Thanks guys! We're on more than 70 websites now, and being played in 125 countries. Pretty sweeeet. I'm excited and mentally focused right now. If you want to support the game, rating it on
Kongregate would bless us greatly. I posted
a proper discussion thread in "More Games" but I think I should have put it in "Creative Projects" instead, as I suspect it'll get buried in the games forum.
I think I want to pick up and continue Zombie Survival Squad when I get a break from the current flurry of activity; I've been watching the TV show "Walking Dead" and the connection between LCS's Massive Conservative Response and attracting a horde with gunshots is so obvious that I'm surprised it didn't occur to me in months of development. I've decided to keep it simple and make the site visits work like Liberal Crime Squad -- you pick a building to scavenge, and your squad goes in. The mission ends when you safely exit the building. Zombies present are largely unalert, though your presence will awaken them if you aren't very stealthy. Shooting the place up and hanging around to see what happens will eventually summon a horde and turn your escape into a desperate fight for survival. Once you're out of the building, you go home -- there isn't a huge overworld.
The huge open world with many buildings on one map is something that I got drawn into just because the technical capacity exists for it. I was seduced into what was cool and possible and got trapped in a nebulous place where my design didn't feel clear anymore. Basing a zombie game on LCS isn't a good place to start with for that kind of open world map design. Ultimately I had to respect that the game I envisioned wasn't the game that the open world technology was leading me toward, and step back. There's another game out there to be made with a huge map, and it's probably really fun too -- but that will have to be a different project. I'm a little sad to let it go, but I strongly believe it's for the best.