Zombie Pirate Robot Attack

Playcorp | Tactical Shooter | Released 2011

Battle the evil hordes of Zombies, Pirates and Robots hell bent on revenge after your countless assaults on their strongholds. You decapitated them in Zombie Headmash 5. You stole their loot in Pirate Torment Gold Fever 6. You terminated them in Electroshock 3. For years you've been defeating the forces of evil and robbing them of their ill gotten gains. Now they've joined forces and it's payback.

If you've spent countless hours playing tower defense games and now you're looking for the something new and exhilarating to keep you engaged, you’ve found it!! ZPRattack is a brand new genre of game. It borrows elements from some of your favorite iPad/iPhone tower defense games, tactics games or real time puzzlers and puts it together as an entirely new experience. The game also appeals to RTS or Real Time Strategy gamers who enjoy more of the tactical elements of that genre.

Battle wave upon wave of walking dead, throat cutting pirates and robots hell bent on destruction. Use the different weapons at your disposal. Each weapon has unique capabilities and strategies that must be mastered.. ZPR attack features hours of gameplay, challenging tactical decision-making, exhilarating fun and great replay value. Each level introduces new weapons and enemies and ramps up in difficulty over 3 waves or assaults. The player is constantly challenged with new tactics and stronger and more complex enemies. There's always something new to learn and master.

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ZPR Attack Dev Blog - Unity Experience

Sep 16 2011

Introduction

Playcorp is a new game development studio based in Melbourne Australia, founded by Chris Mosely a veteran behind a number of triple A titles. Pip Robbins is the lead engineer working with Executive Producer and Designer Chris Mosely to bring Zombie Pirate Robot Attack to life.

Unity 3D was chosen as our development platform for numerous reasons. Unity is an incredibly powerful engine and editor platform with top end integrated middleware such as PhysX, Mono, FMOD, Beast. On top of the power, Unity has designed the development process to be simple, streamline and amazingly flexible. It make game development fast and straight ward providing all the necessary tools to allow us to focus on creating the game rather than the tool. Unity has taken good game development features and combined them into a single product. Examples include component based scripting, editor scripting, drag and drop asset import, in editor life preview, debugging and profiling and many other powerful features.

Unity Experience - The good
Community and support
Unity has fantastic support behind it, the developers of unity are working hard with constant updates and unity is continually growing, during the development time ZPR Attack unity released 3 large updates 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 each bringing a lot of new features and improvements, each making a noticeable difference. Updating unity is painless and fast, never once did we encounter any issues with our development build, everything just worked.

The real gem behind Unity is the community, its large, eager and helpful. The community is a big part of Unity, continually working together and supporting unity, making it better and better. Having worked with a lot of other engines, none of them have ever come close to the having the community support that comes with Unity. The community is there supporting each other, if you need any third party add-ons, help to resolve issues or general motivation then its all readily available for you.

Add-Ons
Add-ons are third-party solutions built for unity; due to the large community behind Unity there are plenty of developers focusing on creating tools and features built purely for Unity. These tools allow the users to focus on game development rather then tool development and can help speed up development. There is add-on for everything and thats another large part of what makes Unity amazing. It saves in production cost and uncountable development hours, its just all done for us.

During the development of ZPR attack we mostly used two add-ons. EzGui and Sprite Manager 2, these add-ons by AnB Soft were of great help and saved us a lot of time. The add-ons helped fix Unity's lacking 2D support. It enabled us to quickly atlas sprites and 2D GUI textures, it did all the work, just by providing a list of 2D textures it can compact them into atlas and find most optimal spacing and position allowing altasing with out constant size cells. Both add-on also allow for easy sprite animations and greatly reduce total draw calls.

Other useful add-ons are iTween, Prime31 assortment of add-ons. These add-ons are constantly improved by their developers and like unity the support is great, help is always quickly given.

Unity provides a reasonably complete package; anything not included can easily be filled with add-ons.

Rapid iterations
ZPR attack greatly benefited from fast iterations; due to Unity's streamline approach iterations could be done quickly. ZPR Attack went through a lot of design and feature changes during the development process. Unity made it easy to quickly throw things in and throw things out, this enabled us to constantly develop, test, review and iterate. This method helped us play test the game from early stages, constantly reviewing parts of the game, improving them each time or removing things that did not work out. It enabled us to prototype a lot of different feature and work out what best worked for ZPR Attack. Component scripting enabled us to drop scripts on and off objects easily, we could make multiple solutions for testing, drop the one we wanted to test on, if it didn't work we could just drag it off again or replace it with one of the other scripts. Unity's streamlined approach to asset import is also another great time saving feature, any asset could just be drag and dropped into the scene ready to go, modification of assets could be done both in the editor or in the original modelling package, updating the old version without any hassles. Removing assets was just as easy as selecting the asset and deleting it.

Multiple platform support
Unity is able to build on PC, Mac, iOS, Android, Web and consoles. As ZPR attack was primary focused for development on iPad, Unity provided easy building and publishing to iOS devices. This was a painless process and enabled us to easily distribute and test on iOS. Testing on iOS could be done using the unity remote to stream from editor to iPad, although in ZPR attack we did most of the testing in the editor via live preview and later double checked by simply creating a iPad build. It’s fast and easy. One of the things that impressed me the most was how easy it was to change from an iPad build to a PC and Mac, it was quick and simple and rarely did we have any issues. During development this really helped as it meant we could build Mac or Windows builds and provide them to the people who needed a copy but did not own a iPad. This enabled our contract sound development studio, artist, QA testers and reviewers to play the game, get a good feel of the game and provide better results and to see their work implemented. I know for sure that if we were not able to provide the windows build to our sound guys, the quality of sound effects would not be at the high standard we were able to get them too.

Editor
The editor has built in profiling, debugging and live preview, all features that make life so much easier. As ZPR attack was designed with a lot of units on screen at once, built in profiling really helped to check out how the game was performing, how many tris were on screen, how much draw calls, what was taking up all the memory, which scripts were hammering the CPU etc. All the information was there provided, ready to help optimise the game and close the leaks. Live preview is the ability to play and test the game in the editor, which is awesome! This enabled us to check scripts, variables, objects all in real time, allowing for easy and fast testing and debugging.