A zombie game I was working on, drawing inspiration from Grand Theft Auto, Minecraft and Diablo.

In 2011 I started working on this idea I had for a zombie game.

Once I got to the point the main building blocks of the game were in place (such as animation, health, scoring, weapons, enemies, walls, collisions and so on) I got fed up with it and didn't touch it again.

It’s amazing just how much the home / indie game development world has grown since then. Nowadays we see titles coming out that surpass what the “triple A”s were putting out as full retail when I was a kid!

Engines and frameworks like Unity and Unreal Engine are absolutely mind blowing. I didn’t know about these all those years ago and, I think you will agree, it kinda shows. Ok, it really shows. A lot!

The video below shows the progress I had made in a basic game engine I found for Java, the language I was working in at the time. Although I was proud of the progress I had made then (and still am to an extent) what took me weeks to do back then could be done in mere hours now, and it could be done a thousand times better.

If / when I pick this project up again I’ll be starting over.

However, speaking of things being done better, I need to highlight that my dream zombie game has pretty much already been made, just not by me! Games like Project Zomboid (which I mention towards the end of the video!) and 7 Days to Die capture a lot of what I was really looking for in the zombie survival genre.

With such great games already out there I have other games in mind now that I’d like to see (a revival of the side scrolling space shooters like R-Type would be great should any developers out there happen to be reading!) so although I’m not quite ready to let go of this dream yet, I think my focus may go else where first.

If you want to know more about this project you can email me using the details in the About page.