Backyard Zombies is now out on the Android

After thee months of hard work up at UCF, I'm finally done with my first game for mobile devices. Backyard Zombies can be bought for $0.99 on the Android Market or you can get the free Backyard Zombie LITE version, which includes only the first character and the first level. Over the course of the past 3 months there have been ups and downs with development, I guess I'll point out the most enjoyable parts and then the many instances when I wanted to toss my laptop off a cliff into a molten lava ocean of destruction.

Alright there were four main stages of development. Design, Assemble, Finalize Assets, and then Optimization.

Design is the fun part. It's when concept art clutters my desk and walls, catchy tunes start ringing in my head in the shower, and my focus in class is only to play other successful mobile games to learn what they did right and what I could do to improve these aspects. After a couple weeks I had a solid idea on what Backyard Zombies would be, concerning the game play and art.

The Assemble phase was fun, too. The Unity3D Engine makes it easy to throw a few objects together and slap on some scripts to prototype a game. Because let's face it, a game can look beautiful, sound beautiful, but if it's core game play isn't fun no one is going to want to keep playing. Towards the end of this phase I found myself playing Backyard Zombies more than working on it, so I think that was a good sign (Right?). My roommates and friends that came over played the early PC version and enjoyed it. One of the most glorious moments of my life was when I saw Backyard Zombies running on my Android Galaxy S. That's when my bathroom breaks became very long as I would sit and play as I pooped.

After I had designed how everything would work and made it work in the Assemble phase, it was time to finalize the assets. What I mean is up to this point all of my graphics and sounds were just place holders, so I needed to sit down and make some good appealing art as well as a theme song. These all came in time as I spent countless hours on photoshop and flash using that amazing brush tool (the one that, no matter how bad you are at drawing, makes the curves of your lines beautiful and cartoony). This was a tough phase because I could spend two hours on a character or the title artwork just to throw it away at the end of the day. It was a bit frustrating at some points, but in the end it was all worth it when i would play the game a few times and marvel at the little things I did to make the art look nice.

Optimization. What if you spent 3 months making the greatest chocolate cake in the world only to realize that before you ate it you were allergic to chocolate? That is how I felt during the optimization phase of Backyard Zombies. I had to go back and redo a lot of the scripts and cut a few assets to reduce lag. LAG. OH MY GOD LAG. The most aggravating thing in the world... There were times when I just wanted to redo the entire project(my friends talked me out of doing it) because there was so much to fix. I can't believe the Unity3D tutorials were teaching me the wrong way to do things all along! Instantiate and Destroy are very expensive functions, so I had to make a GameObject Pool which was A LOT of coding. But, once again, it was all worth it in the end. I can happily play my game without any lag.

Developing games is a very tough process. It requires creativity, patience, and most of all perseverance. Anyone can come up with a great idea, but it is very few who actually stay up day and night to work and make those ideas come true. Right now I'm in the design phase for my new project, which I'll regularly be posting about on here.
Till next time,
-Sean