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PRESSKIT

‘zombies! ARgh!’ is a frantic shoot-em-up that plays out on your coffee table, kitchen floor, desk, yard – wherever there’s a flat surface for zombie destruction to erupt! Battle relentless hordes of the undead, armed with flame throwers, laser guns, rocket launchers and grenades.

Playing in AR means you are in total control of the viewpoint, moving physically right into the action for close up carnage or pulling right out to see where the blighters are coming from. AR brings a whole new dimension to battling zombies!

For non-AR enabled devices there is a more conventional mode where you can have just as much fun obliterating zombies on your device.

zombies! ARgh! Features:

  • Watch as zombie hordes invade your world! Using Apple’s AR Kit, zombies! ARgh! turns your home, garden or workplace into a zombie battlefield!
  • Defend yourself with a vast armoury including shotguns, flame throwers, rocket launchers and more
  • Call in ‘Buddies’ who will lay into the hordes to create distractions, defend your position or just brawl alongside you!
  • Pick-up health, damage boosters, coins and ammo
  • Make full use of the battle-zone and collect ammo, damage boosters and health pick-ups
  • Hear every explosion with stunning 3D audio
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Any room for a Boss?

boss_room

Our demented jester needs a happy home to spread his cheerful brand of carnage and skull shaped bombs. This is a combination of quickly mocking something up in 3D and painting on top (which works for me sometimes and sometimes not!)

Yorick pulls himself together

We like to implement AI just using Cubes and Spheres; get the logic and feel for the behaviour right first, make it playable with no frills. For our first boss Yorick, we started by animating him, aas his activity is quite a bit more complex than the simpler enemies.
 

 
While we cracked on with implementation of this animated object and a written design, we started fleshing out the model.
 

 
Putting the animations together with the new mesh pretty much worked first time. Yes, in Max, we were a little surprised too!
 

 
A first pass implementation of code and art in-game and it’s coming together pretty sweet.
 

Demented Jester Yorick

RSH_Yorick

 

We’re just about to start implementing our first boss character. Alas poor Yorick, who I’ve given an asses skull for an ass. I had to break up the green and yellow with red (He was beginning to look like he should play for Norwich City!)

(Lot’s of fun was had animating him juggling and walking on his hands!)

Fabulous new items in stock!

RSH_items

Here’s a few of the items you can find hidden away in the game that will have varying effects on your playthrough. They have a fairly convoluted path from being comprised of an adjective / noun that’s interpreted (by me) into an object that has a related trait or effect. For example:

“Frozen” “Keech” (An old word for fat) becomes the chirpy little snowman who will be a reuseable item that you can drop in the environment for makeshift cover.

“Dextrous” “Hedgepig” is the ring/keychain that definitely in no way, shape or form is a nod to Sonic the Hedgehog. (Or the fact it makes you drop precious currency when you get hit!)

Dr L Johnson

RSH_lexiconservatoryWe’re going to have a variety of different room types you can encounter and one such idea is a sort of library where the curator can portmanteau two words from your inventory together (for a fee).

Sticking with the historical real people theme I initially thought this person might be famous lexicograther Samuel Johnson but it took no hesitation whatsoever to carelessly drop an ‘L’ as a middle initial and come up with something referencing Pulp Fiction at the same time!

The brain/glasses character was an earlier candidate!

 

Glittering prizes!

RSH_treasure

Another week, another round of scrappy concepting. Some loose designs for a bespoke treasure plinth/room and some chests. The Wordworm is a unique kind of lock that will only sod off if you feed it from your lexicon of carried words!

 

Merchants of Venice!

merchantInspired loosely by the symbolic gold,silver and lead caskets in “The Merchant of Venice” the vendors on the first level come in three flavours!

Mr Gold will offer items for precious life hearts, Mr Silver will exchange items for monies and Mr Lead does nothing but sit there…  or is there going to be some kind of secret about him? (Well obviously there is now I’ve posted that)

 

My kingdom for a horse… er, or not.

RSH_snake_half

 

We’ve developed a classic segmented snake like enemy (You remember the old nokia classic? No? Well aren’t you just young and full of sweet life then!)

Amir had the fantastic idea of making it like a pantomime horse to keep a connection to our theatrical theme for the first level. It began with a mild Kate Beaton rip off developing into something that’s closer to the cute but deranged look I favoured!

Historical Hotshots : Development Diary August 2016

 

 

We were lucky enough to be one of the finalists for the second round of funding provided by the lovely people at the UK Games Fund. As you can see from other entries on this blog and our posts on twitter (@mewestudios), our previous title of “Real Super Heroes” has a new name : “Historical Hotshots”. We can never resist a nice bit of alliteration.

 

Rob put together this great little video to show the UKGF guys our progress. While there’s always the temptation of waiting until everything looks super polished, I love being able to look back at really early shots of the game and seeing how things progress.

 

We’ll be doing these video diaries once a month and we thought we’d share it here too.  Big shout out to Sam Childs for the fantastic audio (the music, not your voice Rob).