Lorcan here, doing a write up on Zombie Gaggle, the 6th Gamejam that I've done in the last 3 months.

This was my first game that had a 48 hour deadline. luckily, unlike previous Jams, GMTKjam allowed use of pre-made assets, so the character models and animations in my game were taken from other projects - (the characters were taken from the Ghostly Repo game), - but I still did my best to plan around having a limited time for art assests.

Prep and Starting

Original, Pixelation, Filter Colour + Pixelation

Since I knew there wasn’t time for visual polish in this jam I decided I wanted to go for a retro look that could cover up the use of basic models. First day of the Jam I went to the asset store and found a free pixelation effect. After that I tried drastically saturating and tinting the colours so everything was an old digital blue and green, to emulate the look of old horror pixel games I'd seen online.

Good Visuals Or Too Pixely?

We were in too minds on the visuals.  Jo was concerned that there wasn't enough contrast between the colours, and that  what was happening wouldn't be clear.  I was convinced that it would be possible to tell what was going on, and the green and blue look gave the visuals extra punch, that was worth a little bit of obfuscation. We decided to gamble and release it as is, and see the response.  So far it seems to have gone down well enough, (though please tell me if you think otherwise).

Brainstorming

This was squeezed into an hour or two before coming up with the zombie idea. The ‘only one’ theme immediately conjured images of battle royale and musical chair games. This made me think of a single player game, where you control a large crowd of characters, and have to use that crowd to get at least one person through a series of puzzles before the environment whittles your numbers down too much to be able to continue.

Liking that idea I thought of how I could make it feasible in 48 hours and swapped the musical chairs for zombies, and a  game where each level is just one puzzle, so all I had to do was come up with different setups that I could make quickly, on the theme of the player having to work out how to get past a crowd of zombies, using distraction etc  The aim was to use strategies that were simple to work with and easy on puzzle/action design.

Levels were kept to one puzzle per level.  Since I wasn't sure I could come up with satisfying level design at first,  I wanted the levels to be short and easy to work with, so I could build up complexity once I found the fun part of my game. As for designing the levels I did what I do for all my games nowadays, player is at the beginning of the level, they must make it to the other side, what's the simplest obstacles that can get in their way with our mechanics?

Level 1 - A couple of easy to walk around zombies to introduce the idea.

Level 3 - A large crowd of zombies and a wall that lets the player split up their group to make diversions with one half to let the others pass.

Ok Level 3 was interesting and hitting what I liked in the game, but a bit of a jump so I need a level 2 to bridge the gap.

Level 2 - A moderate size horde in an open space, giving the player space to learn how to lead the zombies around without huge risk of death.

That was the first set of levels that got me feeling good about the core mechanic. So while I still had time I wanted to show how the idea could be explained by adding a new mechanic.

A few I would love to do in the future would be things like being able to push objects if you have a crowd over a certain size, placing a survivor by certain walls so they can be used as a ladder to help others move higher and so on. But for the jam I went with the easiest to implement.Level 4 - A car that can be interacted with and used to draw the zombies to one spot, letting the crowd avoid them easier and clear the path.

Finally level 5. Up to this point the player could rush through to the end, so I added a side objective to this last level. Before you can reach the end, you must find a way to open the gate first. The answer is quite easy, just press the only other intractable item than the car, but this shows how the game could begin to expand its complexity to a more action + puzzle game directions in the future.

Since levels were made to be quick death and reset I could afford to be a bit deadly, if this was a longer Jam I could have built up the learning curve a bit more, but I wanted to try and lead the player to figure things out from the puzzle alone if I could.

Day 2 - Working with the Visuals

With the roughs of all levels planned out and playable the main part of day 2 was cleaning up the art. Giving the zombies unique animations to help differentiate them and also changing how the colours worked so I could have a wider range.

Because of using filters in day one, I couldn’t have red highlights, I could only use blues and greens. Which meant I had no way to imply interactivity with red highlights for the player. So I could use the full range of colours I edited the models textures, you can see a before and after above.

Release And Marketing

With the visual cleaned up and menus in place I added sound and put the game onto the store after putting together some nice images for the itch.io page. Over the last week I have been doing what I can to get the game seen by people in the Jam and streams and have to say it has been quite a lesson on marketing. Getting our games out there is something which we will be looking into as we go on to release our first priced PC game later this month(fingers crossed).

As for this game, I am happy with the results I've seen. Due to it's simple nature, and the easy level construction and expansion we are thinking we will make a full release of Zombie Gaggle once we finish the release version of Vampire Thief. Thank you to all in the Jam who have commented and given feedback to our game and I hope you stick around to see what we do next!