Developing My Pet Zombie has been a great experience. It’s a bit different kind of game than anything we’ve released before, and that’s brought about some interesting challenges and allowed us to focus on some new areas.
One of the most rewarding aspects of development so far has been creating the zombies and giving them their own character. We knew from the start that My Pet Zombie would only be successful if players could identify with, and want to care for their zombies so nailing them was absolutely critical. Fortunately getting this right was also a lot of fun!
First, our illustrator put together some rough sketches for the overall look of the zombie, and based on those we decided what angle they would be standing at, the body proportions, overall feel and other things that were key to lock down early in the process.
Once we had the base look sorted out, our illustrator and programmer worked together to close out some of the technical issues behind the zombie animations. We weren’t using any external game engines, so we needed to create our own system for animation and movement. Ultimately what we did was essentially create a 2D skeleton built out of the zombie pieces (arms, legs, torso, head), and then simply move those pieces around over time to do the animations. The trick was working out how to export the animations out of the tool the animators would use (Maya) and into our app. After a couple days working on this, and some advice from our friends at Leviathan Games, we put together a solution that combined a custom Maya exporter with our own parsing tools to make this work.
From here we continued revising the zombie parts and exporter, and after a few more days, we felt we had a really solid system to build everything off of. At that point our illustrators began creating the more than 300 different shirts, shoes, hats, hair, accessories, etc that are available to customize each zombie.
At the same time the animators over at Bloom Animation began building out all the different animations we’d be using in the game. This phase was one of the most enjoyable parts of development since we were able to finally see our zombies come to life. The animations Bloom put together were great, and seeing them in the game with our fully illustrated and dressed up zombies was a great feeling.
The last step in the process came extremely late in development. We needed to give the zombies a voice. Our original thought was that we would have the Zombie Talkback feature always available in the game, so the zombie would constantly mimic back what you said. This worked fairly well, but we thought it made it harder to connect with *your* zombie. So we did a quick voice test having everyone on the team record a couple lines, and then picked the ones we thought worked the best. Ultimately that means my wife is the voice of the girl zombies and our Art Director became the voice of the boy zombies. As soon as we put this in we knew it was the right choice. The zombies finally had that last bit of character they really needed.
We couldn’t be happier with the final result of the zombies. We’ve already gotten a lot of great feedback and comments on the way the zombies look and move. We knew going in this was the most critical thing for us to get right, and we can’t wait for all of you to see the final result when you try out My Pet Zombie.
My Pet Zombie is a universal application that runs on iPhone, iPod and iPad devices. It is currently available in Canada and will launch worldwide on Thursday July 14th.
