In Survive the Living the Undead are the least of your worries. In this zombie tactics survival game, players must fend off zombies, encounter other survivors, protect their party, and survive by any means necessary.
Team Name: Team 9 - DSG
Game Name: Survive the Living
In the development for this game we ran into a lot of problems. We knew that the idea worked. There are plenty of strategy RPG games out there's and ours would be similar to something like Fire Emblem game play wise, but wouldn't have all it's mechanics and some new ones. On top of that it's a zombie game which we knew there was an audience for. Despite this a lot of our initial playtesters didn't think the game was fun. Our first playtest had players express that the game lacked any form of challenge, tension, and that our map felt empty. We were surprised to hear that one of the playtesters from this group didn't think there was any challenge or tension because his team had only a few health points left and almost died. This was the most helpful feedback we got, because unfortuneatly the other suggestions were more features to add to the game such as player interaction, status effects, and other things that were very much out of the scope of our game. We couldn't think about adding new features until the base game itself was fun.
Our solution was to give players turns instead of going at all at once, giving zombies a much larger hearing radius, giving players equipment that could reduce how much noise they make, and filling the map with a lot more zombies. We also made the game so players wouldn't want to fight every zombie they saw and most players did end up running away zombies at some point.
Another issue we had was that we kept going way over 15 minutes during playtests. When Dom and I playtested on our own time we didn't consider that we didn't really need a DM and understood all the rules. During playtests players had to read the rules, often would ask questions at some point to clarify an action, and had to wait on us to do anything that required the Game Master such events and zombie movement/attacks. We also had a couple playtesters say that the game felt sluggish and slow. To solve this we upped the player movement from 5 to 7 and zombie movement from 3 to 5. This not only helped the game move faster, but slightly increased tension as players worried a bit more about zombies reaching them despite still moving two spaces faster. It looked more dramatic seeing a zombie move 5 spaces on a board towards them then moving only 3 spaces which barely seemed threatening.
We also had issues implementing guns into the game. It seemed unrealistic for zombies not to hear a gunshot from across the map, but it was too easy to have in the beginning. We solved this by not have players start with a gun and instead made it a reward if players explored the police station which was a bit away from their target destination. We also found that players seemed to have more fun when they didn't have a gun at the start.
If we were to continue with this game there were some ideas we would have liked to see. These ideas include hunger, scouting buildings, different types of objectives (ex. defeat all zombies, gather resources, survive rounds), and status effects. We had a lot of ideas we wanted to implement, but sadly didn't have enough time for. I don't really know what I would have changed about our development process. I think something that would have really helped would have been doing research on strategy turn-based RPGs. Our biggest struggle at the beginning was trying to figure out how to place everything on our map.
