Dwight of the Living Dead is a long-dead game project of mine that I started and abandoned before making Linus Bruckman. Here’s some info and the summary, all of which was also written ages ago, but I thought I should share it! Enjoy!

History

I came up for the idea for Dwight of the Living Dead ages ago. We’re talking 2005. Right after finishing Anna. I was going through a zombie phase at that point. I don’t exactly know why, but I knew that I had to make a game with zombies! I suspect it had something to do with Shaun of the Dead, which has an obvious influence on the title of this game! Gameplay-wise, I was really impressed by the game Baten Kaitos and the way that it worked card collection into combat. It fit really naturally into an RPG setting. So, my initial concept was a card-based RPG with zombies. I was also, at the time, feeling nostalgic for my childhood playing Hero Quest with my father, and wanted to add in a touch of board game with randomized levels.

I was feeling very disillusioned at the time towards the game industry, and the idea of making a send-up of the industry in game form seemed perfect to me. And the zombies? Fit right in.

I decided that it would be my next game. After figuring out the game mechanics, I started coding the game using really crappy programmer art as placeholders. My intention was to get the game to such a state that it you could play through a little bit of it and get an idea of how the game would work, and then approach some artists to see if anyone was interested in working on the game with me (for free, obviously, as this would have been a freeware game).

I had gotten pretty far, implementing the decks, movement, random levels, bad guys, and some different AIs, and was just starting on the main combat. But then, in December of 2005, my daughter was born. Six months later, I still hadn’t touched the game. Lack of sleep has a definite impact on your ability and motivation for coding.

Also, during that time, Linus was growing in my head as a much more interesting, and far more doable game idea and I soon after would start work on that game, never to look back.

I’ve lost the code for Dwight a while back in a hard drive apocalypse (which is just as well, the script was messy and if I ever pick it up again, I would definitely start over) but I still have this playable alpha which you can play around with, if you’d like.

The early alpha

I’ll let you figure it out as you go. It’s mostly just demonstrating navigating the rooms and the limited in-room fighting system. The idea was that coming into contact with a zombie would bring up the one-on-one battle screen, but unfortunately, I never finished that. So touching a zombie just kills him!

Mess around if you’d like, and read on for the description of how the game was intended to be!

Download the playable alpha!

Story

Meet Dwight. Ten years ago, Dwight founded a game company with his brother Jay. Zombie Games was Dwight’s dream come true. Dwight handled the design, programming, and graphics, while Jay handled the business side of things. Everything was going great until the money started flowing in.

Jay, consumed with greed, continued expanding the company, focused on maximizing profit. Jay didn’t care about gameplay. Graphics sold games! Violence sold games! Sex sold games! Innovation? The word meant nothing to Jay! After buying out all the competition or suing them into oblivion, Zombie Games became the largest game developer on the planet, pumping out game after game of the same mindless gameplay hidden behind the latest shiny graphics.

During his brother’s ruthless company expansion, Dwight was relegated to the game design department. Well, “department” isn’t exactly the right word. More like “broom closet.” Dwight comes to work every day, takes the elevator to the fifth floor of the Zombie Games corporate headquarters (just below the sixth floor blood-spatter department and above the fourth floor lens-flare department) and walks past the huge cubicle farm of the jiggle-physics department to his closet next to the bathroom. Every day, he faxes a new game pitch to his brother in the penthouse office. And every day, that pitch comes back denied.

Since the players had stopped noticing or caring (or both) that they were just getting the same game over and over again, the life of an employee at Zombie Games was becoming more mindless and repetitive every day. They continued toiling away at their increasingly zombie-like lives until one day they simply became zombies.

Dwight will now have to fight his way out of the zombie-infested Zombie Games headquarters. Zombie programmers, zombie marketers, and zombie lawyers stand between him and freedom. As they stumble around the building’s ten floors, they may be moaning for “Synerrrrgyyyyy” and “Crosss plaaaatforrrm commmpatabiiiiiillllityyyyy” but it seems that what they really hunger for is brains!

Battle

DotLD was intended to be a card-based RPG/Adventure board game. (More commonly reffered to as a CBRPGABG) The player would use his deck of cards for everything including moving, fighting, and solving puzzles. Solving puzzles and winning battles would yield additional cards and keeping strong cards in your deck would be important for completing the game.

Each card would have a rank and a purpose. The rank would be a number from one to ten and the purpose would range from general cards, like punch, shoot, and block, to more specialized items or attacks like med-kit, or bullet-barrage. Some cards would also be used for puzzles, for example, you might pick up a bucket-of-water card and have to figure out to play it on an electric wire to electrocute the enemy standing next to it.
For battle in the room screen, you could play cards such as a punch card to attack any enemy within your physical attack radius, or a shoot card to fire your weapon at any enemy within your weapon’s range. The damage from the attack would be based on the rank of the card played and the equipped weapon’s attack strength. Ranged weapons would also have a chance of missing based on Dwight’s accuracy stat and the distance of the target while physical attacks would never miss but would be affected by Dwight’s physical strength stat.

Once you’ve come into contact with a zombie either by landing on the same square as one or having one land on a square with you, the battle screen would come up and you’d engage in one on one combat.

The battle system was never fully ironed out, and would definitely need some play testing before using it in a real game, but what I had originally intended was for Dwight and the zombie to take turns on the offensive or defensive, with the battle instigator getting the first offensive. The offensive player would play three cards face down, one for a head attack, one for a body attack, and one for a leg attack. The defensive player would simultaneously play three cards face down to intercept these attacks.

Early battle screen mock up

Once all six cards are played, they are turned up to calculate the results. If the offensive player plays a shoot or punch card, the resulting attack strength would be calculated by combining the rank of the card with the attack strength of the equipped weapon (ranged weapon or physical weapon). Physical attacks would also be affected by the offensive player’s physical stat. Ranged attacks would have a chance of missing based on the offensive player’s accuracy stat. The damage done from all attacks would finally be modified by the defensive player’s defense stat.

The defensive player has to try to predict the offensive player’s cards and lay down appropriate cards to defend. Playing a block card in any of the three slots would decrease the damage done from the corresponding attack card by an amount depending on the rank of the block card and the defensive player’s defense stat. Playing a punch or shoot card defensively is a risk, but could pay off greatly. If you play a punch card defensively opposite an offensive punch card and your defensive card’s rank is lower, you will take the damage normally from the offensive punch, but will also counter with your own punch. If your defensive punch card is a higher rank than the offensive punch, then you preempt the offensive punch all together and get a punch of your own, taking no damage! Playing a shoot card opposite a shoot card works in the same way. Playing a punch card opposite a shoot card, however results in the offensive player getting an unblocked attack in and your defensive card being voided.

The final twist to battle is the additional effects of attacking the head, body, or legs. A head attack or counter attack decrease the attack’s accuracy, making the attack more likely to miss altogether; however, there will be a chance of causing a “critical hit,” which will double the damage done. A leg attack will also decrease the accuracy of the hit, but will have a chance at causing a “low-blow” causing the recipient to miss his next offensive turn.

There will also be other cards beyond shoot, punch, and block that will have more specialized roles in battle. Their actions will be described on the cards.

After the head, body, and leg attacks are all calculated, the opponent who was previously on the defense, will now be on the offense, and both sides will continue switching back and forth on offense and defense until one opponent falls. If Dwight wins, he gets some EXP and continues. If the zombie wins, Dwight’s dead and has to reload.

Since all the cards are played face down and all six must be played before any are turned face up, there is some guess work regarding where the attacker is going to attack and where the defensive person will defend, though with experience, the player can find certain attack and defense patterns for different types of enemies or bosses which will make it more strategy than guessing.

Leveling up

Battles will net the player some EXP which can be spent by the player to level up Dwight’s stats. The player can choose to spend points on leveling up any stat.

Puzzles

In order to keep that adventurey feel that I love, the game would contain a number of puzzles that would be mostly optional. The idea would be to allow the player to choose whether to battle through the hordes of zombies, which would help you level up and become stronger for the later levels, or solve puzzles, which would net you the most powerful pieces of equipment and would sometimes allow you to clear enemies or bosses out of the way.

Some of these puzzles would be of the logic or find/use password variety, but most would involve collecting special cards and using them at the right time. Perhaps in one area of the game, you get a remote control card. Using that card in a room with a TV would turn the TV on which would distract all the zombies in the room and allow you to pass. Using a wrench card on a wall panel could allow you access to some wires which you could then play a shoot card on to break the wires, thereby unlocking a nearby door and allow you to bypass a section of the level. Puzzles could also help you open safes containing equippable items, unlock secret passageways, and unlock desks containing powerful cards.

Puzzles could also be used to help you with boss fights. Reading computer terminals might reveal hints about weaknesses of the boss. Maybe the head of the Lens Flare department is afraid of the dark. Using a bucket of water card on each of the spot lights in his room before attacking him would greatly decrease his stats for the battle. Perhaps the head of the Legal department will charge you as soon as he sees you. But if you play cards of a high-enough rank, you can stay ahead of him and lure him into a pit, allowing you to bypass the battle all together.

In this way, the game can use lots of wacky cards for fun effects that would give the player a choice of how to approach the game — smart, aggressive, or both!

Presentation

To go along with the silly send-up of the games industry, the game would be presented in a cartoon style.

Music would be completely unnecessarily over-done John Williams style affair, making even simple things like picking up a mop to use as a melee weapon a dramatic affair.

In Conclusion

This was a fun idea that has stuck with me for a while. I think such a mixture of genres could turn out to be very fun, and the game industry parodies would make it incredibly enjoyable for hard-core and casual gamers alike. If I ever get really ambitious (highly unlikely after Resonance!), I might give this one a go again!

Resonance will be out this year.

Update: April fools!

Well, blog, it’s been a while. As I mentioned on Twitter, I’ve found that I can be in one of two modes: productive but silent, or loud but stagnant.

Doing community and marketing stuff takes up a lot of time! And when your only time to work on your game is between the time when your two kids and wife fall asleep and the time when your eyes start closing and you start writing code that incorporates words from the dreams you start having, you don’t want to spend too much time blogging.

I actually wrote the word “sink” into a bit of dialog two nights ago that had nothing to do with sinks because I started falling asleep when writing it. When I was played that segment the next night I had no idea what I had written.

Anywho, things are still going well. I’ve had a few epic nights of productivity recently. I’m working towards yet another deadline: this time trying to get as much of the game as possible polished and submitted to Indiecade.

One thing that has really helped me get as far as I’ve gotten has been Kickstarter. I raised $2080, which made a big dent in that red number at the bottom of my expenditure-tracking spreadsheet.

Here’s what the money went to (and it was all pretty much gone in the first month!):

• Music and sound! Nikolas Sideris got a large chunk of the Kickstarter purse. He has produced some amazing tracks for the game as well as purchased and recorded a ton of high-quality sound effects. His work really brings the game’s audio to life.
• Backgrounds! There were a few backgrounds that I was going to cut for budget reasons, which would have kind of weakened part of the game, but I was spending money that could be going into my kids’ college funds! But after Kickstarter, I put them back into the game and Nauris has done some more of his stunning work! In fact, I just posted one a couple paragraphs above! (You’ve got to see it with the mist drifting across the scene! It’s gorgeous!)
• Dialog! Deirdra Kiai got some moolah for her excellent guidance and help so far with writing the actual words that come out of the characters’ mouths. I found, that writing the dialogs had become a major bottle-neck for me since I felt like all the characters were speaking in my voice rather than expressing their own unique personalities. Luckily Deirdra is a fantastic writer and offered to help! She’s done some great editing, re-writing, and writing for the game! Thanks to Kickstarter, she got a bit of remuneration for her time, which I’m sure went straight into her own game-in-progress, Life Flashes By..
• Posters! And of course a bunch of money went into getting posters printed out and sent back to the people who pledged enough to receive one. We had a bit of trouble with a couple international backers who didn’t receive posters, but I think that’s all been sorted now!

So, yeah. Kickstarter was immensely helpful. So, I hope I don’t sound like a total beggar when I hold out my hat again.

I’m opening up donations again, this time via PayPal (as some people mentioned to me that they wanted to preorder via Kickstarter before but couldn’t do so via Amazon’s payment system). My goal is to get enough money to commision the rest of the art that I need to complete the game. Right now, a decent portion of the last half of the game is still in programmer art (crappy MS Paint drawings!) and, partially due to a recent incident where I had to spend a bunch of money to get my wife back into the country (long story), I don’t have enough money right now to pay for those backgrounds. It is slowing game development.

I will be applying the same gift structure to all PayPal donations as I did to Kickstarter, so every PayPal donator can get the same gifts that were available before. Likewise, any Kickstarter backer that wants to increase their pledge to get up to a higher gift may do so by donating the difference!

Also, all PayPal pledgers will gain access to the same Special Backer Gifts that Kickstarter backers had access to. This includes:

• Never-before-seen screenshots
• Never-before-heard music tracks
• Some sneak peaks at awesome character animations.
• An amazing wallpaper
• A special video!

And of course, you get prizes based on your contribution amount. Here are the pledge levels and prizes:

PLEDGE $1 OR MORE
A mention under the “Special Thanks” section of the game’s credits!

PLEDGE $15 OR MORE
All the above, plus a coupon to download the game for free when it’s done! This is as good as a pre-order! (This is likely cheaper than the game will be sold for when it’s complete.)

PLEDGE $35 OR MORE
All the above, plus an early playable sample sent to you before the end of November! (a complete scene from the game missing only voice acting)

PLEDGE $50 OR MORE
All the above, plus a guaranteed spot on the play-testing list. Play the game early and give feedback to improve the game!

PLEDGE $75 OR MORE
All the above, plus a poster, which I’ll send you as soon as the above time period is up!

PLEDGE $500 OR MORE
All the above, plus your name in the credits as a producer!

Any and all help (including kind words of encouragement!) will be deeply appreciated! I thank you in advance for your support and look forward to sharing Resonance with all of you!

If you like playing indie games, but don’t know who Tim Langdell is, you should find out. He is, in my opinion, a trademark troll who uses his fraudulently-maintained trademark of the four-letter word “EDGE” to harass, impede, and extort money from any developer who haplessly uses the word in the title of their game or semi-remotely-game-related-something-or-other.

Recently he has been going after indie game developers, which has caused the indie game developer community to band together to shed light on all his dirty dealings.

Here’s a good summary of the events that drew the focus of the indie dev community. And here is a great Tim Langdell, This Is Your Life! summary of info about him and his antics. Edit: Oh! And how could I possibly forget ChaosEdge who have been the best source for delving through the Langdell Muck!

Even with EA having recently joined the fight (after his laughable attempt to pretend he was making a game called “MIRRORS a game by EDGE”), he recently has been attempting to have Killer Edge Racing for the iPhone pulled from the iPhone App Store using legal threats and is, in my opinion, undoubtedly attempting to extort money from the developers.

Anywho. It’s still Resonance, yo.

Newsflash! In order to avoid a lengthy legal dispute with well known game developer Neocell, one of the oldest game development companies ever to make a game called Resonance, I have decided to change the name of my game.

I was never happy with “Resonance” anyways. It just didn’t reflect the edgyness of the game. I mean, this game is truly on the edge. Almost over it. And I wanted a name that will make that known to all.

So, henceforth, Resonance will now be called rEDGEonance®!

Please update your bookmarks to rEDGEonance®’s new webpage:

Thanks!

All backers (even with just a $1 donation) get access to the six special gifts that I’ve given out:

• two never-before seen screenshots
• two music tracks
• a handful of animations
• a desktop wallpaper
• and coming soon: a 5 minute video!

Thanks!

I could have sworn that my typed replies had more carriage returns, but apparently Dualnames thought it looked much better to put each answer into one giant paragraph.

And by the way, the fundraising over on Kickstarter has been ridiculous. I love you guys! New gift for backers coming tomorrow!

And since I’ve just recently welcomed a new son into my family, my cash reserves are not where I’d like them to be to keep up the speed of development that we’re currently rocking at, so I’ve decided to reach out for a little help from my friends!

I’ve set up a Kickstarter project for the game. Kickstarter collects pledges from kind individuals like yourself and, if the project meets it’s fundraising goals by the deadline, delivers your pledges to the creative endeavor that you’ve pledged your support to (in this case, Resonance!) In return, supporters get gifts or rewards for their pledge amounts! If the goal is not met, then no money or gifts change hands.

So, this is really your first chance to pre-order the game. A $15 pledge will get you a pre-order for the game to be downloaded when it’s done. Keep in mind, that this is likely cheaper than the game will cost when it is released (price to be decided), so you’re saving money here.

Beyond that, there are lots of other things that you can get (along with your pre-order) for larger pledges, like a playable sample of the game, a spot on the beta-tester roster, posters, and more.

So, the pre-order is undoubtedly a good deal here. I don’t expect you to feel obligated or whatever to give me money, and recognize that times are tough right now, but if there are any kind-hearted people with some extra clink in their pockets who are interesting in supporting a passionate indie developer and his team, I would appreciate your support. I’m not expecting a ton of money for this, hopefully just enough to cover IGF entry fee and team payment for the rest of this year! Thanks for your consideration!!!

November 1st is the deadline for this fundraising drive, so get your pre-orders in before then! Read up on the Kickstarter page for the full details!

While I’m at it, there are some other awesome indie games in production using Kickstarter for fund raising, so if you’re looking at getting in on the ground-floor on some of these, you should check out Saturated Dreamers and Liferaft

Adventure Gamers got around to reviewing Nanobots yesterday, and of course had nothing but nice things to say! I mean, what’s there to complain about? Great puzzles, charming characters, a cute story, adorable graphics, fantastic mind-blowing programming…

And free!

If you haven’t played yet: do so immediately!