It’s been far too long before the first weapon release, and we thought we’d start off by bringing you a shotgun in this latest version. The shotgun works differently from the pistol, in that you aren’t just clicking targets to shoot, you line up a template over as many zombies as possible and fire. Any zombies caught at close range will be scattered to the winds, while zombies further back will be damaged and pushed backwards.

Press 2 to ready the shotgun and aim the template, click to fire. If you decide you no longer want to fire, press 1. Shotgun is limited in ammo, and shells aren’t easy to find, so conserve ammo!

The only person to carry the shotgun for now will be yourself, and your friends provide backup fire using just pistols.

Other changes:
- Pistols are infinite ammo for now. This may change again if/when melee goes in.
- Pistols fire slower and are less accurate
- Zombies are faster
- Infinite zombie spawning from fog of war is out for now. We will revisit this later, but for now it has a few problems.
- Shooting in general should be more reactive. If you click to shoot now, you’ll get instant feedback rather than waiting for the survivor to pull his weapon out and fire. You still can’t fire as fast as you click, though.
- Survivors turn quicker and are more responsive to move.
- Fog of war radius larger
- Zombie/civ stats back in
- Numerous other balances/tweaks. Please tell me what you think of difficulty for “normal” suburban maps.

Hope you like it!

Regards,
Jay and Saxon

We’ve recently been awarded a couple of grants by South Australian government funding groups, which we are of course pretty stoked about!:

- $50k from the South Australian Film Corporation
- $10k from the South Australian Creative Industries Program

We’re in the final contracting phases on these, and expect to be able to switch into full-time development of Class 3 Outbreak from around June.

This will keep us going for a couple of months, but what then?

We’re using the IndieGoGo crowd funding website to raise money to keep us working full-time for as long as possible. So we are asking for your help to support us in our indie endeavors! If we reach our target of $50k, that will allow us to keep working for several more months, and put us on the path to being profitable and self-sustaining. But any amount would still be a big help – we’ll work for as long as we can afford, or work part-time.

C3O Mockup

IndieGoGo allows us to give away pre-orders for our game, along with perks if you spend a certain amount. All of the perks include free access to all of the paid features, as they are developed. So when we start charging our other players for those, pre-order customers get them for free. When we introduce virtual currency, we’ll also give you some for free. And of course, whatever amount you give us, you’ll receive our undying gratitude, for helping us make Class 3 Outbreak a reality!

Our primary plan to become profitable is to make Class 3 Outbreak “freemium”. It will always be free to play, but players will have the opportunity to purchase additional features if they wish. We’ll have a virtual currency via which you will be able to buy extra items such as weapons, and we will offer exclusive paid features as well.

To kick off our crowd funding efforts, we’ve just released a Royal Wedding map for the game. Saxon quickly coded in Prince William and Kate Middleton and some onlooking crowd members, and I drew up the Westminster Abbey map. Of course, zombies descend and make a mess of their wedding. We think it’s pretty funny, and so hopefully a lot of other people think so too. If it picks up steam and spreads then we will be very happy!

We have outlined a feature set for Class 3 Outbreak on the IndieGoGo website, head on over, check it out and please support our game. Thanks!

The game has also been moved to www.class3outbreak.com, where you’ll see that we have a world map showing the location of outbreaks across the globe. Maps that are published are moderated by myself, and if they’re of high enough quality, they go on the home page as one of the red markers. Even if you don’t get featured, you can still play and share your map.

So now that our most important feature is out the door, we will be moving back to gameplay, so that players can load up their neighborhood map, then begin the task of surviving the outbreak. Unlike any other game, you will walk the streets and be familiar with your own surroundings. Very first on the agenda is controllable units, I believe we will be starting with just one controllable civilian, then we will go from there.

We look forward to seeing what maps you come up with. So far I’ve been deluged with about 60-70 map moderation requests in 2 days, which is a good sign. Tell us what you think, constructive good or bad criticisms are welcome. If you’d like to follow development as we get back into the fun stuff, you can follow me on Twitter @JayWeston or Saxon @SaxonDruce. Then there’s our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/Class3Outbreak and the forums.

Cheers,
Jay

For the first week or so the game will be site locked to class3outbreak.com, but then we will remove that and let it spread to the games portals that support 800×600 games.

From here on, now that much of the ground work has been laid, we look forward to putting in some of the really fun stuff. Feel free to head over to our forums and chat with us, we are always watching!

We look forward to following the response over the coming weeks. Thanks for supporting and following our game!
Jay and Saxon

Our plan with ZOS was always to make it just a bit of a tech preview or teaser for Class 3 Outbreak (the RTS), something that’s just a bit of fun to watch and whet your appetite for the ‘real thing’. Having developed the game for so long, and testing/balancing Class 3 Outbreak for a while, I thought that ZOS would get some “oh, that’s kinda interesting” remarks and we’d get a little bit of traffic from some zombie or google maps sites. Funnily enough, I started to see some traffic coming from Digg via google analytics. I went to their website and found that we had been Dugg 30-40 times, which I thought was pretty good. A moment later I was about to head off to sleep for the night and I thought I’d check the site again, and lo’, we had just reached the front page! To our great astonishment and excitement, we eventually shot up to the third most dugg site of the day, getting over 1700 diggs. Our server went down perhaps a dozen times or more but luckily it never stayed down, it would just restart and keep on trucking. rorr.im also mirrored us which helped a little. We ended up having to put up static html files for all of our pages on class3outbreak.com, and that plus some help from our host finally got traffic moving smoothly. Saxon and I definitely enjoyed watching ZOS climb though, it was quite unreal.

I loved reading all of the comments people were leaving at Digg as well, and I made some comments/replies myself. Its great to interact with fans! We were amazed to see that not only would people post what settings they were using for the outbreak, they would even make up entire stories about the little 20 pixel people running around – extensive stories! It seemed to really capture peoples imagination, and I think running the game on google maps played a part in that, because we are using actual imagery. It’d be nice if the people looked a little more realistic but I’m not sure if I can improve them much with only 20 or so pixels.

We weren’t entirely prepared for the traffic when it hit, so we didn’t have mochi ads running, and our adsense banners weren’t really optimized either. It’s funny that after getting played 250,000 times and dugg 1700 times (I’d call that a huge success) we made around $300 in 2-3 days. As traffic levels out it looks like we might make 5-10k by the end of the year at this rate. That’s a pretty good sign to me that making money from advertising in flash games is incredibly hard. Sure, if we had mochi running from the start, we probably would have made a bit over double in the first 2 days, but that’s still peanuts for something that was so popular. I’d imagine getting the game to spread successfully over portals and get 10’s of millions of plays could start bringing in some half decent money too, but we are in the middle of seeing what we can do in this department.

When you consider the super great article: “You should be making a premium flash game” and games like Fantastic Contraption, we are very keen to try selling our game at some point, ie when there’s enough game there to charge for. If we punched in the Fantastic Contraption sales numbers with our current traffic levels we would be making over $90k a year, not too shabby. And yes, the games are both extremely different, and its impossible to know whether we would reach the same level of success as Colin did, but it is interesting to guesstimate these things…

Since ZOS has gone online we’ve also put up a facebook page that has reached over 1700 fans, and a forum which is already producing a lot of conversation. Feel free to join either!

You might be wondering how C3O is coming along… we hit a slight snag which requires another 2-4 weeks work, so I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a little longer. Ah games and their so called release dates… :)

Thanks for reading!
Jay

MWLL is a total conversion of Crysis, so if you own Crysis, you can download and play MWLL for free. I can’t say I get into FPSs much these days, and so I don’t own it, but as soon as my PC returns, I’ll be getting it just to play the mod. MWLL has such high production values and is so well designed you will swear you are playing the next retail MechWarrior title. I haven’t been so pumped about a game in a very long time. The mix of spectacular Crysis graphics, professional, super high quality artwork, equally good sound and a brilliant mix of Mech’s, tanks, planes and battle armor (little dudes) makes for a highly entertaining and epic experience! It is quite like Battlefield 2, but it has a very real feel to it, like a Flight sim but for Mechs.

On the business side of things, I think this game is a great example of how powerful mods are for extending the life of a game, and even bringing in new customers. I would have never bought Crysis, even for $5, but after seeing a few youtube videos I was sold for $30.

Give it a go, there’s even full servers of people playing in Australia. It’s a little painful to get the game running but its so worth it! MechWarrior: Living Legends.

If any of the team is reading this, I’d just like to say a big congratulations and thanks, I’m a huge MechWarrior fan, and a fairly jaded gamer for the most part, and its great to get this excited about a game again!

Jay

All boring money management stuff aside, after having played multi million dollar, AAA quality titles for years on PC, PS2, XBox 360, etc, I was surprised that this simple game of cards was without a doubt the best game I’d ever played. It really drove home the fact that games don’t need a million features and great graphics to be fun, challenging, addictive and infinitely varied. I had always seen games as getting better due to more features, more detail, bigger budget, more, more, moar!

I started out playing Texas Hold’em with play chips online, and occasionally home games with friends. I quickly realised that poker simply isn’t poker without something real and tangible to risk, bet and bluff with. So after buying a book or two on how to play, and reading a lot online, I started playing $5 buy in games with a bankroll of $100.  While I wouldn’t say I was addicted to gambling in the traditional problem case, I loved the game and played up to 8 hours a day. I treated it like a business and took it very seriously, studying daily, hiring a coach and playing according to strict bankroll management. I rarely bluffed, and other players bluffed constantly, so I quickly moved up the stakes to $100 buy in games. In 6 months I turned $100 into $5,000, which funnily enough is actually not impressive in the online poker world. You’ll see stories of people turning $100 into a million in a year… I managed to reach $10k before leveling out at the $200 level, where I found it increasingly harder and harder to win.

At these stakes with the level of players getting better, I found that my mood was getting affected by the game, even after improving significantly in this area during the year. I didn’t go and attack people or anything, but if I lost $1000 in a day I would be less than happy! I also found that I wasn’t creating anything, so while I still love the game, I felt it was time to move on to something else and so here I am.

The elements I find in the “game design” of poker that are so interesting are the meta game (what has happened in the past with players you regularly play against, and how that affects future action), the hidden cards, bluffing, semi bluffing and your opponents, whom can be old foes or new unknowns. Also the random elements of the game, the psychology, and all of the above and how they mix together to form an infinitely complex and changing game.

I haven’t been online in about a week so I might actually go and have a game… $50 only though, I’m a bit lacking in practice!

If you’d like to see some example hands I’ve posted a couple below that are interesting.

This first one is a hand that is probably around 1 million to 1 of actually occurring, straight flush vs quads: http://www.pokerhand.org/?2957028

The second (and last since I can’t find many that are all that interesting strangely enough)… is a semi standard ‘race’ where my opponent makes some questionable moves and wins: http://www.pokerhand.org/?1729856

I find it particularly interesting because its as far from a normal flash game as you can get. It has the system requirements of some PC games and plays in a huge 1280X800 screen (minimum), whereas most flash games play in a tiny 600×400 window. I’d actually have to say that this is the most hardcore flash game I’ve seen, as in, it’s not created just to shoot some zombies for 5 minutes and then never come back. This is a full fledged, feature rich, realistic and eye popping game that you’d be happy with if you had just paid $100 for it at EB.

You could almost call it a MMOG (ok not quite), as there are tournaments run all the time where 1000’s of players compete to make the cut, qualify and win prizes. In fact WGT just ran a tournament alongside the US Open at Bethpage Black, they called it “the Virtual US Open Championship” and the winner gets a pass to next years tournament. The virtual US Open was played out over the same time period as the actual event, and it certainly adds to the interest level of the game and the event itself, as people who have played the online course a lot can watch the pros do it on TV and compare themselves. I can’t think of anything else like it, and its a great idea. Over 180,000 people also though it was a great idea and signed up to compete on the course. Only 200 people made the cut, and the winner, NASAGolfer, took the prize and received 2 tickets to the 2010 US Open at Pebble Beach.

Where all these people actually found out about the game is a mystery, and while I found it over 6 months ago, I can’t remember where either! You can even try a few searches on google for online golf and flash golf, but you’ll never find it! Odd!

WGT Golf uses a great little business model where the game itself is free, but has a micro transaction system if you’d like to buy new clubs. The Bethpage black course almost required some better clubs (you couldn’t even reach some fairways with basic clubs) but when they only cost $5-10 for a set, it’s good value.

So if you’re tired of the same shallow flash games that are released over and over again, and you like golf, I highly recommend giving this one a go. If nothing else the scenery is speccy!

Give it a go now… WGT Golf

I’m about to attempt a kind of review of this game, but its going to be difficult, since I’m not sure if my fond memories cloud my judgment! So I load up the game and am greeted by the quirky animated logo…

Deuteros

This is so cool, and I can’t believe no other games (?) ever did it. It’s one of the many small details that makes the game take on its own unique feel and atmosphere.

In fact the detail throughout the entire game, from the interface to the sound all come together with such skill that you almost forget that you are playing through gameplay sequences that would be considered as boring as making paint dry, if it were attempted today. Ok, maybe not that bad, since I did play it for a good 3 hour stretch (and found it hard to stop). I’m not sure exactly what made me want to, but here is what the gameplay consists of for most of the game:

- Train dudes, press “advance time”
- Research part, advance time
- Build part, advance time
- Launch ship, advance time, deploy part 1 of 8 (no advance time needed!!)
- Shuffle personnel around in a very drawn out, annoying process.
- Build new base on new planet and repeat above.

Yep, the advance time button is hideously annoying! There are some frustrating and boring tasks, and there’s very little action. But this game, for something made in caveman times, has some serious immersion and atmosphere. It really feels like you’re part of a post-apocalyptic space faring people. The visuals ooze style and flair, the ship designs are awesome and the interface screens (particularly earth’s flaming surface) are works of art. The midi sounds are brilliant, each screen has its own sound – beeps for research, oppressive industrial sounds for mining, and super cool mechanical ship loading sounds. The boring task of launching a ship into orbit is almost made fun with the noise and gloomy Giger-esque ship interior (complete with rear view screen for some reason).

Deuteros

I think another factor that really adds to the immersion is the interface. You’ll rarely ever see any text interface which is just a functional “button” floating in space attached to a “game interface”. In Deuteros the main interface is a mess of wires and screens, eyeballs and globes. You don’t just press “launch ship”, you’re inside the ships cockpit, and the launch button is on the actual console. So you get the feeling that you are moving around in the game environment, rather than commanding things from a distance, unattached to anything.

So far I’ve progressed to meeting the Methanoids, and have built up a stockpile of resources to wage war on them, however during their first few attacks I’ve been beaten back pretty badly (man this is a hard game!). I swear they knew I was stockpiling, damn cheat computer! I think I’ll need to adjust my strategy next time…

Well I hope you enjoyed my hastily written, unplanned and so called review of one of my favorite Amiga games, Deuteros. It’s a great trip down memory lane, and if you somehow missed it I highly recommend checking it out!

Now… can I implement these design features in our game… humm…