Developer thorns: 10 years in the quarantine code

A hundred years have passed. But not about that now. Recently, leafing through Stopgame blogs, I saw the story of an indie developer, a former student without starting capital (with a width in a pocket and a crust of bread), who with sincere excitement shared his experiences about creating a game Sophie’s Meat. There, all the torment of the phased torment of all possible juices from the game – from the concept to the gameplay, which I suddenly realized: I have something to tell about what to tell. So, ten years ago I created a browser game Quarantine. With the budget zero rubles. Without a share of jokes. The game has not reached a million installations, but it desperately strives for this. Through the thorns – to the stars.

2015 is the time when the game industry resembled the Wild West Gamdev. A bunch of the same type of artisan games. But I’ll start my story with what served as a starting point, that is, with an idea – the root system of any concept. I always, like many others, wanted to create a game associated with a zombie apocalypse. It was not even discussed. For a person who grew up on Resident and a fan of the science fiction writer Andrei Cruise with his “The era of the dead “ – It would be a game ohmmage.

The “era of the dead” is the popular trilogy of Andrei Cruise in the genre of combat fiction telling about the causes of the crash of civilization

We drew ideas from how Cruso https://bingobongacasino.co.uk/ described the destroyed cities, infected territories and mutated diseases that become not only a physical threat, but also a psychological.

“The infected streets of Moscow became not only a dangerous maze for the survivors, but also the mirror of their own fears, where each step could become the last, and the human soul – more vulnerable than any mutations.”

Andrey Cruz

We liked the idea of a complex ecosystem, where survival depends not only on how you fight with a zombie, but also on how you interact with the outside world. We decided to transfer these elements to the game, focusing on the real consequences of infection and how it changes not only people, but also the environment. IN Quarantine A man was looking for a shelter, cleaning the city of infection, lined up alliances, engaged in trade and many others.

The idea is cool, but you can’t go anywhere on it. And then I remembered my excellent principle in life. The bottom line is that each developer, whether in Gamdev or any other art, is somehow borrined by ideas and concepts from others. This is not only inevitable, but also natural, since all creators develop existing ideas, adding something of their own. As old man George Lucas said: “My whole career was based on borrowing, I always drew inspiration from other films and books.”.

And then came to mind Urban Dead -Browser multiplayer game of 2005, which since its release has become the basis for many games in the genre of survival and zombie apocalypse. IN Urban Dead Players could choose a side of the survivors or zombies, and the mechanics were built on step -by -step actions with a limitation by the number of available moves per day. This system allowed players to focus on strategies and resource management that we wanted to transfer and develop from us.

Urban Dead I used the classic model Turn-BASED GAMEPLAY, where each action (search for objects, attack, treatment, etc.D.) spent the glasses of action (AP – Action Points). The limitations of these glasses a day forced the players to think a few steps forward, which made the game more strategic. We adapted this mechanics by adding more layers of interactions. Instead of simple division into zombies and survivors, we made an extensive system of mutations for zombies. Each zombie has 3 main types of mutations: teeth, arms and stomach. Each of which is divided into 2 more subtypes: alpha and beta. For each subtype 9 ratings of the evolutionary chain. Who will be interested. Calculate 🙂