Now that ZDay:Tales of the Undead is finally out the door, the team has started to turn its attention back to ZDay:Survivor. This is, of course a much larger, more ambitious project, but everything that was developed for Tales of the Undead will be incorporated into Survivor. In particular, the Meridian, an open source POI database that will be powering the geolocation component of Survivor. It's quite tragic that there isn't a free, open database of commercial locations in the vein of Wikipedia, and one of our goals with Meridian is to fix that. The ZDay universe of games is being reborn on cutting edge technology and while we wish we could launch everything today, we know that we must put in the work to make sure the games are as amazing as the player base is. Thank you for your patience. I promise that you will not be disappointed.

Happy Friday everyone! We have some exciting news to announce. After a lot of user surveys and internal testing, we have decided to rebrand the Simulator app as ZDay:Tales of the Undead! We felt this name better captures the spirit of the game and reduces confusion with our upcoming other titles in the ZDay universe. (More on those soon!) We have just released new iOS and Android builds with the new branding, but also with some exciting new features: Achievements - track your progress as you try to 100% each of the stories! Improved NPC logic during combat! Your party members no longer run headlong into zombie hordes! Games can now be paused and resumed at a later time! The introduction of Vinnie the Merchant Improved cosmetics in some of the buttons and screen layouts A myriad list of bug fixes! We are incredibly excited about this release - it's pretty big and addresses many of the issues that we've heard about from the player base. Along with the rebranding, this is a significant milestone. iOS can be downloaded here and Android can be downloaded here! Stay tuned for more improvements and more importantly new stories and content, including a brand new challenge from Ed Anderson, himself!

I’m a little delayed in writing this, but I’m super excited that ZDay:Simulator is available for both iOS and Android! iOS can be downloaded here and Android can be downloaded here!

Woohoo!!!

Happy Friday everyone! If you’ve been waiting for the Android version of ZDay:Simulator, your wait is over! Get it now on the Google Play Store!

play.google.com/store/app…

Just a quick update to let everyone know that the launch was supposed to happen today, but it has been held up by Apple. We submitted the final binaries over a week ago and unfortunately they have objected to a few things. We are trying to work with them to resolve the issues. Hopefully that will happen this week.

We obviously are very disappointed by this, but are also excited that we are so close to the launch. Stay tuned for more details!

I am thrilled to announce that we have reached feature complete on the iOS version of ZDay: Simulator! There are so many amazing things about this relaunch that I am excited about. The amount of content that we are launching on day 1 is amazing. And if you thought you knew what this game was about, you will be amazed at how much deeper everything is in this relaunch. Yes, the amazing story telling and gameplay that everyone loves are still intact, but everything about the game has been magnified and amplified, and when you combine it with the new storylines, it becomes something special. If you’ve been following our progress here, then you know how much time and effort we have been putting into the content creation pipeline for the ZDay universe. This is a huge milestone for us. (That being said, Android is still in process, but won’t be too far behind.) We still have some i’s to dot and t’s to cross in terms of preparation for the App Stores, but we are confident in announcing the launch date, so stay tuned for more launch info!

We hit another major milestone this week with Evergreen: we are now successfully exporting full, self contained stories which will allow ingesting them into ZDay! To demonstrate this, we have exported and uploaded a non-ZDay story to itch.io that you can play for free! You can check it out and play it here on itch.io. With this now implemented, we are dangerously close to having the content authoring pipeline completely wrapped up which means we can start creating new stories in parallel to the core game development that we still have to do. It's honestly a pretty exciting milestone to be able to see the power and flexibility of the tool in another platform. It's also confirmation that the hard work of laying a strong foundation has been worth it. Stay tuned for more soon!

This week there was a question on Discord that I think is worth posting the answer to on this blog.

The questions was:

I’d like to know how Evergreen relates to the new Survivor Z. Could one import an Evergreen creation (probably their own) to SZ and vice versa? With the scripting/notes tool could one add items/loot? And one more thing, will these events be in the actual survivor Z? Or will they be vetted/only put in if winning a challenge or the like?

This is a great question, and while I’ve been explaining different aspects of the platform, it’s clearly time to explicitly connect the dots. So, Evergreen is the name of the content management engine at the heart of ZDay: Survivor. It manages all of the “story” related pieces and is the starting point for all content authoring in the game. However, stories in Survivor are more than just stories: there are items to be found, and fights to be fought, etc. To that end, all of the stories written by the development/in-house content teams use a version of Evergreen that is in our development environment, and it has additional capabilities to “decorate” stories with all of the other game specific things you expect in Survivor. However, it’s still the same exact engine that you find at evergreen.ink

In the past, (and hopefully in the future) Survivor has had professional writers create stories for the game, but the authoring tool has always been cumbersome for people outside of the core team. One of the purposes of releasing Evergreen is to allow third party authors an easy way to do what they do best without having to deal with game specific components (like adding combat.)

With that being said, we also hope that by opening up the tool, people that love the game will also be inspired to write content for Survivor. It isn’t implemented yet, but we plan to have a mechanism to allow Evergreen users to submit content to be considered for inclusion in the Survivor universe. Once submitted, the development team will review the content and do the work of “decorating” the submitted story with appropriate combat and item discovery actions to round out the game play. Evergreen includes a notes field on each card that allows story authors to leave information about the card for the developers as well (“put a fight with runners here” or “user should find a flashlight” etc.)

So that is what we are hoping the process looks like. We know that the tool is easy to use, and we are excited to open it up soon to the broader community because we know that many in the player community are incredibly creative. It’s going to be amazing!

Today, I'd like to discuss what I think is one of the more incredible features of our new content authoring tool: scripting. If you've tried out Evergreen already, you'll know that out of the box it's a powerful, but intuitive and easy to use content authoring tool for choice based content, like ZDay:Survivor. However, what may not have been evident is that underneath the content creation interface is a powerful scripting engine that runs in-game and gives authors amazing control over the outcomes that players will see as a result of the choices they make in-game. The scripting engine allows authors to modify the text, images, and even choices that a player will see. The scripting itself is JavaScript based, in order to make it easily accessible to anyone interested in trying their hand at authoring. We feel that by opening this up, we will allow potential writers to really stretch and explore the limits of interactive fiction. Internally, it will allow our staff content creators to push the envelope without having to modify the core game engine at all. The controls and tools for scripting are live now on the site, and if you're curious about what the interface looks like, we have a brief help/intro guide here.

It's been a while since I've been able to give an update on where we're at with the game. Despite my lack of posting, we've made some incredible progress, albeit mostly with the content authoring system. I know that I've posted about this before, but I cannot understate how important the content tools are to the long term success of the game. ZDay is ultimately a persistent story driven game and in order to remain fun, and relevant, content needs to continue to be generated at a dynamic pace. Having the right tools and workflow for that is critical. And on that front, we've continued to move forward with new releases and new features in the Evergreen.ink platform. As of today, we have opened up an entire new set of advanced authoring features. The entire Evergreen authoring platform is powered by the Sapling scripting engine and that power is now accessible to creators. I'm incredibly proud of what the team has accomplished and I'm excited to see what is created. However, that isn't the only thing that we've made progress on. We've also been forging ahead with our IAP model. Initially, we debated moving to an in-game currency model that so many other games have moved to. While there are some advantages to those models, we ultimately decided against it. ZDay is set in a post-apocalyptic universe, and trying to force a capitalist view onto a post-capitalist world just felt weird and gimmicky. In the end, we decided that we will be utilizing a very similar model to what the original game had. All of that being said, I wanted to take a moment to clarify one thing that I do get a lot of questions about: ZDay Survivor is not the same game as the original. It is reusing many of the gameplay concepts and most of the content, but it is a fundamentally different system and different platform. Any accounts on the old system will not be transferred over to the new system, including IAP, stats, etc. However, I do want to reiterate that we are planning on rewarding player loyalty so there will be some very significant things done to show appreciation to the player community. We will have more details on those down the road. We are very excited about the progress being made, and we are getting closer and closer to our goal. Hopefully these updates are interesting and informative to folks, and as always, feel free to chat with us on Discord about any ideas or questions you might have.

This week, I returned to work after a short vacation (hence the lack of updates the last couple weeks.) I’ve been catching up with the development team and they have been making some great progress in my absence. Of particular note, the content authoring tool has really made some great progress, and it’s far enough along that I can publicly talk about it.

One of our primary goals with this project is to make sure that the content authoring tool is easy to use, yet powerful enough to create great stories. As we progressed through development, we realized that what we were creating was a powerful enough tool to stand on its own as well as to power the core of the game. We internally debated what this meant, and in the end we hatched a crazy idea to make the story telling part of our engine publicly accessible!

So with that as the backstory, I’d like to introduce Evergreen.ink to the world! I’ll talk more about this as we progress, but we are opening Evergreen up to select access. If you’d like to get access to Evergreen to try it out, you can join the Discord here: https://discord.gg/stHbVGtq and let me know you’d like an invitation.

I am super excited to finally let people know more about Evergreen and I’ll definitely be talking more about it over the weeks to come. I can’t wait to see what the community creates!

Happy Friday and happy Cinco de Mayo as well! I have a few things to announce this week that we're pretty excited about. First of all, if you're reading this, you may have discovered that the blog has moved to https://blog.zdaysurvivor.com . That's because we are opening up our early signup list accessible on the main landing page here: https://zdaysurvivor.com. If you want to be notified of release information and earn early rewards, make sure to get your email on the list! The other thing that we are super excited to announce is that we will be, for the first time, opening up part of our content creation pipeline to public access. What this means is that if you love the game and have ideas that you'd like to see in the world, you can craft your own stories and submit them for inclusion in the ZDay universe! This week, we launched a private alpha build and we will be transitioning that into a private beta, shortly. More details will be released as we get closer to the beta.

One of the questions I frequently get asked is how the platform that we are building relates to the old game, which is still operational. The shortest, simplest explanation is that the new game shares some of the same mechanics, a lot of the content, but otherwise is a completely different platform. From a practical perspective, this means that accounts from the old game are not going to transfer over. Players will start the game fresh, from the prelude and continue on from there. Things that you did or owned or claimed in the old game will not be present in the new game. You will have to find/discover/earn everything fresh and new. The adventure will be a fresh start for everyone! However, that isn't to say that this is the same game as before. There are a number of things that will be improved and changed going forward. I've alluded to some of them previously, but a few examples of this are item management and combat. I'm sure that there will be some things that players have gotten used to (like unlimited carry inventory) that might surprise them and even frustrate them at times in the new system. We are confident though, that the changes we are making will make the overall experience much more fun and accessible to everyone. The final thing I'd like to address is why this is. The reason for this is pretty straight forward: the old platform is barely working any more. The code base is literally crumbling and both the server and client have some very foundational flaws both in terms of technology but also in terms of logic and performance. This isn't to denegrate the original game in any way. The fact that a game that was released over a decade ago is still functional is fairly amazing, especially considering there haven't been updates to it in years. Hopefully this helps clear up some of the questions about what to expect. Of course we aren't going to give away all the secrets just yet, but we are very excited about getting it out into the world. More news soon!

Another week has come and gone, and more progress on the game has been made. This week we did a lot of work on the content creation tools which is an area that often gets overlooked. The stories in the game of Survivor are probably my favorite aspect of the platform. It's important that when we relaunch the platform, there is an easy way for new content to be continually introduced. Many people don't know this, but the old content authoring tool was a native Mac application that was sort of cobbled together and really took quite a bit of work to use and understand. The new tools that we are creating are going to be web based and more intentional in terms of UX, so the team can make sure to keep new stories and content coming. Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books were a staple of my life growing up, and I always found the interactive fiction aspect of them to be intriguing. As a reader/player, you have an element of choice over the story, and yet the author still has narrative control over where the story goes. The same is true of Survivor but when you combine that interactive fiction aspect with what is essentially a persistent open world, the blend feels almost magical. I realize this is a bit of self-hyperbole, but I really do love this platform because I feel like it's special. It's also why I'm so dedicated to relaunching it and trying to bring as many folks along with me for the ride. Anyway, that's it for this week. I'm hoping next week we can finally unveil something that we're pretty excited about. Stay tuned!

This week was one of those weeks where work definitely got done, but nothing flashy was accomplished. Some of the more mundane tasks we worked on were: UX improvements, implementing some new animations, and basic IT infrastructure tasks. We will definitely have more of these types of weeks until we launch. Probably the only thing worth expanding on here is the work we are doing around infrastructure. The previous system was fairly monolithic in terms of database and server, and the interfaces were brittle. In the new system, we have implemented a smooth dev/QA/staging/production pipeline and are using modern standards to ensure the platform is secure. At the end of the day, the integrity of the system is the most important piece to ensuring a fair, consistent, fun experience for everyone. And while it might feel like simple blocking and tackling, it's still critical to get right. I'm hoping next week we'll be able to share one of the more exciting new pieces we've been working on, but that's about it for this week's update.

One of the purposes of this weekly diary is to try to keep people abreast of our progress on the game and the platform, and to that end, I like to try to talk about whatever aspect we worked on in a given week. But that being said, I can't tell you about what we worked on this week because it's not quite ready to be revealed. But I can tell you that once we do reveal it, it's going to shock and delight a lot of people. I've said all along that the ideas we have for the Survivor world are much larger than the original game's scope and this week we took a pretty huge step towards that. To say that I'm excited about it, is an understatement. So let's talk about something different. Let's talk about inventory and inventory management. For anyone that's been following our progress, last week I posted an updated image of the main screen and if you inspected it, you can see that the familiar backpack button still exists, but there are 3 other buttons as well: your party, your vehicle and your companion/pet. Our hope is that by segmenting the traditional "inventory" into these different groupings, everything will be easier to organize and manage. We are hoping to carry this through to the strongholds as well. We also want to elevate and give more purpose to vehicles and pets/companions. I'll write more about that in a future post, but in the Survivor world, your car and your dog are far more important than the random stranger that you found in the wasteland. We are very excited to get this into players' hands and we get closer every day!

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I'm very excited to announce that we reached one of our early development milestones this week: we have fully implemented everything required to play through the Prelude story line! While this might seem fairly minor to some, it's proof to us that the foundation we are building for the entire game is solid and that as we add new features and areas, we know that we aren't making compromises from a technical perspective. It also encompasses a lot more functionality than you might imagine. The story engine for Survivor is very robust in terms of content because it is both dynamic and has a long memory of choices that players make. Combined with our brand new content editor, and content management system, we are very excited about hitting this milestone. Stay tuned for more!

For the update this week, I'd like to discuss music. For a game like Survivor that relies almost entirely on story telling, music can be critical to setting the tone for the player; it can add an additional narrative that moves the player along, and in this new version, we'd like to elevate how the audio is used throughout the game. The original game only had 4 audio tracks: one during combat, one during the stories, one before you logged into the game, and one when you died. We've heard repeatedly from players though, that they really enjoyed these tracks, which is wonderful. But quite honestly, this doesn't constitute a large amount of content. We feel like we can do a lot more. For the reboot, we have been actively sourcing and planning how we want the audio to work in the game. We have plans to offer a significantly larger amount of variety of tracks, and we hope that players will enjoy the new music and choose to keep the audio turned on while they play. If the audio is compelling, it will simply make the game that much more enjoyable. Most modern games feature "soundtracks" for the game, and that's how we are approaching it as well. As we get closer to launch, we might even start doing some sneak previews of what will be on the playlist. That being said, we will probably be working on the audio features all the way up until launch, so some things will definitely be in flux. Regardless, though, we are excited for you to see and hear what we've been working on!

If you were to ask any previous player of the game what the worst or most confusing aspect of Survivor Z was, they would more than likely respond with something about the combat system. And honestly, they'd be right. The old combat system was slowly evolved over time and most of the changes made the interface more confusing. If you dropped a new player into the old combat system, they would have no idea why some zombies appeared large, while others appeared small. They wouldn't have any idea what the "initiative bar" did. More than likely they would just start tapping on things and eventually the fight would be over. And they wouldn't have fun. We'd like to change that. We have been prototyping a number of different combat systems and feel like we have settled on one that we think is intuitive, understandable and most importantly, fun. To that end, we have decided to take a page out of table top gaming; the new combat system will feature a hexagonal battle system and expanded fighting options and choices. While we are still figuring some aspects of it out, we have implemented enough that we are confident that not only is this a huge improvement, but it's also quite enjoyable. And in certain scenarios, it can be downright scary. It now feels a lot more real when waves of zombie hordes are starting to surround you! That being said, we understand we need to be careful with the system. A lot of a player's success in the game obviously is centered around their choices and how they choose to equip their character. Every single item in the game already has a set of fairly balanced and fine-tuned statistics, and the last thing we want to do is to ruin that. Our goal with these changes is not only to improve the existing game play aspects, but we want to expand them as well. In this new world, you will encounter types of enemies that you've never seen before. You will encounter combat scenarios where movement is just as important as fighting. You will find that certain weapons operate differently in different scenarios. There will be so much to explore and uncover, and we are incredibly excited about what all of this means. We are very excited for players to become immersed in this. More details to come!

When the original Survivor Z launched, there were only a couple of different screen sizes and as such the interface was designed around what we would now consider to be very small screens. As we are looking at what this new platform can be, we are trying to re-imagine and improve wherever we can, and one of those areas is around screen real estate. One of the big things that we've been working on this week is trying to imagine an interface that can still provide the richness and simplicity of the original while also taking advantage of the ability to display more information and controls to the user. One of the primary ways we are looking is centered around dynamic resizing of options, buttons and text. If we can create an intelligent renderer, players can see more of the text without obscuring imagery. An intelligent renderer leaves more room for bigger buttons and more controls. In short, smarter layouts are better. Of course this doesn't mean that we don't still have to be smart about what we are building. One of the big paradigms that we are trying to embrace is bottom oriented controls. Because phones are larger now, people's fingers and thumbs tend to be located at the very bottom of the device. Trying to drive user input to the lower portion of the screen makes life simpler and easier for people because they don't have to reach for commonly used buttons. The original version of the game did actually embrace a version of this, but as time went on, the buttons migrated further up towards the center of the screen. In short, we want to reclaim the bottom of the phone for most of these inputs as well as create an intelligent layout renderer. We feel this will simply make the game more enjoyable for everyone.

One thing about writing a weekly developer blog is that there is an inherent sense of wanting to express that progress is being made. However, one of the drawbacks is that sometimes things get worked on that don't necessarily feel like progress. This was one of those weeks.

Most of this week has been spent fixing, refining, tweaking and testing existing functionality. In particular, we have been spending a lot of time dealing with the inventory screens. While this might seem like it should be a straightforward feature to implement, it's important to note that the new platform doesn't treat all items identically like in the previous incarnation. For example, there are separate screens for NPCs versus vehicles versus equipment etc. We also are elevating the purpose and usage of pets. While you might have many pets available to you, only one of them can truly be your companion. So, it's important that your ability to see and manage your companion be a different experience and interaction from what armor you're wearing, for example.

And yet all of these different items that you can collect and use do need to work together in a coherent way. So, that's what a lot of this week has been spent doing. And we aren't done, either; it's very likely that the update next week might sound very similar to this one. But that's ok. We are committed to making this platform fun, intuitive and impactful. We want players to be able to make choices that will impact their experience, but as a result, that means we will be spending a lot of time on things that might seem mundane. Like inventory management.

One area in the new system that we plan to expand upon in the reboot is the concept of "achievements". In the original version, It was always fun whenever the animation would pop up to reward the user, but despite a large and sprawling world, the number of possible achievements remained static.

With the redesign, we want to not only expand on the existing achievement library, but also make it easily extensible from a development perspective as well as potentially add in a reward system for achievements. We are still batting around ideas and concepts for the reward system, but having a set of icons simply buried in the player profile seems inadequate given how difficult we hope some of them will be.

Another aspect related to achievements that we are debating is a system of goal "sets" with possible profile or user adornment rewards. For players that play regularly and often, we want to reward them in a way that they can show their status whenever interacting with other players once we open up the PVP aspects. While we haven't settled precisely on the how's and what's of this system, we think it will be a fun extension of the achievements. Hopefully more on this as we flesh out the details!

One area that has caused a lot of issues in the past is the account creation system. And while this isn't necessarily one of the more glamorous parts of the platform, we felt that it was critical to create a simple, email based account system with all the normal support that you would expect for resetting your password, password recovery, etc. (This means that we have removed all Facebook and other non "standard" ways to login.)
We don't want to make this process difficult so our initial plan is that you will be able to create an account with a unique user name and a unique email address and quickly get into the game without having to do any additional verification steps.

That being said, one thing that we absolutely want to be able to do is to reward the people who have continued to play the game by detecting when an email from the old game is used in the new game. To do that safely, we need to make sure that players can "verify" their email addresses because we wouldn't want someone to steal someone else's email address.

So, the current plan (still subject to change) is that you will be able to quickly create an email based account and during account creation, you will be given an option to "verify" that email address. At that point, if you prove to be the owner of that address, we will be able to confer whatever reward/rewards that should come along with that account. (Of course, if you don't opt to verify during account creation, you can still do so at a later point in the interface.)

So, that's the plan. We are trying to walk the tightrope of new and old, and hopefully we will be able to pull it off.

This past week we tried to wrap up a lot of work from the previous week around data and security, which is critical to the success of this going forward. We also have been working on doing some UI/UX testing around the map screen. While we don't want to change the heart and soul of the game, we do think there are a number of ways/places that things can be improved, both from the look of the game as well as with the usability. We also want to elevate some of the less utilized gameplay pieces as well. The screen here, while not final, hopefully gives a hint of the direction that we're taking things. Also, this is a screenshot from the Android build!

The past few weeks we have been focusing on upgrading the data model and the client/server interaction. One of the primary complaints about the original game was that the app's data could be "spoofed" and players could gain unfair advantages. The new system design prevents that and closes the holes that were exposed in the previous game. One of the results of this, unfortunately is that existing player's inventories and histories won't be able to be maintained. That being said, we are looking at ways of rewarding long time players for their loyalty, so stay tuned for more information on that!