Metal Slug: Zombie Road, Survival shooter with zombies Options

[MoogPHP]

Metal Slug: Zombie Road is the result of a 5-week learning project with GM. This is my first GM game. And you can call it a Metal Slug fan game since it is set using Metal Slug sprite sets.

Zombie Road is an arena-shooter that with keyboard+mouse controls in the vain of NaaC and in honor of Smash TV and others.

The goal is to survive as long as you can by shooting various types of zombies while moving up and down the road, which consists of 4 screens (levels). Difficulty increases and if you manage to save the POW human you'll get big bonus points.

My goal behind this game was to learn GM and see if I had the ability to make a game. The game is rather feature-less in terms of online play, although if I have time to figure it out I would like to have an online highscore table.

Please stop by the Zombie Road web page and download the install EXE and start blasting!

And I thank everyone now that posts feedback about my game. It is not perfect and probably won't get tweaked anymore (unless there is a demand!), but I think it's fun little addicting game that is a good time killer.

And thanks to everyone here at The Community for posting your ideas, code, and tricks -- Zombie Road couldn't have been made with this resource.

Some screen shots

[Nobody]

Pretty good. Excellent use of ripped sprites. The gameplay was okm but got repetive quite fast. For a first game this is great. Make more stuff!

[MoogPHP]

Thanks! I've gotten a lot of mail feedback and I know it uses ripped sprites, but I was looking to make a (fun) playable game at this point, not a 100% original. Now that I understand GM better I hope to make some more original games.

Thanks for the feedback. Glad you enjoyed it, even if only briefly.

[acevampire]

im guessing you certainly have a history of other programming languages?

[chris_kurz3]

PRDY COO LAWL!! MAYBE MUSIC????????

[MoogPHP]

Yes, I have ample experience with programming, mostly web development with PHP. This is the first "real" game I've ever made though. My real world programming experience is mostly in applications...but I am a life-long gamer so once I found that GM had a decent language under the hood it was a perfect match!
~~~

In the beginning I planned to have some music but after I got the interface designed and the "packaging" done for the splash screens, etc., I was just too excited to try to find good music that fit the game.

Now that it's done and out I am going back in the game to fix some minor bugs and hopefully add on-line highscores. If I can find some music for it I will certainly add that too (but I still want to keep the game relatively small).
~~~

Thanks for the feedback!

[MoogPHP]

Just a quick mention that I recently put up version 1.1 of Zombie Road. I know this is a quick release after v1.0, but I made some easy and needed updates.

Included:
- Better room switching
- Better bonus item dropping (more random)
- Download is an actual installer! (Thanks to Inno Setup!!!)

Download Metal Slug: Zombie Road v1.1


Still in the works:
- Online highscores (still trying to figure this out)
- Background music (trying to find some that doesn't slow the game down)

[MoogPHP]

I know, I know...I already released an update once today! Well, I managed to figure out online highscores quicker than I thought, so a even newer version with online score support -- so version 1.2

I've had some friends test this version with online submissions and none of them have had any issues. If you could download and play through at least one game just to submit the high score I would appreciate it. And if you have any problems, just post a reply here --- or if you don't have any problems, feel free to post as well.

Still no background music though, sorry....

Thanks, all!

(Just click the signature banner)

This post has been edited by MoogPHP: Apr 23 2007, 03:42 AM

[Surrendered Game...]

Amazing! This is the best GM game I have ever played! This should go into the staffs choice! And where/how did you get those sprites?

[[Cool*Beat]]

Wow nice game i enjoy it very much ~~~

[MoogPHP]

Thanks for playing! I'm glad you had fun with it.

Almost all of the sprites came from Metal Slug Database .

Some came as animated GIFs, which made importing easy. Others I found as a "sheet" of sprites that I had to put together myself to create an animation. That wasn't too complicated, just a little Photoshop work and importing into GM.

[Surrendered Game...]

thx for sharing where you got the graphics

[MoogPHP]

** UPDATE v1.4 **

Just posted v1.4 of Zombie Road.

-- Fixes include a "wandering zombie" bug that sometimes happened on the last board. A zombie would get stuck outside the range of the room and the player wouldn't be able to shoot them. This would make the game endless unless you closed the game, which would not submit any high score.

-- Added some easy access web links to the ZR site from the game, plus some web site promos on some graphics.

-- Some misc. code clean-up and minor fixes otherwise.

If you're a fan be sure to download the update.
And if you haven't played yet - what are you waiting for!

---
Aside on background music that someone mentioned. When I first added BGM to the game the music was very sluggish and dragged. I thought this was a game limit but turned out it was my PC limitations (not beefy enough). I played ZR on a better computer and the BGM worked as I had hoped, so next updates/version may include a BGM on/off option.
---

Thanks for playing!

[blue123]

Hmm, this was quite good. Nice job. One thing is you can avoid the rates of fire on the guns by rapidly clicking the left mouse button!

[MoogPHP]

I need some constructive criticism and suggestions for future games (ie, another possible Zombie Road game).

I found some discussions of my game out and around and one thing people comment on is the gameplay. To me, "gameplay" is control of your player and managing them.

Of those of you that have played Zombie Road, what might you suggest to improve the gameplay?

I'm fond of and like the mouse+keyboard controls, so that will not change. The controls are fairly simple and straight forward, so I'm not exactly sure off hand how to improve them.

Unless, of course, my definition of "gameplay" is a something entirely different.
Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance for any replies on this topic.