Archive for January, 2012

3
31
Jan

Send a photo, win a gig!

Hey guys,

we present to you our first of many to come, creative contests. And we hit it off big time!

Send us a photo of a self-made papercraft of a character or thing out of the ZOMBASE universe. The entry that gets the most attention and awe, will win! (Of course, we reserve us the right to decide, if there is tie.)

The prize: An appearance in the finalized first Episode of ZOMBASE, break out, break free! I will pixelate you and teleport you into the zombie-crowded streets of Central Peak!

It may be any modded version of an existing papercraft (for example, use Aschaschis ghettoblaster and mod it). e-mail us: happy_happy_creepy_cute@zombase.com! 

You will see the pictures right here in this blog…

Gogogo! With great expectations, truly yours,

the HHCC Team (Madame. A and Miss G.)

1
31
Jan

Listener Discretion is advised

Hey there, boys and girls,
dear friends and readers.


(btw: That >whoops< is delicious!!! Sweet Jesus!!!)
Since there is quite a bit going on in the Zombase kitchen, I was thinking, maybe this is a good time to show you guys some results of the musical work it did so far.
It’s not much since I didn’t have much time (u know, I got hospitalized because I fell of a cliff an broke two legs and then I lost my eyesight on the right side and then somebody broke my nose, my girlfriend left me and then my car broke down… … well, I’m just fooling’ around… but I was really busy).

Anyway:

This is considered to be the Main Theme.
Although it is not finished yet, it sure has it’s… well, u know… swagger. I like it pretty much, either do the girls.
http://soundcloud.com/the-zom-base-foundation/velvet-gloves

And this one right here is the first stage BGM you’ll get to hear in-game. It’s not too much, it’s pretty polite and down to earth and not upsetting anyone… I hope so.
http://soundcloud.com/the-zom-base-foundation/fonky-donky

Alright, and here’s Lizzy’s theme. Well, if you know her, there is absolutely no question about that tune. It fits perfectly on her.
http://soundcloud.com/the-zom-base-foundation/headache-frequence

And so does the theme for Prince with its retro touch and its… well… kinda sparkly sounds.
http://soundcloud.com/the-zom-base-foundation/rhythmic-love-letter-prince

And the last two tracks are not specified yet but I think they are worth showing you guys.
http://soundcloud.com/the-zom-base-foundation/elefunk
http://soundcloud.com/the-zom-base-foundation/sewer

And here are my conceptional thoughts to the music in Zombase:

I’m working with pretty much of my own musical preferences like UK-Electro, Drum’n'Bass, Funk, Jazz, other Electronica Stuff and Trip Hop and … Stuff like that.
And I am trying to create a very unique soundscape for the game since it is playing in a fictional future-world and who knows, what creepy kinds of genres there will be… so we decided to create our own genre-titles. Read the rest of this entry »

7
29
Jan

Blast some walls, heads and sanity!

Hey slayers of the undead,

it’s Aschaschi speaking! Presentation day is close and we want to thank you guys for wishing us luck! We are actually enjoying to work on the ZOMBASE project very much and hopefully all of those joining us at Merz Akademie will be able to feel that and will get to love the whole colorful package, too! <- That sounds quiet cheesy I know, but … Hey! Non of us slept much during the last weeks ;) !

Anyway: to thank all of you guys, Madame Aschaschi sat down and came up with a little papercraft which she wants to share with you here! I really hope that you will have fun printing, handcrafting and displaying this … all your friends will be jealous if they see your cool and awesome miniature of Lizza’s ghetto blaster! I totally love papercrafts: this one is very, very easy to do, even if you never did one before, so do not hesitate to try! This is just a preview picture! Don’t actually print this one out, the quality is much too low … use the PDF – version that hides behind the download link!

PDF Download Link!

Lizza’s blaster was designed and build by the Prince of Bad Hair! It can spread the beats at more then 140 dB, no wonder she never leaves the house without this mind-fucking party-machine! Grey-Chi also had the idea of adding eyes to the blaster, you could try that, too. Simply draw some eyes on a blank paper and sick them on or draw directly on the blaster. Read the rest of this entry »

5
28
Jan

Official demo that will be presented to the diploma people is now finished!

Hi again!

This is just a short post on the blog to tell you that…

We finally fixed the background issues that we have been having. We removed everything glitchy from the old demo, added in the final music and graphics and are ready for tuesday when ZOMBASE will be presented to the diploma people!

Wish us luck!

1
16
Jan

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

3
15
Jan

Ya have 2 know how 2 treat it …

Hey, beloved readers, posters and followers!

This is Aschaschi speaking. I want to keep you updated; we got some very interesting news for all of you guys. We just finished our first  version of the game treatment. The treatment is a document explaining some about the game world, the  game’s story, the characters and of cause the game play and feel! (Some of you might know, that we didn’t only focus on ZOMBASE the game-comic-crossover, but had to write a theoretical text (to impress our diploma profs ;) ). We wrote about the phenomenon of fandom, related it to the economics of the game industry and came up with a model showing the fan as a dedicated, aptly producer. We wrote all of that in German language, so we decided to write the treatment in German, too, and to translate it later on. So sad but true: I can’t post passages of the treatment, to show you guys what’s going on.)

Grey Chi is taking over: But we are able to show you the funny, scribbily comics that illustrate the gameplay. Aschaschi’s sketch above is showing the item/ collectable pick up-system. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do! I love her style. Read the rest of this entry »

8
11
Jan

A word from your programmer!

EDIT: This is very old now! Check my newest blog post!

Hi there!

I’ve been part of the Zombase team for almost a year now without saying anything to you guys so I thought it’d be good to just say a few words about how the game is coming along: The game is programmed completley in the C language using the compiler “devkitPro” and two additional libarys called “libnds” and “PAlib”. I work on making everything looking smooth and proffesional; the current version of ZOMBASE already has over 1000 lines!

Recently, Aschaschi has sent me some graphics which look great on the DS! You can see a little screenshot of the menu for example:

The menu for Zombase!

None of the graphics in the game (except the menu graphics) are final at this stage, I have been experimenting using graphics from previous games of mine just to see how everything looks. This is why the game looks like a complete mess and the moment, just see for yourself!

But with all the final graphics and elements in it ZOMBASE will hopefully turn out to be the best NDS homebrew game ever!

Your programmer,
-YoshiInAVoid-

PS: There is a video of me playing a level which I built in an early version of the ZOMBASE system here:

Quality isn’t great but it’s okay.