#worldzombination

Along with being the UI dude around here, I'm also responsible for a large portion of the graphic design that happens at Proletariat. Crafting sweet logos is one of my favorite activities as an artist, and much to my delight, the logo project on our current game involved the development of not one, but two logos. AT THE SAME TIME. **FLEX** In the process of coming up with a name for the game, there were two options that we had a difficult time choosing between: "Conflict Dead" and "World Zombination." Since there was no clear winner at the time, we decided to make concept logos for both names to see if the visualization would help with the decision. The following is a step-by-step account of the logo process, both on this project and how I approach this type of work in general. 

1. Reference, a.k.a. Cruising the Interwebs for Pretty Pictures for Work I SWEAR

In general, it's much easier and faster to nail down an initial direction when you're working from already-established sources. By collecting reference images that represent the "vibe" I'm going for, I can narrow down my focus before pen hits paper (or screen, in my case). Back in the olden days, this meant lots of art books and photos, but since we live in the future now, all it takes is protein pills and some Google Image Search mojo. Some people save images to their machines directly, but a lot of folks use online scrapbooks like Pinterest. I personally use Springpad, since it allows you to make your collections private and share them with only the people you choose. Here's what the reference page for this project looks like:

You can see here that I was going for more of a retro feel, with examples from the heyday of monster and zombie films. I especially love the old Aurora model kit boxes. It doesn't get more classic and straight-up awesome, especially the hand-done typography. Some of the references are more playful and whimsical, while others are more sinister—I wasn't sure exactly which "feel" was best, so I grabbed a bunch of varied examples. I also loved the idea of integrating zombie/illustrative imagery into the text.

2. Sketching, a.k.a. Doodling Instead of Listening During Meetings

Once I had enough reference to work from, I began jotting down thoughts as rough sketches. As with most art projects, it's advantageous to put down as many ideas as possible as quickly as possible so you can weed out what doesn't work from what does without spending hours rendering details. With logos, it's important to capture the essence of the product in the mark itself—what is this thing and who is it for? Since we were still stuck on two names, I did sketches for both using a range of tones, type, and imagery. Quick note: you don't have to be a super-duper-draftsperson for this phase. The point is that these are quick and ROUGH. Just enough to get the point across. The name "Conflict Dead" felt a little more serious to me, so the sketches tended to be more Romero-esque, with a little millitary-spray-paint-stencil thrown in occasionally:

A few more that I still love (hand-drawn type is wicked fun, some of the better I've done IMO):

And the beginnings of "World Zombination":

I was generally going more fun and playful with most of these, and tried a few times to get some Earth imagery in there. You can also see in both sets of sketches that the Survivor fist/Infected hand featured heavily early on. I actually tried using them (unsuccessfully) to see if I could come up with a "pull-away" mark that could also stand alone as a logo. Figured I'd share them here, since they're kinda funny.

LOLZ. Not all ideas are winners.

3. Refinement, a.k.a. Al...most...There...

From here, sketches are presented and direction is given as to what to focus on as we move toward a final product. Occasionally, a sketch will nail most of the elements on the first try, but usually the next version or versions feature a combination of elements from different sketches. The consensus was that the fist/hand imagery was working, so I made sure to integrate them into both names. Additional feedback was to keep the tone lighter, in the true spirit of the Funpocalypse ™. Here are some of the variations, still hand-drawn/polygonal lasso tool'd in Photoshop, but a little more refined:

In these versions, the letterforms were starting to solidify, and I was trying to find the best layout/placement of the fist and hand. You can also see that "Conflict Dead" is still more referential to classic zombie-movie-title typography, where "World Zombination" is a bit more general mid-century. At this point, the candidates were narrowed down and one version of each was chosen to receive a final clean-up and presentation, which leads us to...

4. Vectorization, a.k.a. friggin_wizardry.ai

Once final "sketch" versions were chosen, it was time to essentially give each a final art pass, at the end of which we'd have logos that were ready to be used in the game and on all related materials. All of this work was done in Adobe Illustrator, which is a vector-based drawing program that produces art which can be scaled to any size without losing quality. This is opposed to a raster-based program like Photoshop, which deals in pixels that are a fixed size and thus can't be enlarged. Working with vectors is advantageous for images like logos, especially when they need to be printed (which requires high-resolution images). It's also my bread-and-butter, so there. The vectorized, one-color versions of each logo:

And finally, a star is born. "World Zombination" was chosen and I entered the last phase of the process, which was creating a color version.

5. Colors, a.k.a. Colours

Basically, this entails choosing a palette from a bunch of variations. In our case, the choice had wider implications, since each faction would be represented throughout the game by that color. Originally, we had chosen green for the Infected, as the first pass reflected:

Not being 100% sold on green as the color for Infected, I did a few more versions. We also realized that we should use a background to thicken up the mark and make sure the text can be read on any background.

I put the top contenders in some context for the final decision to be made:

There you see it, right smack in the middle, the version that ended up as our logo. Added a little texturing and color variation, and we were good to go.

And there was much rejoicing. Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone,

For a while now, we’ve been out there showing World Zombination to as many people as we can through demos, conventions, Twitch, and now our beta. We’ve been included in a bunch of really awesome local events including Boston Indies, Boston Post Mortem, Mass Digi/Made in MA, the MIT Enterprise Forum, and Games Forum. We were featured as part of Unity’s showcase at GDC alongside other awesome indies like Monument Valley and Night in the Woods and had a great time as part of the Indie MEGABOOTH at PAX East. We do all this so we can see what players like about the game, what they don’t like, and what we can improve.

We’ve listened to your feedback and have recently added a bunch of new features to World Zombination. If you’ve been following us, you’ll already know that the game allows you to join the Survivor or Infected faction and battle for control of cities online in a shared world map, as well as play with your friends in guilds, collect characters, and level them up. Here’s what’s new:

Rally Points

We heard a lot of feedback saying that the Survivor gameplay needed to be more interactive. In its tower defense style, you may choose to place most of your units at once, then watch as they fight the oncoming hordes, while reinforcing depleted areas. Now with movable Rally Points, you can adjust your Survivors’ positions within a radius of their starting point on the map. This allows you to place melee fighters in front of ranged fighters, move Snipers around corners to change their line of sight, retreat away from pesky Spitters, and come up with your own useful formations and active strategies.

  The Survivors at the top of the screen can move around the corner to fight or dodge Infected coming down either street!

Make some noise!

Zombie hordes follow their nose and constantly move toward where the tasty brains are. Much of the strategy when playing as the Infected involves managing your horde as it moves into danger and creating multiple hordes to join together when you need increased strength. Now you can delay or redirect your horde by making “noise” on the map to distract them. Tap once to make a little noise or keep tapping the same spot to make a LOT of noise!

  Boom boom boom. 

Search Missions

Search missions add a new type of special event to the world map. Instead of a city battle, it is an opportunity to gain more resources from an abandoned bunker, shipwreck, airplane, or similar point of interest. By sending some of your units to search, they will be taken out of play, but they’ll come back with resources! Some events will require more time and you can send extra units to reap more rewards. This feature will help you advance in the game when you come back to it after putting your device down for a while.

  Chat

We have added world chat and guild chat as great ways to coordinate your play! Simple as that.

We are continuing to work on new features to add into the game during beta and after the worldwide release. Coming up will be more characters, new mission types, power-ups, borrowing units from guild mates, and, yes, something many of you have asked for…PvP play!

There’s really nothing like getting a fresh set of eyes on the game and the feedback is invaluable, so thank you for all that you’ve contributed! If you have suggestions, please let us know in our sprint review stream (every Friday at 4:30 Eastern Time) or send us an email.

As a reminder, we’re currently taking signups for our beta, and if you want to stream World Zombination, please contact me directly at [email protected].

  Kristen Mukai

Within the realm of design-land at a video game company, level design typically comes in two flavors, each with its own set of quirks. There are generally things I love in one type and miss in the other, but neither is inherently better and both offer distinct advantages. What follows is a brief, high-level introduction to both traditional and procedural level design, as well as how we approach it here at Proletariat.

When talking about traditional level design, there’s something I like to call, for lack of a better term, “traditional level design.” Building levels this way gives the designer direct and precise influence over most of the minutiae in the design of a level: obstacles, enemies, objectives, etc. For thematic and mnemonic purposes, this is the “surgeon’s approach” because surgeons use scalpels and those are supposed to be precise. The Surgeon is also a playable character in World Zombination. See what I did there?

Traditional level design has a designer manually manipulating and arranging assets to produce a compelling experience that falls somewhere in that just-right-porridge state (technical term). It’s not too tough and it’s not too easy, but juuuust right.

Beyond traditional level design is what Proletariat leverages in the development of World Zombination: procedural level design. In describing this approach you could put on your fancy pants and call it algorithmically-made level design. Or you could stay in those comfy sweats and call it the “firefighter’s approach.” Much like the axe-wielders in our game, I like to think that procedural level designers do their jobs in much broader strokes. Like swinging an axe. Firefighters swing axes in broad strokes. See what I did there??

Now, as to those quirks mentioned above, each approach to level design has associated strengths and weaknesses. I’ve labeled the former approach traditional because that’s largely how it’s been done with content-driven games: one guy manually laying track that is always more-or-less the same at that point in the game for everyone who’s going to experience it. Mario Brothers games are the quintessential example here: it’s a handcrafted experience and pretty much the same for all players. 

Traditional level design empowers an expert designer to lead the player along a predetermined experience. A good level designer has done his or her job if the player can put on their smarty pants (these can be dressed up or down) and progress forward under the guise that they accomplished it entirely on their own (when the level designer was telling them how to do it the entire time). Another example that jumps to mind here as it applies to narrative is Portal; you can’t help but feel compelled to follow and enjoy the narrative from little more than cake-related vignettes left for discovery at opportune times.

This is where I’d like to make an important aside: a level designer is first and foremost a teacher. This is one of the strengths of traditional level design: since designers have finite control over the minutiae, they can determine how and when a player will be exposed to new mechanics, new enemies, new narrative, and other shiny new things that are…new. They can introduce new concepts in a safe environment where the player is free to experiment, they can teach the concept through ramping iteration, and challenge the concept precisely when and where the player is primed for the challenge and standing on the precipice of mastery. It’s a great feeling when you get there as a player, like hitting that elusive “flow” state, but chances are if you’ve ever felt empowered by your own mastery of a new skill in a game, or had that “A-HA!” moment in the narrative, you have an expert level designer to thank at least in part.

Yes, traditional level design empowers a designer with precision, but this comes at a cost—literally. The common con associated with traditional level design is the expense: time, money, people, you name it. Somebody’s got to sit down and spend the time iterating on an “optimal” experience, and those somebodies gotta get paid.

But with a little ingenuity and a lot of talent, developers can put together a solution for a game like ours, which on one hand requires a ton of compelling content, but on the other hand, is being made on a budget. Where a surgeon uses a scalpel for the smallest details, a firefighter has his axe. Now, I don’t in any way mean to suggest we’re figuratively fireman-axing levels to death in comparison to precisely modifying elements. Rather, in World Zombination we’ve got a pretty rad system that simplifies the process of designing cities and their layout (our version of levels).

Allow me to better explain with an example. Our artists have made a ton of wonderfully post-apocalyptic buildings, many of which are specific to a single city. This is done so each city carries over the identity of its real-life counterpart. Traditional level design in many cases would then call for some combination of level designers and artists to assemble these hundreds of assets into interesting combinations in and around the play space. For a game at the scale of ours—with dozens of cities and hundreds of city blocks—that’s an amount of level design work that could occupy a small army of designers.

Rather than grab my scalpel, I’ll instead reach for my axe. Generally speaking, what are the sweeping strokes a particular city would need to make it recognizable? What’s the min/max for park coverage in San Francisco? How about Detroit’s industrial area? What about New York? How do we represent Central Park? 

By determining generalities about these and a slew of other factors, we can successfully approximate the layout, look, and feel of any city. Better still, we can randomly generate near limitless unique variations of each city, blowing the roof off of replayability. We can tell our tools to pull from certain décor or gameplay sets—what we call ‘encounters’—and calculate offensive and defensive ballpark values along a particular route through the generated city. We can determine the complexity of the streets layout, which buildings appear adjacent to roads, and which enemy types are allowed to appear and in what combinations. At the end of the day, we have a ton of variables to tweak and modify.

It’s a remarkably robust system and incredibly efficient, saving countless man-hours of development around each city. The drawbacks come in when we demand a great deal of precision. It defeats the purpose to use the tool this way, but there’s a very good reason why we do it exactly once. It’s called the first-time user experience, or the FTUE (‘fuh-too-ee’—that is actually a thing), which could be its own post so I’ll summarize briefly: the first time a player plays a game is also the first time they can make a judgment and either become a dedicated player or walk away forever, so you want to get it right. Understandably, we bend over backwards to make this first experience as accessible as possible, considering what’s at risk.

Similarly, many games without procedural level design try to shoehorn in the replayability and content load of this approach—but with limited success. Look at mastery systems (lots of mobile and Facebook games), mirrored levels or playing levels in reverse (Mario Karts and shooters), incentives to play through the game again or on a harder difficulty (“new game plus!”), or modified art in an otherwise unchanged experience (ever beat Super Mario World’s Special World?). Instead, many of these approaches just come across as a desperate plea to keep players playing and arguably aren’t as compelling as new, original content.

Weighing both sides equally, there are parts of me that do miss being the surgeon and giving a level that element of craftsmanship you can’t really achieve otherwise. But procedural level design’s got more heft and staying power and can keep things fresh for far longer. It’s still possible to noodle with individual gameplay encounters and drop them in the pool of assets a generated city can draw from. And an axe is way better in a zombie apocalypse anyway.

Seth sat down with John Lindvay of BigSushi.fm to talk about the inspiration for World Zombination and also completely geek out about WoW.  "After exiting Zynga, Seth and his team sat down and thought long and hard on what kind of games they wanted to make. It’s the common type of soul searching that happens all the time, especially after layoffs. What do we want to do with our new found freedom? Proletariat started to talk about their collective experience in playing WoW. The community, the coordination, the persistence, these are all things that we shared a fondness for. Their hope is with their first hand experience, they could perhaps capture some of that essence.

World Zombination is the plan. It is an interesting mix of deck building and real time strategy. It also requires coordination that’s often found in games like Pandemic or World of Warcraft. We as players choose a loadout of human or zombie squad members and attempt to overrun or protect cities across the globe. Prior to the call Seth was walking me through the early and later levels for both factions. I got a good sense of the depth that was possible. The potential for cooperative and coordinated gameplay but with the leniency of being able to '…get up and check on dinner,' as Seth put it has me excited." 

Kristen and I were totally in Breakin'

Last week, instead of sleeping on a cross-country flight, I wrote the first part of a two-part post about Proletariat's approach to building and managing our community leading up to the launch of our first game, World Zombination. Part 1 was primarily about why we take our unique approach (we're small, the game benefits from your feedback, and we want a strong community already in place when the game launches). This post will broadly cover how we are going about implementing our strategy.

I find it valuable to give an overview of what "community management" means to us. While there are as many definitions of community management as there are community managers, I tend to think of it as having four primary functions: growth, engagement, listening, and development.

Growth is obvious; a community can't exist, let alone prosper, without members, especially ones who are active.

Engagement is fundamental to personalizing the brand and fostering invested community members; it's the creation of relevant content and initiating, participating in, and moderating conversations.

Listening combines both qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis; basically: gathering direct and indirect community feedback and hard metrics from social media and web channels, scrutinizing that data, finding patterns/anomalies and potentially valuable conversations to participate in, and making appropriate action plans to address those things.

Development is the part where we take the actionable things from our listening and...take action; filtering feedback to the appropriate development and customer teams, making adjustments based on competition and industry trends, and changing marketing approaches and channels that are utilized as deemed valuable.

So who gets this done? Our community team is actually a community/marketing/communications team., or put simply, “Team Awesome.” We're a small studio, so Team Awesome consists of only two people who wear/share a number of hats: Kristen, our Communications Manager and me, the Community Director. While we very much work in tandem, we have specific specialties: Kristen mostly deals with the media, while I focus on our players. Additionally, every member of our studio gets involved with community in some way, through writing blog posts about what they do, live streaming their work, answering questions on social media, speaking at events, and demoing World Zombination at conferences.

One of the critical features of our marketing and community plan has been to talk—from very early on—about how we're developing the game and its progress. By creating these discussions well ahead of launch, we have the opportunity to shape the conversation about World Zombination and drive chatter about the game and our studio. I wrote about our goal to be a transparent development team in Part 1 of this post last week, and talking early and often about what we're doing is elemental to that aspect of our culture. What this achieves, from a community standpoint, is the creation of a scenario where players have the chance to experience a game from start to finish—from initial concept, to raw implementation, to finished product—and see everything that goes into that process. We're not just creating a polished documentary after the fact with the key pieces that make us look good to show people what goes on "behind the scenes." We're letting people peak over our shoulder at everything that's being made—even if it's sometimes not so good.

One of the other major pieces of our community management is making friends with the members of our community. We're involved on a multitude of channels: Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, Reddit, Instagram, Google Groups, and a variety of forums and gaming sites. We've befriended a number of regular posters who consistently demonstrate interest in what we're doing, which ultimately creates a more rich, holistic experience for these players, and engenders loyalty and excitement. To be perfectly honest, the feelings are mutual; it’s awesome when we recognize people on our channels and they know us and our personalities based on the shared experiences we’ve already had. In the end, these relationships not only enable us to attract and retain potential players, but it also allows us to more fully advocate for these players and grow the game into something they will love to play.

Our community is broad, ranging from teens, to 30-somethings working in tech, to stay-at-home parents who are avid iPad users, to rabid zombie aficionados. As such, we take a fairly broad approach to finding them, reaching out, and engaging with them. As I mentioned previously, we're on a variety of social networks and forums, which allows us to reach the most potential players possible. It's simply unreasonable to assume that everyone who would be interested in World Zombination would be similar to one another. They like different things and they hang out in different places. Granted, the bulk of them are on the ubiquitous networks (Facebook/Twitter), but we derive tremendous value from participating in more focused venues like Twitch and gaming forums. When it comes down to it, though, despite the different demographic and psychographic profiles that are interested in what we're making, the one thing they all have in common is that they're curious about what we're doing. And we're more than happy to indulge their curiosity with our weekly live streams, galleries of new character art, and discussions everywhere we can make an account.

So what does this approach to community net us? At a very basic level, we have a cumulative community of roughly 3,000 people at this point (not counting people we interact with in forums and other less-trackable venues). Considering again that this is our first game and we don't have a built in audience based on our (nonexistent) history, that number is a pretty solid starting point (although I definitely want to increase that dramatically before launch). Having a base like this helps us to more easily spread the word about the game both from a traditional word-of-mouth standpoint and also through the echo chamber effects of sites like Facebook and Twitter, where people who interact with your content can actively and passively enable their friends/followers to view what you post. In addition to this base community, we also attract around 15,000 viewers per live stream on Twitch, so our audience grows across multiple channels each time we go on air.

We'll be launching a new website and our own forum in the near future, which will add another layer of complexity to what we do. In the meantime, feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions about what we're doing, if you have any tips for how we could be more effective with our community efforts, or if you just want to chat about community and marketing in general! 

Gordon Ryan, Community Director @gordon_ryan