Beta Signup Invitation

The site has been in very limited Beta so far but tonight I'm going to widen it up a bit more.
If anyone would like to check out the site, here's the address:

http://zodlogic.webfactional.com/

You'll be able to look around a little but can't do much unless you create a Beta-tester account. To do that, follow the Beta Testing link at the bottom of the front page. Right now, I'm giving accounts out for free, and all I need is for you to give me an email address to identify yourself. And please use promo code "ZLD" in the signup form.

Once you've created a Beta account, you'll be logged-in, and will have access to more features, including the ability to play the browser-based games. The only game available now is my launch game, Dead By Zombie.

Dead By Zombie is a game of survival and strategy in a world in which a zombie outbreak occurs, just like in the George Romero movies. Except that you're the main hero of the movie that we're all rooting for to succeed. You're free to explore, to help or hurt others, to fend for yourself, hoard, loot, be a hero, or try to take on the task of eliminating the zombie menace once and for all. It starts as a simple game of survival but there are various plots and sub-plots which you will (or should) uncover as you play. You generally have a lot of freedom of action in terms of whether to just play to squish things, play to explore, or play to solve-and-conquer the plot.

Yes, I'll admit that it's current state is still fairly small and crude, and concentrates on the basics. There's a lot more to do. I have much bigger plans for it. Lots more stuff to add. More detail. A larger world. More richness. We'll be improving it over time, incrementally. And if anybody has any ideas or feedback or suggestions for improving or tweaking things then feel free to shoot them to me and it might get incorporated into the game as well. This is a long-term project and a long-term investment so everything should get better over time. That's the vision anyway.

thanks,

Mike Kramlich
ZodLogic Games

Games Worth Making

One of my goals with ZodLogic is to make games that are worth making, and interesting to play, and, hopefully, original. It's hard to make something that's totally original: the designer is always influenced by what he's played in the past, and he's drawing on a body of knowledge about game mechanics and play patterns that will overlap a great deal with what every other game designer has in his/her head too. (Or, rather, they should have in their head. But not all seemingly do.) Plus, sometimes a good way to make an "original" game is to make one that is an intentional hybrid or cross of two or more previous games or game styles.

I don't want to make Yet Another FPS.

Or Yet Another Racing Sim.

I do want to make the kinds of games that I wish more existed of. The types of games that *I* want to play. Especially because at the end of the day, after all of the work I've done to make one it may turn out that I am the only one who likes it. So if I'm going to do a lot of work on something that may never see a monetary reward, I should at least get the reward of gaining a new game that I like to play. Fair enough.

I am also a child of the 80's. And anyone who played computer games in that decade remembers that we had very primitive graphics and computer power back then. So a game had to succeed more on the merits of it's game play, it's ideas, it's mechanics, than on glitz or sheer audio-visual magnificance. I'm not saying all were good. Some sucked, of course. But the game designers active in that era had very primitive tools at their disposal, and were forced to attempt to reproduce the functionality of Federation technology using only the equivalent of stone knives and bear claws. (To adapt Spock's quote from The City on the Edge of Forever.) We loved any cool new graphical feat we saw. But gameplay was improved usually only by breakthroughs in play mechanics, more realism, adding more nuances and tradeoffs to the player's set of choices, or by expanding or enriching the world. So I remember that I used to imagine the kinds of amazing games you could make in the future if you had double the memory, double the CPU speed, double the disk space. Or quadruple. Or a thousand, million times more. Well, folks, I think we've found out. The vast majority of all the extra hardware brawn and capacity has been requisitioned to the mission of delivering prettier-looking graphics, prettier-sounding sounds. And yes, of course, the ability to model physics has gotten better too, and I admit that's a good thing. And being easy on the eyes and ears is not, in itself, a bad thing. What's bad is the sense of an industry that lost it's way somewhere along the line. Lost sight of what makes games be at their best. Instead it's mostly become an exercise in re-implementing the same set of games over and over again, with slightly better graphics and sound, each year. For the most part: I'm not saying that all companies are doing that, and that all games are doing this. But in general, this is what's happening.

What I'd rather see is a return to an ecosystem that's more like it was in the 80's: lots of little solo efforts, the guy in his garage, the mom-and-pop software shops, and developers as eclectic visionaries or rock stars rather than just another hunched-over clone monkey madly typing away for The Corporate Machine.

If only designers and developers today would work only on what they think are Games Worth Making --- and set the bar as high as they can, even if they can't quite totally achieve it -- then I think everybody would be better off: gamers, publishers, the economy, the rest of civilization. 

That's what I'm trying to do.