Just to get it out of the way up front, “on rock and roll”. The following is a kind of post-mortem on the development of The Last Stand: Union City and what I’ve learned along the way. Hopefully some of you who’ve played the game or followed the development will find it marginally interesting. If you haven’t played it yet, go now!
Starting Out – The Documentation Days
Way back in the ancient times of 2009 I’d just wrapped up Warfare 1944. The game was running well and was a relatively short development cycle of about 4-5 months. I was feeling more confident in my programming skills and had a backlog of ideas of where to take The Last Stand in it’s inevitable second sequel. So I dove in, alone, to what would be the longest 18 months of my life.
I knew that I wanted to make a bigger Last Stand game, something with more of EVERYTHING. Weapons, locations, characters, zombies, survivors. It was basically a bigger is better scenario as far as I could see. Around that time I’d been playing entirely too much Fallout 3, as most of you have astutely noted from the references in the game, but I’d also been playing Torchlight and Titan Quest a fair bit as well. With three great Action RPG’s swimming around in my head, I announced to Armor Games that I wanted to build my “Zombie RPG”.
I had the “world” part of my RPG already and was amazed at how much people had projected their own stories onto the previous Last Stand games. Forum members were writing choose your own adventure style stories, people were making videos, writing their own stories. It was in people’s heads, it wasn’t something I’d intended. I just wanted to make a zombie shooter, but it seemed like fans wanted a story from me.
So in November 2009, I started writing documentation. Read the very short original design document for an idea of where my head was at. I find documentation invaluable, not because I re-read it and check that I’m sticking to plan very often, but just to force me to get my ideas out and actually think them through. If you have to write down how to solve a problem that you think you know the answer to, you’re inevitably going to be forced to explain your workings. Aspiring game devs, if you’ve got a game idea, write it up. It will do nothing but improve your game design skills.
Around that time I also started prototyping the character creator, the skills and attributes was something that I didn’t have 100% figured out until the end of the project so I’m glad I started on them this early. Although some of the skills ended up being dropped or changed, around 80% of them were laid out here and stayed intact.
Decisions, Decisions
Early on I played with the idea of making the game top down and even made a prototype (which I subsequently lost) to try it out. It was interesting and allowed for a more movement related strategy to the game. It opened up a whole lot of issues to do with path finding for enemies though that I wasn’t capable of tackling at the time. The other major problem with it was that it took away a lot of the “cool” factor of The Last Stand series; the top down view made it incredibly hard to do nice looking / easy to read animations. The profile view allowed for weapon and zombie animations that were more impactful. Firing the M82 side on just looks cool as the recoil makes it’s barrel fly up into the air, shells spew out and fall to the ground, zombie death animations just look better, all thanks to the 2D perspective.
In the end, I decided to stick with a 2D profile view. The choice then was to give it depth or not. There was definite precedence to, with the previous two games having it. Of course, it created a slew of issues as well. In terms of programming it needed some more complex path finding and collision code. Each scene would have needed a collision map, which would need it’s own separate editor. On top of that, it meant that I’d need actual 3D artwork for any objects that would sit in the mid-ground. Characters would need to be from a slight angle as well. It all just piled up to being too hard when I was foreseeing needing to multiply the process out 100 times.
Ultimately, I ended up with the 2D side view you see above. The world was made up of three planes with a background, mid-ground and foreground. This allowed me to quite simply create backgrounds and foreground objects from flat photographs (more on that in Part II). Also in that image is the early block out of the interface, an important step in figuring out where things belong. For most of those elements, I looked at the likes of Gears of War and a collection of first person shooters over the last 5 years or so.
In Part II - I’ll talk about the world building process, the beginning of the combat systems and getting the community involved.
