Swivel on It!

If I hadn't made this for the "Out of Control" theme, I probably would have just gone with a click-to-shoot control scheme. I did try and make sitting and waiting a less viable strategy in general, though: that's why backing into a wall screws up your aim so badly.

I think the game runs most smoothly if you tend to stay in the centre of the city. I noticed that relying purely on pathfinding caused an enormous amount of lag once you got far away from a few zombies (I assume because they have to plot a route through the entire area to get to you) so my solution was to have them try to make a beeline initially (with the buildings laid out so as not to funnel them into too many dead ends along the way) and only start looking for a valid path once they're within a couple of thousand pixels of the player. This setup means you can't escape a horde by letting it run face-first into a wall while chasing you, but unfortunately I think it may also cause performance problems if you do manage to get a large cluster of zombies stuck somewhere. Getting close enough that they all start looking for you at once is likely to send the framerate through the floor.

I did, yeah! The jam submission page asked "Did you create all the audio during the event?" so I picked "No" (because the gunfire and bullet sounds are public domain, and I made the death sounds for an earlier project), but the voices were all recorded specifically for this in the last couple of hours.

Haha! Have a lot of people gone that route? I've definitely seen at least one more on Twitter.

The game could definitely do with some further tweaks - I started running out of time before I even had any audio in, which was a problem as it's currently the only clue where you need to go at the end. I'll probably stick in an arrow as well if I come back to this: the landing site is randomised (within the wide green space) so currently there's an element of trial and error even if you've won once already.

I'm fairly certain the lag will be down to the zombies' pathfinding. I tried to get it down to manageable levels, but there was a trade-off between having enough zombies tracking down the player to keep things interesting and keeping the game running smoothly. If you (or anybody else reading this) knows a way of optimising that, particularly in GDevelop 5 specifically, I'd be glad of the advice. I've tried simply running them straight towards the player's position, but even with relatively few dead ends to get caught in they tend to get stuck on the far side of buildings.

Thanks for playing! I've been trying to come up with games that'll work elegantly on mobile and condensing all the controls down to just one style of input makes a massive difference. I'm hoping to put out an Android version of this but it seems it'll have to wait until they allow uploads again after the jam.