Break Out, Break Free!
Dear survivors, Dear zombiefied,
Mona here: in the course of our work on the ZOMBASE concept it was my job to draft a story for the first episode, that is also the first game level. While I did the transition I stood in close contact to Aschaschi that does the game controls, game play design and the (concepts for the) GUI, so everything will fit together in the end. I really enjoyed to do the sequence concept, it was much fun to get to draw something for a change. Here some words on the process:
The hard thing to do is to keep the cutscene short, to introduce the world, the characters and at the same time to build up suspense and drama. After showing the cutscene it was important to me that the player is ready to go to explore the gameworld without too much chitter chatter about how to control the game, so I broke down the things the player needs to learn into different sequences.
How it will work you can see here (kick on the sketch to enlarge it):
As you can see I used a color code to distinguish between different modes of the game. The orange colored parts are cutscenes. In the yellow colored scenes NPCs will give you stuff or information, and the blue scenes is where you have to maneuver Lizza threw the zombie hordes. The first part is easy, just a bit running and jumping to get to know the surrounding. But soon you will reach a passage where there is no getting threw, like time-square full of zombies. Music is being played anywhere. As the tune changes all zombies on the crossway get pissed off being chased away from the sound. They just can’t stand this particular kind of music Lizza realizes.
