistent game stored on the web site, and you can drop in to the site to play for a few minutes (or longer :) ) whenever you like. Perhaps you’ll have a home base which you can gradually build up over time, adding fortifications while you continue to scavenge for supplies and recruit new survivors. Eventually it would be awesome if there could be some kind of cooperative multiplayer, maybe even make it somewhat MMO-like, so each map has its own set of persistent fortifications.
However, I’m only one person. All of the above will take a lot of work, and I’ll be adjusting priorities as I go, based on what seems like the best idea at the time, and based on the feedback I get from you.
Adding more features to the web version of C3O will hopefully help in advertising the mobile version of ZOS to more people, and it will hopefully help make more maps for mobile players to enjoy. However another benefit of working on the web version of C3O is so that I can try out various gameplay ideas, which I could eventually make use of in a mobile version of C3O. This is why a mobile version of C3O is probably a fair way off yet.
Originally, Jay and I planned to turn the web-based version of C3O into a free-to-play game – we mentioned this back when we launched our crowd-funding campaign. So you would have been able to play the game for free, but have the option of spending real money for extra in-game items if you wanted to. In the long term this may still happen, but it’s not my immediate focus. There are a number of challenges around this, not least of which is that Google won’t allow me to charge for a website which uses Google Maps, without paying them a hefty ($10k+) fee first. My goal isn’t to squeeze every dollar I can out of C3O and ZOS, but the more I can earn, the more I can put back into developing the games. If I do introduce any free-to-play style features, I’ll want to do it in a way which isn’t sleazy, like many of the free-to-play games out there which essentially make you stop playing until you spend some money.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m currently taking a break from work, spending time with my family. I set aside some money from my savings to cover me for about 6 months, so I’ll be returning to full time work around the end of January. That means that from now I’ve got about 2 months, where I’m hoping to be able to get a bit of a head-start on developing some of the above features for C3O and ZOS on iOS. After that I’ll be back to developing C3O and ZOS in my spare time around my work and family, so the pace will be slower, like how I developed the games in the past.
Since it’s been so long since I did anything on the web version of C3O, I’m going to focus on releasing an update to that first – ie the ability for the map author to change the infection settings. After that I’ll switch to working on both the web and mobile versions in parallel – maybe a couple of days on one, then a couple of days on the other. I’ll see how it goes – it may be easier to concentrate on a single feature on one platform at a time.
The web versions of C3O have about 2 years left to live – before Google will switch off their Flash API for Google Maps. I’m guessing it might take me around 6 months to rewrite the game in JavaScript. I’ve done a quick prototype in JavaScript, with 4000 sprites roaming around a Google map, so I know it’s possible to get it to work. However, there’s a lot of code to convert – even though the ActionScript language used by Flash is based on JavaScript, they’re still quite different. So from now I guess I have around 18 months to improve the web version of C3O. The challenge I’ve set for the next 18 months is to prove to myself that it’s worth rewriting the game in JavaScript. I’m hoping that the features I’m planning to add to the web and mobile versions of C3O will grow them both enough, to make it worthwhile to keep C3O alive after the Flash API dies. At the moment the web versions of C3O are seeing about 30,000 unique visitors a month. If the changes I make can grow that figure significantly, and if people are still playing and asking for more, then I’ll have a reason to begin the big job of rewriting C3O. It will be fun trying, anyway! :)
Jay and I worked together pretty well most of the time, and our skills complemented each other. I did the programming, and Jay did the artwork, game design, sound, music, and many other things. I’m definitely not an artist, as I’ve demonstratedin the past :) When working with Jay, I could just make things ugly, and rely on Jay to make it look good. I will now have to put in some more effort myself – but mostly I’ll be hiring freelancers to help me with the artwork, and everything else. This will be a very different way of working, and it will be interesting to see how that works out :)
I’m also planning on doing things a bit more transparently than we did in the past – so discussing what I’m working on and what I’m planning to work on, posting more on the blog, on Facebook, and on the forums. As well as being not much of an artist, I’m not much of a game designer. Jay did most of the game design (and he is a huge zombie fan), so he mostly came up with the ideas (and then I disagreed with him..). Instead, I’ll be mostly relying on your comments and feedback, for ideas on what I should work on next. While I can’t guarantee to implement everything you ask for (there’s only one of me!), I’d generally like to involve the community more, and work towards building the kind of game which you would like to see!
I’m looking forward to this next chapter of Binary Space, and I’m hoping I can produce something which you will all enjoy playing. I’ve enjoyed working on C3O and ZOS over the last 3.5 years, and what I’ve enjoyed the most is hearing everyone’s comments – and it’s because of you all that I want to keep working on it. I’d like to know what you think, so please let me know your thoughts on the forums, on the Facebook page, or in the comments below. Thanks! :)
If you’ve been following us for a while, you might remember some of the major things we’ve done with Class 3 Outbreak and Zombie Outbreak Simulator over the years:
Way back in November 2009 we released the original Zombie Outbreak Simulator for PC, which has since been played over 1 million times.
In April 2010 we released the original Class 3 Outbreak for PC, which has since been played over 1.4 million times.
In April 2011 we released the new Class 3 Outbreak featuring an editor. Since then over 9,500 maps have been created (with over 1,500 of them featured on the home page), and the game has been played over 600,000 times.
So, now that we’ve finally released ZOS for iOS, you may be wondering what we’re going to do next! Jay and I have been discussing the numerous options, and so this post is an update on what we’re currently planning.
Before I go into that, here are a few stats on the release of ZOS on iOS so far:
Released 11th April 2012.
2,835 sales for the first 7 days to date.
At approx $2 per sale and after Apple’s 30% cut, we’ve made approx $3,900 of profit.
Currently ranked in the US app store at approx 20 for Simulation Games or Strategy Games (peaked at rank 11 on day 3 in the iPad categories), and ranked approx 190 over all Games (peaked at 127 in the iPad category).
This has been a great response so far, and thanks to everyone who has bought a copy!
Now for another trip through the murky history of ZOS and C3O… :)
Back in April 2011 we announced that we’d been awarded a grant of approx $10,000 from South Australia’s Creative Industries Programme. We owe huge thankyous to Creative SA – this grant has helped us a lot! Sadly it looks like that funding programme has now been discontinued, so we were one of the last few recipients.
The grant covered various expenses related to the PC version of Class 3 Outbreak (such as website hosting, legal costs, music, software, advertising, etc). However the bulk of the grant was to allow us to buy hardware so we could produce a mobile version of the game. So it covered the purchase of Macs, iPhones and iPads for each of Jay and I, which we could use for development and testing.
Then later in April 2011 we launched a crowd funding campaign for Class 3 Outbreak on IndieGoGo. As part of that announcement, we also announced that we’d been awarded a $50,000 grant from the South Australian Film Corporation, for further development of Class 3 Outbreak on PC. We had actually been awarded that grant back in December 2010, but we’d kept it quiet while we negotiated terms with SAFC.
I booked two months of leave without pay from my day job as a software developer, starting mid-June 2011, so that I could work full time on Class 3 Outbreak with the funding from SAFC. Jay and I also decided to pitch in some of our own money to hire two other developers (Luke and David) during that two month period. Luke was going to help us out on the PC version of Class 3 Outbreak, and David was going to produce the iOS version of ZOS, freeing me to also concentrate on the PC version of Class 3 Outbreak (which was what the funding from SAFC covered). We also lined up a graphic designer and writer to help us out.
On top of that we had a great response to our crowd-funding campaign, with over $1300 pledged by 44 people. Huge thankyous to everyone who helped fund us!
Things were going great! And then suddenly… they weren’t.
It’s a long story, but the short version is that the $50k funding from SAFC never came through. We had to let Luke and David go after only about 2 weeks. The money from the crowd-funding campaign disappeared in an instant, with much of it spent on Luke (who developed some great features in his short time with us like building barricades, the show buildings button, and some back-end features to help us out such as with map moderation), as well as other boring things to keep our company going (like accounting). Jay and I had to dip into our own pockets to cover expenses that might have been covered by the SAFC funding, or that we wouldn’t have spent otherwise, to the tune of about $5,000. I went back to my day job sooner than expected, but still had to dip into my mortgage to cover some of the time I’d been without salary.
So then what? We still had the $10,000 grant from Creative SA to develop a version for iOS. David had made a good start on prototyping the iOS version, but there was a lot left to do. Class 3 Outbreak for PC was earning zero income, but had just cost us a whole lot.
That’s why we decided to put Class 3 Outbreak for PC on hold for a while, so we could concentrate on developing Zombie Outbreak Simulator for iOS. As we explained at the time and during development, our hope was that we could earn some income from Zombie Outbreak Simulator on iOS – enough to support future development on both PC and iOS (and maybe even Android).
But wait, there’s more!
Way back around March 2009, when Jay and I first started working together on this project, Jay had his “hey, could we do this on Google Maps?” idea. I’d done some enterprise software development with the Google Maps JavaScript API, so I knew it would be possible. But I also knew that JavaScript (back then) would be slow – we wouldn’t be able to support many zombies at all. Then I discovered that Google had recently released a Flash API for Google Maps. I’d done a little bit of Flash development a long time ago (9 years earlier), and figured we had a chance of doing something. I did some experiments with the Google Maps Flash API and found it worked really well for what we needed. So we then jumped into developing the original ZOS and C3O.
The Flash API for Google Maps has worked really well for us across the three PC versions of ZOS and C3O that we’ve released so far, with over 3 million plays on that API across all versions. However in September 2011, Google announced that they were discontinuing the Flash API. Google’s policy means they will switch off the Flash API 3 years from the announcement, so in September 2014. All our PC versions of ZOS and C3O will suddenly stop working.
So, what can we do? The solution is to rewrite the whole game in JavaScript! Browsers have come a long way in the last 3 years, and it is now feasible to write a version of Class 3 Outbreak which will work with the JavaScript API in modern browsers. But it is of course a lot of work to completely rewrite our game – and we need to get it done by September 2014!
So suddenly the demands on the iOS version of ZOS became much higher – we needed to earn enough to fund a full rewrite of the PC version of the game, and soon.
Then in October 2011 Google announced that they were going to start charging websites for using the Google Maps API. The charges kick in at 25,000 map views per day. We’re currently running at about 4,000 map views per day, so we’re okay for a while. But if we get a bit more popular we’ll have to start paying more to keep C3O running. The kicker though is that Google don’t support charging for over 25,000 map views with the Flash API. Websites which exceed 25,000 map views per day with the Flash API have to switch to the JavaScript API immediately, so even sooner than September 2014 when the Flash API expires.
So by now we were basically hoping for a miracle with ZOS for iOS! :) We needed to be able to afford a rewrite even sooner, and to be able to support higher ongoing running costs too.
Why don’t we charge for the PC version of C3O, so it can support itself? The problem which we’ve had with ZOS and C3O since we began development is that Google only provide their Google Maps API for free if the implementation (ie our game) is free. That’s why C3O on PC has always been free, originally supported by ads (which we removed about a year ago, as they weren’t earning much, but looked ugly). In order for us to start charging for our game on PC, we need to upgrade to a Google Maps Premier license. Last time we checked the minimum cost for this was around $10,000. This is a big investment for us to make – and it would take a lot of sales to recover it. We’d been hoping that iZOS would help fund the purchase of a license too! That would have allowed us to start experimenting with some premium features for C3O on PC, to help it become self-sustaining.
So here’s the conclusion: Although the initial sales for ZOS on iOS have been great, they aren’t enough to fund ongoing development of C3O on PC. In one week we’ve earned more from ZOS on iOS than we’ve earned from C3O on PC in 2.5 years.
So what does this mean? It means that for the near future we’re going to continue concentrating on ZOS on the iPhone / iPad / iPod platform.
We know a lot of our fans of C3O on PC will be disappointed with this. Many of you have been waiting patiently for us to finish ZOS on iOS, so that we could get back to the PC version. Unfortunately it hasn’t worked out as we’d hoped.
We’re still hopeful that we can grow our revenue on iOS, and eventually be able to fund further development on PC. However we have no way of knowing if or when this will happen. Hopefully we can achieve this within the deadlines set by Google!
Since announcing that we were bringing ZOS to iOS, we’ve had many people request an Android version. Although I’d like to do this at some point, for now we don’t have the time or resources to work on porting to Android, for the same reasons as the PC version. The Android platform also has some technical difficulties which may not make it possible, which I wrote about last year.
So what is next for ZOS on iOS? The first update we’re planning is to add some more maps – many of our reviewers have been disappointed to find that only one map was supported. We’ll see what the response is, and then take it from there.
Finally, thankyou to everyone who has been with us along this journey over the last three years. It’s been a lot of fun! :) We’re looking forward to the next chapter of releasing future updates on iOS.
The first change is that you can now choose the names for the three controllable civs, instead of them being fixed to Ethan, Emil and Paul. The first civ uses your account name, and for the other two civs you can choose from your Facebook friends. You can also choose the type of civ for each of them.
The second change is that you can now build roadblocks, using wood which you can find when searching buildings (like ammo).
Our crowd-funding campaign at http://www.indiegogo.com/Class-3-Outbreak has just ended earlier today. Thanks everyone for helping us raise over $1300 – we’re really thrilled with that result! :)
Thanks especially to Ethan, Emil, Paul, Adam, Joao and Sean, who each donated $100. Now that the controlled civ names can be chosen, each of these supporters appears as a random civ in the game. At the moment you can’t do anything with these named civs, but in the future we plan to make it possible for you to recruit them into your group.
For now we have set all of these named civs to the default guy, but let us know if you’d prefer a different civ type, and we’ll change it in the next release. Also, your names are now listed in the credits at http://www.class3outbreak.com/credits – thanks again!
As well as these changes, Jay has made a number of tweaks to the various game settings, to change how the game plays. He wanted me to add this:
We’ve reduced civ auto attack distance (conserves on ammo, requires more player input, but still keeps you safe if you’re getting attacked).
Civ numbers have been brought up and zombie numbers down initially, with 2 min infection time. You have around 3 minutes to move around searching until you start really getting outnumbered. Watch out for reanimating zombies around this time (bright red dead people).
Maps with only a few buildings are still going to be mostly unplayable until we decide to implement a building dependent number of zombies and ammo.
Finally, we’ve added a new music track by Rhys Lindsay into the start of the game music.
We hope you like the new release – let us know what you think! :)
The main gameplay feature that we’ve added is the ability to search buildings. You now start the game with a limited amount of ammo for your 3 civs to use. However they can enter buildings and search for more ammo.
There’s also a bunch of smaller changes that we’ve made:
Smaller minimap, so it doesn’t cover so much of the game area.
Civs show up as dots on the minimap, when there are less than 50 of them left.
The ability to delete maps from the editor which you don’t want any more (as long as they haven’t been published).
Previously all published maps would be submitted to Jay to be moderated. With over 30 maps being published a day, this was starting to take a lot of time. We’ve now changed this so that you can choose to nominate your map for inclusion on the world map.
We’re excited to announce that following our search for programmers, we’ve now hired Luke Mitchell and David Coen!
Both Luke and David will be joining us in just over a week, from the 13th of June – the same day that Jay and I are going to start full time development on Class 3 Outbreak.
Our team is now even more geographically distributed than before! I am in Perth Australia, and Jay is in Adelaide Australia. David joins us from Melbourne Australia, and Luke is all the way over in the United Kingdom.
Over the next week we’ll likely be busy on preparation for the transition into full time work. We’re looking forward to getting lots of game features developed starting from the 13th!
I’ve just uploaded a new version of C3O with the ability to select multiple civs at once. Click to select the first civ as normal, then hold the control key and click another civ to add them to the group.
We noticed that sometimes it was difficult to tell where your civs were going to walk when you moved them – such as not knowing exactly where the doors on buildings are, or whether a fence has been drawn in on the map. Therefore in this version we’ve also included a display of the path which each civ is going to take. This makes it easier to tell if your civ is about to walk into a horde of zombies! :)
Also in this version we’ve renamed Jay to Paul, in thanks for Paul’s contribution to our campaign at http://www.indiegogo.com/Class-3-Outbreak. Thanks Paul! :) As I mentioned in the last progress update, these names are temporary. Eventually the controllable civs will be yourself and friends you’ve imported from Facebook. At that time Ethan, Emil and Paul, and any other $100+ contributors, will become named civs wandering the map. In a later version these named civs will be able to be recruited into your group.
The next feature which we plan to work on is the ability to search buildings on the map for supplies.
As we’ve mentioned before at http://www.indiegogo.com/Class-3-Outbreak, we’ve recently been awarded $60k in grants to further develop Class 3 Outbreak. This is going to make a huge difference to how quickly we can develop new features. We’re looking forward to starting on that – we’re currently aiming for the middle of June.
To speed up development even further, we’ve decided to pitch in some of our own cash, to hire some extra people to help us out.
We’re looking for one or two additional programmers, to work part-time for up to a couple of months, starting from mid-June / July. This will most likely suit university / college / tafe students. We’ll be flexible around your studies / exams / mid-year vacation / etc. Depending on how it works out, we may be able to extend the work longer-term as well.
The key attributes we are looking for are someone who:
Is smart
Gets things done
Has initiative
Is enthusiastic
Below is a list of technologies / areas which we currently use. If you already know some of these, then great! If not, then we will expect you to be able to learn them quickly, based on your coding experience.
ActionScript 3
Flex
FlashDevelop
Python
Google App Engine
HTML
JavaScript
CSS
jQuery
AJAX
Game Development
2D Graphics
Although optional, we would also be interested if you have experience developing for iOS.
We are primarily looking for people either in Western Australia or South Australia (where we live – about 2500km apart from each other). However given that we work with each other online, we’re also open to receiving applications from other states of Australia, or other countries. You will also be working remotely, and so you will need to be able to supply your own computer / internet connection / etc.
A demo of something you have created. Preferably something you have worked on in your own time, rather than a study project. Instead of sending an attachment, please send a link where we can download it from. Note that we have Windows machines (so won’t be able to run a demo on other platforms), even though most of the technologies we use for Class 3 Outbreak are platform independent. You might also want to include a link to screenshots / videos.
A sample of your source code. There’s no need to send a whole working project, just send an extract such as a single class or function – enough for us to get a sense of your ‘programming style’.
For visitors not familiar with us: Binary Space was formed in February 2009 by Jay Weston and Saxon Druce, who worked together developing PC racing games at Ratbag Games back in the late 90s. We are currently developing Class 3 Outbreak (www.class3outbreak.com), a zombie real time strategy game based on Google Maps. Since the first release in November 2009 it has been played over 2 million times, and we have lots more features planned!
There’s still lots more to go, but this is a ‘first cut’, which we thought we’d put out there so that you can start to play around with it.
When you load a map, it will initially start the Zombie Outbreak Simulator as before. Click ‘Play a Game’ on the left, and it will reload and start a game. In this version you have three controllable civs who you can move around, and order to shoot the zombies.
Now that you are controlling civs instead of police, the game is more about survival than about attacking zombies. We’ve therefore changed the behaviour so that when you click to move a civ, they will no longer stop to shoot at zombies – they will just keep running. In the classic C3O you had to double-click to get that to happen. Your civs will however still auto-fire at zombies when the civ is standing idle. For the same reason, by default the game now starts already overrun by a map-wide outbreak of zombies (but you can still change that in the options).
In our crowd-funding campaign at http://www.indiegogo.com/Class-3-Outbreak, all perks for contributions of $100 or more include “Your name/character appears in the game world. Choose to be a zombie or civilian!”. Our plan for this is that your will appear as a non-playable civ or zombie roaming the map, which the player might be able to recruit later in the game. Our plan for the original civs that you start the game with is that they will be yourself, plus friends you’ve imported from Facebook (or just typed in). However we haven’t implemented any of that yet, so for now I just inserted three fixed names. As a temporary bonus for our two top contributors Ethan and Emil, we’ve included them as the first two controllable civs (and Jay rounds out the third). Also Ethan and Emil have been added to the credits page at http://www.class3outbreak.com/credits. Thanks Ethan and Emil for your support, and also to everyone else who has made a contribution! :)
As of this release, we’ve also decided to remove all of the ads from the site, as they just made it look bad, and they weren’t earning much anyway.
The next feature I’m planning to work on is the ability to group civs together, so you can move them as a group, instead of having to do it individually as they are now. And then of course we’ll move on to all of the other features we have planned, as described at http://www.indiegogo.com/Class-3-Outbreak.
We hope you enjoy the new release! Let us know what you think :)
The Tomorrow Start Grant is a competitive grant to assist South Australia’s emerging digital media industry and ends in June 2012.
The purpose of the Tomorrow Start Grant is to:
Assist start-up South Australian digital media businesses to become better established and overcome significant and immediate barriers to the growth of commercial revenues
Target innovative start-up companies with a clearly identified business opportunity, that need some external financial support to capitalise on that commercial opportunity
Support the development of new technologies, products and services involving the commercialisation of digital media and, in particular, embedded digital media
Enhance the economic growth of South Australia
We’ve been approved for a grant of approximately $10,000, which will allow us to buy development equipment, pay for legal advice, and cover our hosting costs.
Binary Space is the developer of the games Zombie Outbreak Simulator and Class 3 Outbreak, which feature a zombie apocalypse played out in real locations on maps.
