Matchday of the Dead

Match Day of the Dead is a title I worked on with Andromedus (Ric Hoddinott), Ric had got the contract from Mousebreaker to make a physics based zombie football game in the style of Crush the Castle/ Angry Birds. As I seem to spend my entire life making either zombie or football games a combination of the 2 seemed ideal.

It was a fairly long development period of 2 and a bit months from start to finish, I’d probably underestimated how many assets there were to draw as I figured there were only 6 environments plus 10 or so characters and animation. In reality as the backgrounds were made up of 3 layers with lots of distinct landmark buildings it was a fair bit of work. I was pretty pleased with the overall art style and direction for the game and I did really enjoy doing the zombie versions of famous footballers for the main menu screen. It did also make an interesting change doing a game for hire with a deadline rather than making indie games. Working with Mousebreaker again was also pretty good, I hadn’t done a game for them since Grand Prix Tycoon and luckily things haven’t changed, they were still great to work with.

The actual game plays quite nicely although I do think the levels are a bit too hard for a casual flash game and slightly too frustrating in places, this probably was due to the fact Ric did all the levels himself and we didn’t really do a lot of testing with other people for feedback. It’s also a little bit too slow between goes and getting back into the game play. The play times reflect this a bit too, it averages around 14 minutes per player, which although pretty good doesn’t fair very well against Zombooka 2 and Soccerballs average of 22 mins.