Zombie Survival Game – Beta

Following on from my zombie game pitch, I’m now in the ideation and development phase of my yet–untitled game, but have settled on a style and method, including the creation of an initial prototype board and a two-round playtest with my family.

In my pitch I devised three seperate ‘game types’ in which I could deliver the experience, and I decided on the most developed of those ideas as I figured it could deliver the best game experience for the narrative I’ve chosen.

Below is the first prototype game board – note the locations each marked in a different colour and the grid denoting the moving spaces. The yellow location at the bottom middle of the picture is the ‘Home Base’, where the team of survivors begins, and the top middle location marked in red known as the ‘Deadlands’ in where the zombie team begins. I don’t own grid paper so I spent roughly an hour sticky-taping six pieces of A4 paper together and ruling margins to create the movable spaces before denoting locations on the board which I’ll get into below.

The board, cards and story seen for prototype one

The idea of the game is a group of ‘survivors’ draws one Safe Zone card – seen as the yellow cards on the picture above – to be kept secret from the opposing team of ‘zombies’. This is the goal destination, and is any of the seven coloured rectangles on the top side of the board as seen in the image above. This was done so to give the ‘zombie’ team a better chance of catching the survivors. which they wouldn’t be able to do if the safe zone was on the survivors half. The black rectangle in the middle of the board is not an accessible location, and instead acts as a ‘wall’ players must navigate around to pass.

The other deck of cards, marked ‘supply drop’, are awarded to ‘survivors’ when they enter a building (that isn’t the safe zone) and may provide help against the ‘zombie’ team, such as a zombie bait card which a survivor plays on any zombie to force them to miss a turn.

The complete initial list of rules and story for prototype one is listed below.

I have completed one playtest of the game with my family, in which we completed two rounds so I could play as both a ‘survivor’ and ‘zombie’. I recorded a list of notes for feedback which I can incorporate into the game in its next prototype. One thing I didn’t create yet was player tokens – so I initially grabbed three each of two different coloured ‘markers’ from the game Trouble to mark each team, before realising we’d all need different colours to identify each individual player and not just each individual team. Thus for the actual playthrough I got six different colour player tokens from the game Cluedo – to mark each individual player, and we made note of who was on what team as we went on. For a final prototype, I’d like to have some markers to indicate zombies and survivors and also individual players.

Below are some pictures of the playtest in action and yes, there was some beer involved on my part. It was good to get input from a number of different age groups with my parents in their forties, my girlfriend and I both 21, my brother a teenager and my sister 11. Developing a target audience hasn’t been something I’ve put too much thought into this far but gaining feedback from all of those above was helpful in that.

Something to note from my playtest was while during the first playthrough a couple of players questioned why each survivor should have the same ‘safe zone’, when the survivors essentially play as individuals (any survivor that makes it to the safe zone wins, any caught by zombies lose), on the second playthrough there was some positive feedback to how it added an element of strategy to the game as the survivors can work together to try all reach the safe zone, throwing the zombies off the scent of just which location the safe zone IS until one final all-in push, or a survivor can choose to play for themself, going balls-to-the-wall and showing no care as to whether their fellow survivors make it or not.

Also in the days following the playtest, I had my sister, girlfriend and step-dad all ask if we were playing again that night as they enjoyed the game. Flattery, I know, but the reception seemed to get better as days went on and they thought back on the game we had played. Its worth noting on the feedback list below, I was asked to remove the bottom point at the end of the second game as they like the strategy of survivors playing as individuals, as mentioned above. However I have kept all the feedback to this point to read over and take into consideration before further ideation of the game.

Feedback notes from the first playtest

Now, I’ve been calling my game ‘prototype one’ thus far as I don’t yet have a name set in concrete. I have been tossing around names with survival, survivors and zombies involved for obvious reasons. A name and player tokens are both big questions still left to be answered before my final delivery of the project.