The game
Story background:A team of 4 Special Operations personnel descend into an underground lab to retrieve critical data after a failed experiment turned the facility into a hostile zone.
They'll face dozens of monsters, security systems and dangers while navigating tangled corridors of the complex, all to uncover what happened that the experiment has gone awry.
About the game:ZombieLab (name WIP) is a top-down rogue-like dungeon-crawler.
Game sessions are meant to be fairly short (5-30 minutes), each time player will be going through randomly-generated levels with their randomly-generated team of 4, managing items, killing and escaping from zombies and unlocking story parts as you progress.
Development status
The game is currently in development. Current version is a playable alpha - from starting the game, through skills, items, levels, enemies, fighting and tutorial hints - all that you see in-game is currently working.
The prototype version is available at:
http://ethnar.com/Zombielab/stable/Note: I recommend testing the game with mobile emulator enabled in Google Chrome, using Galaxy S4 mode to give a better impression of how the game will work for mobile. The game should also work in Firefox and IE11+, although it wasn't thoroughly tested. Playing on a mobile browser is not recommended as scrolling issues may prevent you from progressing in the game.I also have a mobile build .apk of the game that's working very well on the primary testing device (my Samsung Galaxy S4), but since I didn't publish the game in Play store the only way to check it out would be to install it as an unauthorized app on your device and I wouldn't be asking you to do it.
The code base is available here:
https://github.com/ethnar/ZombieLab/Target platform
The game will be released as a native mobile application (most likely built using cordova or similar platform), targeting Android devices primarily, possibly including iOS/Amazon/Windows Phone release at a later date.
Monetization plan
The game will be released as a free-to-play, no micro-transactions, no adverts in-game.
Current source of the game is available on github under GPL license, although I won't be forcing GPL on assets as long as they have compatible license.
At some point after the release I might consider donations or other income methods related to the game, in which case I'd be sharing the profits with the artist at an agreeable percentage.
About the job
I'm looking for a pixel artist who'd create all the graphical assets for the game. This includes tiles, character faces (ideally as modules - so we can "generate" faces), items, enemies, UI, animations & menu art.
An important aspect for the game will be weapon variety, so you can expect quite a handful of weapons among the items.
I expect animation will be kept to a fair minimum - things like explosion, fire, blood spatter, etc. There's no plan to include "walking" characters in the game, but instead rely on icons/symbols.
When picturing the game I imagined it as lighthearted, or leaning toward a comic - thinking Mercenary Kings or Spelunky. Avoiding dark shades, the UI and lab itself to use lighter colours, giving that "sterile" look to the facility itself.
I'm not strictly attached to the current design and I'd be more than willing to discuss alternative UI, perspective, style, game atmosphere etc. My dream is to deliver a fun, highly playable and re-playable game and as long as these new ideas work well with that then it's definitely worth considering.
About me & contact
My name's Arek Bisaga, living in Kraków, Poland, working full-time as a developer and progressing with this project in my spare time. I've been working on the project for over a month now.
When not coding (which is fairly rare lately
) I'm a video game fan and an airsoft enthusiast.
I'll be checking out this thread, or you can reach me through email (shown in forum profile) or PM.
As a side note - if you've played the game for a bit and have some feedback you'd like to share - please don't hesitate to contact me!
Thanks for reading!
Arek "Ethnar" Bisaga
