What are you waiting for? Download Ultimate Battle Zombies now!

Today’s launch is just the beginning for Ultimate Battle Zombies. We have several updates planned, and will be introducing new fighters regularly. The first new fighter should come out next week.

Thanks for playing!

Here are a few more promo images that we would like to share. The first is one of our screenshots which should give you a little more insight into what this game is all about.

As for the second image, our Art Director Adam, said that we can’t launch this game without a Luchador Zombie…..we had a hard time disagreeing with him.

Here is a preview of the intro motion comic we are currently working on. Battle zombies and motion comics…I love my job!

Here are a few teaser images…more to come soon!

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.

We’re really excited about this game, since it’s the first game release of our own in a while. We’ve been super busy lately and obviously have all of our iLookApps, but are glad to get back to some games.

This is actually our second game released this week – on Thursday, Bop It! which we developed for KID Group and is published by EA. It’s currently featured by Apple on the App Store, and we hope you love it just as much as they seem to!

This will be the first game in the Mobile Mysteries series of apps and it is inspired by the best-selling PC Game The Secret of Shadow Ranch.

The great part about this game is that it lets you the player, make decisions about how the mystery unfolds. It takes everything that is great about Nancy Drew novels, and adds a bit of interactivity to create a whole new experience.

We’ve been having a great time building this, and look forward to sharing more with you about in the next couple months. In the meantime keep an eye on the Mobile Mysteries website for more information and updates.

As a special incentive for all of you, we’ve decided to release Gravity Sling Deluxe for just $.99 to the first 5,000 players, $1.99 to the next 5,000 players and then the price will reach it’s normal price of $2.99. This won’t last long so be sure to act fast!

We hope you enjoy playing and look forward to hearing your feedback. While you’re waiting for it to download, go ahead and check out our gameplay trailer:

This update has a lot of big changes and improvements to it. Most notably is that we’ve introduced moving planets, which adds a huge amount of complexity to the levels that have them. We’ve also added star pickups to most levels giving you more opportunities to earn points on each level. With these changes we added a total of 64 more levels to the game so there’s a LOT more content to play too. Here’s a list of all the big changes we’ve made:

• Moving Planets
• Star Pickups on most levels
• 64 new levels (4 free + 2 new level packs)
• Display indicators for if you’ve met a level target or not
• Better help for the first few levels
• Improved game flow between levels and retries
• Much better UI performance
• Updated OpenFeint to 2.3.1
• New achievements
• Fixed multi-touch bug in gameplay
• Numerous other tweaks and bug fixes

We hope you enjoy this update, and as always let us know what else you’d like to see!

Circle of Life from Gravity Sling v1.1

Gravity Sling Deluxe has not yet been approved for sale. It is identical to this version except that all level packs are automatically unlocked, and you will need to purchase it from the start (instead of it being free with In App Purchase).