More Stores for Your Zombie Shopping Pleasure

03.19.2013

I've been making more Zombie Mall progress. After another update to the rules I went back and worked on the map that people will be able to download and print in order to play the game. I've got a big 30"x40" map. but it's not very practical to print. I could break it up into 8½"x11" sheets which would make it more printer friendly, but I find those a royal pain to put together. Plus, everyone would be stuck with the layout that I made, and I've always envisioned the map to be modular so that each game could be different.

When I put the big map together, I made 6"x6" stores thinking that would be nice and modular. I forgot about the mall sidewalks. And corners. If you don't have 6"x6" walkways (I was planning on 3" wide) the modularity part of that plan kind of falls apart. I went back to the drawing board and eventually decided to stick to a 6"x6" modular tile, but I would include the walkway on the tile. With this, a 2" wide walkway would be the norm for matching up tiles. A little more narrow than what I originally thought, but it kind of helps with the "Oh no zombies are after me/How will I ever get away?" feeling. Using the original 6"x6" stores as templates, I went back and made 6"x5" stores (for the average store) and 5"x5" stores (for stores on the corner, with a walkway on 2 sides). 38 tiles later, I consider myself 99% finished.

I need to go back and make stores that will fit on the outside corners. I think these may only have 1 space of walkway, so the entrance may look a little funky. I need to play around with the tiles I've made and see how everything fits together.

With the above I've made the walls on the map bigger. Thick black lines are hard to miss, so I added in a concrete texture in the core of the wall, along with some shadow effects. The wall cuts into the available space more, but I'm hoping most people see it as a slight perspective shift and having some things hidden that are up against the wall won't seem weird.

I've still got a list of things to do to finish up the downloadable version of the game. Granted, there's still more play-testing to go (I just keep putting round 3 off, trying to get as many fixes as I think are needed in first). None of my tweaks affect play, they just make the initial rules comprehension a little easier. At least I think it'll be easier.

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Card Back Evolution

03.12.2013

I've had a couple of productive days of boardgame development. I've updated the written rules that I had been putting off for 2 weeks 3 weeks at least a month. After that I went about revamping the playing cards a little bit more. Thanks to a couple of different graphics programs and their various filters and brushes, I finally got pretty close to the look I originally envisioned.

Above is the original card back, with a nice zombie horde of arms I stole from somewhere on the internet which more than 1 person has noticed. The font for "Zombie Mall" I actually purchased! For all of $8, plus it came bundled with 3 other fonts (1 of which will make its debut in the next card). Although I couldn't use this picture for the back over the long term, I liked the look of it. I decided I would try to design something similar, yet original. Inspired by sounds good.

Thanks to a mix of Poser and Paint Shop Pro, the above was my first completely original pass at the card back. I used Poser to create a generic, green hued figure and just played around with arm poses. I took a lot (19?) screen shots of those arm poses and took them into Paint Shop Pro, where I fiddled with the hue, brightness, and added some weird cross between dirty smudges and blood. At this point the cards had been split into "Loot" and "Objective", so I color coded the card backs to match. Instead of everything having a black background, "Loot" would sport a red background while "Objective" would have green. This may have been cheating, but I just applied a colorize filter to the black background to get the red and green that I wanted. In addition, the "Loot" font is one of the extra 3 fonts that came with the Zombie Mall font. I'm getting my $8 worth!

Lastly (for now) is a more comic book inspired layout thanks to a graphics app I got that probably does all kinds of things, but it has a 1-click button that applies a filter to give the image a nice comic book color palette. Part of the filter is just boosting the vibrance of the colors, but I still like the look.

Now I've uploaded and sent off another order to Hong Kong to get this last batch of cards printed - I like printed cards. They make me feel like I'm making a game with some substance. I know it's all in my head, but I don't care.

This last version is also what I'm using to put together the PDFs for the downloadable Print-N-Play version of the game. The cards will be laid out so that the back and front fold over at the top (thus forming the front and back). A lot of people just stick the folded paper/card into normal card sleeves and play with them without worrying about the hassle of printing on proper cardstock and trying to glue everything together perfectly.

My goal is to have a complete Print-N-Play version together by the end of the weekend. I have to put the card & token PDFs together, and that's mostly fiddling with a bunch of fine-tuning the placement of already made graphics on the page. Lots of graphics. There are 162 cards, and I can fit 3 cards (front and back) per page. I've also got 5 or 6 pages of tokens, but those aren't optimized as far as their layout yet so that number will probably go down.

54 pages of cards to layout and convert into PDFs. That might take longer than I think it does.

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Zombie Mall - Updating Forward

12.16.2012

After 3 days of editing, re-reading, and tweaking I've managed to finish what's turned into 3 parts of the rules for Zombie Mall. Quick Start Rules (4 pages), Basic Rules (22 pages) of the details of how to play, and a Walkthru (38 pages) of graphics heavy play examples.

Now to play test this puppy some more.

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Zombie Mall - Updating Backwards

12.13.2012

While going through and making my Zombie Mall walkthrough example yesterday, something hit me as not being right. Losing combat wasn't working out like I thought it was supposed to - losing Health was happening too often. But I was acting out combat as I had written it.

As I slept on it, I decided I wrote it wrong. Today, in the back of my head, I was trying to figure out how to say it correctly. After the majority of the day (in the back of my head) I figured out how to say it.

Now I've got to pseudo-play through it a couple of times and see if it says what I think it says. Regardless, I've got to go back and re-make some screenshots. And tweak the quickstart rules. And the detailed rules.

I've also got to re-brand some tokens so when a player dies it doesn't get confused with when they lose combat and get bitten.

Lots of going backward today. I don't like it. It makes for, theoretically/hopefully, a better product, but it makes me feel like I'm spinning some wheels right now.

This is what happens when you step away for a couple of days and come back with fresh eyes. Stupid, stupid fresh eyes.

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