History
Don’t Bite Me Bro! (as The Herd), began as a class assignment at Parsons School of Design. Rafi, Andrew, and Keiji were chosen as a group and tasked with creating an asymmetrical multiplayer game. The game started from scratch for an annual weekend game jam, and continued to be worked on for two weeks.
The original idea, The Herd, had 4 original survivors playing split screen, with a fifth player playing on an iPad tablet. The survivors gathered parts for a broken pickup truck throughout a large open world filled with 1000 zombies. The tablet player or “Watcher” triggered various sounds around the map in order to swarm the players with the zombies.
Work on Don’t Bite Me Bro! began in January of 2016. The game did away with the split screen separating the players, but maintained its asymmetrical multiplayer gameplay. The Watcher player was replaced with The Hand, allowing for all players on a single screen. The Survivors completed objectives of the various maps while The Hand placed and reused different kinds of zombie units.
Through play-tests and iteration the game discarded its asymmetrical roots and evolved into an open world experience, where the players:
COLLECT various resources through out the world, BUILD and maintain a home base, EXPLORE randomly generated dungeons, and DEFEND themselves from constant waves of Zombies. Alone or TOGETHER.
