Our first idea for the theme was rather boring but luckily we had a different idea after the theme was announced. ;)

Since both of us will be busy during the week we were extra-productive today and got the game foundation done. Zahme has finished all of the necessary graphics and will spend the rest of the week on eyecandy (and images for new features). Meanwhile I've implemented the gameplay basics with placeholder graphics.

Behold our marvellous non-fake screenshot! Sloths! Everywhere!!

So... Day 6 is over, Day 7 began and we are on track... probably.

Most of our game is already done (Well, basic gameplay was established after the first day ;)) and we are quite happy with this as I had to go to work and Serval had to go to university during the week.
So this was the first time where both of us only had less than a half day per workday to work on this game. - And still I think we got quite a nice thing together here.

Instead of explaining all the stuff surrounding the game I will just briefly announce that this game is a "classical" Zombie-Survival-Game with simple graphics and a bit complexity (to increase replayability).
For more information, please refer to our (just completed) in-game help screen below: :)



So, we are on track and apart from implementing the Soundfiles, creating some Music and implementing a "special" (read: "hidden") game-mode, everything is done [maybe some polishing here and there] - One day left and it looks like we might finish... this time :)

Wow. Even though both of us were quite busy this week we still managed to finish our game. So unless we stumble upon some horrible bugs, this is our final submission!

Yay! \o/

Ok, so Zahme had to go to work and I had to visit university classes during Pyweek. Yet this entry feels like the most complete game we've ever submitted. It seems a little embarrasing... as if we'd been just lazy during the previous Pyweeks. XD

Of course, that's not quite right. Since we knew we'd be busy, we decided that our game should be simple, not too many graphics and easy to code. So we came up with the usual overly ambitious idea and a very simple idea per theme.

Our initial idea for "Get off my Lawn" was a rather boring "Hit-the-Mole" game. You need to defend your precious lawn against molesting moles. Destroy their molehills (with a hammer or something) - and if you don't destroy them in time a mole would look out of the molehill and laugh at you. Vicious creatures. ;)

When the theme was announced, we talked a little more about the mole-game and I mentioned the word "Shotgun" (you need some kind of powerup, right?). That reminded Zahme of another game.. and so Lawn of the Dead* was born.

The basics of the game were already done on Sunday. The character - a cat picture - was moveable, turned to the mouse pointer and shot deadly bullets at sloths. And the sloths moved towards the cat with zombie-like determination... Using placeholder art is actually quite fun. I made a version with 5 cat pictures that always rotated towards the mouse cursor - just because it looked funny... And it's nice when you finally see the real graphics in a playable game.

Meanwhile, Zahme pixeled some zombies and a lawn. He found a nice font for the logo and made some buttons. He actually wanted to create some more zombies (with missing limbs) but inventing 43 perks and making images for them takes quite some time - even if you have a whole week.

I may extract and document the game's "engine" and use it for Pyggy. If we can still pick older game entries (for Pyggy) we could finally finish VoCFI or Slider or C.A.T.:B.O.T... We don't have any good ideas on how to expand Lawn of the Dead but we'll release a less buggy after-pyweek version (with less typos). Soon. ^^

Well, thank you for a busy but fun week. I'll go and test the other games now.

*We had just watched Shaun of the Dead.

...and it's not too late for our (long-awaited?) wrap-up of this PyWeek.
Be warned, there is a lot of text ahead.

I want to start our wrap-up with the positive and suggestion stuff:


Well done. / great game! / Nice work. / Very nice game. / That was fun!

*bows* thank you very much!


(Rating: 4-4-4) the powerups come too fast, the pacing might be better if they were handed out more sparingly.

Too fast? Mh - I was quite happy with the current distribution (theoretically every 10th zombie at start, and every 5th with the correct perks). This way actually eased the survival on later stages. We might consider to set the power-up rate down, but this would require some more testing on how this effects the overall difficulty. (Maybe every 20th at start and every 10th with the correct perks?).


(from the same comment) team servalkatze sure got dark compared to past entries...

(some nitpicking first) It's team zahmeKatzen, but nevermind (after all, ServalKatze is the lead, right? ;o) ).
If it's okay for the PyWeek-Participants we would like to continue making some more darker games (as far as the voted theme and our time/ideas permit)... but as the game designer I'm a bit afraid that to dark games might not be accepted well here (I had the same problems when drawing the graphics of the last dungeon for our first Pyggy/last PyWeek entry...) - But on the other hand, if the "panty shot" of a drawn virtual fairy in a very cute game is considered tacky and misplaced... I don't know maybe blood, gore and cookies might be ok ;P (watch out - sarcasm here!).


(Rating: 4-4-3) The movement keys dont feel totally right

Sorry about that, but I would be happy if you/someone could elaborate what exactly felt wrong? (so we might do better the next time)
But we also did have one comment stating that the "controls feel natural", one more reason for me to know where we might improve here :)


(Rating: 4-4-3) I think the perks were very important to the game - I would have been bored after a while if it weren't for them and their icons and texts. :)

As I spent most of my time designing the perks (graphically, technically, and "descriptionally") I of course strongly agree ;o) - I had a lot of fun doing so and I actually can say that the perks are the main reason I'm still playing this game from time to time :) - Thank you very much for your comment and rating!


(Rating: 4-3-2) The level up system kept me replaying a few times trying to get a higher score and see the other perks. =)

I'm happy to hear that you had fun with this game and even tried it multiple times - thank you very much!


(Rating: 5-3-3) very good game,allthat upgrades make it really various even without levels

Thank you very much - as already stated somewhere above, I'm quite proud of our perk system :) Happy you liked it!


(Rating: 4-3-2) Pretty decent game, reminds me a lot of Crimsonland.

Yep, as also stated in our "final" diary post we used Crimsonland as inspiration :)


(Rating: 5-4-3) The sound really makes the game

Thank you very much! Most of the sound samples were taken from freesound.org (a very good sound resource site!) and modified to fit our game - so also thanks to them for providing this huge sound database.



Now to the a bit less positive ratings and/or comments:

(Rating: 2-2-2) Not zombies *again*...

Noaaaah... If I'm not wrong there were only two other Zombie games this PyWeek ;( - At least we had much more Tower Defense then Zombies this time.


(Rating: 2-2-2) Another generic top-down-zombies-on-my-lawn shooter. I liked the name, though.

Thank you - I like the name, too ;) (somewhere between "not very original" and "so lame that it is funny")
Of course, we are aware that this game is not very original, but we wanted to participate & finish while both of us needed to go to work/university during the PyWeek [First time that both of us were unable to participate here full-time] - so we just needed to come up with something simple ;)


(Rating: 2-4-2) I don't if it was intentional, but even when not reloading I had to wait quite a long time (well, 2 seconds maybe) between shots. Maybe this was intentional but I found it quite annoying.

Spontaneously I would say: yes, this was intentional. After all, you are using a pump-action shotgun and are not able to auto-fire with it. The initial "cool down" time should be somewhere between 1 and 2 seconds, going considerably down with the right perks. In the end (when you received the Jackhammer perk plus "Auto-Fire" and "Speed-Striped Barrel") you should have something that nearly resembles automatic fire.
Sorry to hear that you found it annoying, but I thought this would bring some more atmosphere into the game (after all the sounds were designed/used to match the shoot/cool down/reload times).


(Rating: 3-1-1) An enjoyable but blatant Crimsonland ripoff. If you already have the perk-tree, why not let the player pick the next perk? Without this possibility of choice there is very little interactivity here.

I'm quite unhappy with this comment, or more precise especially with the rating (After all, there seems to be always one comment you especially don't like, right? My experience so far from previous PyWeeks and looking through some other wrap-ups I feel I'm proven true ;) ).
I'm not going to debate on the 1 for innovation - as already said we were inspired by Crimsonland so there really is not much innovation here, but we still implemented things that are not present in Crimsonland. (e.g. As Crimsonland was our inspiration, I did not expect high Innovation scores, but I think we put enough effort into it to receive innovation ratings from 1 to 3 - but what you choose is personal preference after all :) ).

But I would like to debate on the 1 in production. What is so bad about our game that a 1 in production (meaning as much as "No production at all") is a fair rating? Are the graphics ugly? The sounds not fitting? The bug-freeness of our code or the fact that our game worked on every machine as intended without any major errors/miscalculations a flaw?
Are these single parts (graphics, sounds, music, and code) not fitting together, like using music from Hans Zimmer in combination with 5-Minute M$Paint-Art and Sounds from different genres, quality, and volume in code so broken that the game runs (so you can see this truly masterpiece) but crashes all the time at different points and causes other unwanted things?

Also, the "perk"-issue: I agree that this is a game inspired by Crimsonland (I don't like the word "rip-off" because this somehow implies that we copied this game without putting any effort into it just to become successful because the game is quite good, especially since you are using "blatant" in this context.), but this does not mean that we need to use the comfort given by the Crimsonland "Pick a Perk"-Option.
Actually, I did not want to copy this part from the beginning as this would make the game a bit more difficult (you do have to live with what you get, luckily everything is useful somehow [some things more in the beginning, some things more during the "endgame"]) and also (so I hoped) would increase the replayability (you do not know what you will get), by forcing the player into a "perk-experience" that would be pseudo-unique from game to game.
In Crimsonland you can chose from a list of 5/up to 7 random perks. But after you played Crimsonland a while you do have your pool of Perks you will always pick and given the amount of perks listed the chances are quite high that the perks you want are listed - this removes a bit of the uniqueness of every session [in my eyes].

Also, I think that the game is interactive enough, even without the ability to chose the perk you want ;P

So yeah - as you can see I'm quite unhappy with this comment/rating, but I felt I need to complain about it - At least I feel better now ^^"



Just as a further/side note, judging from the comments nobody found our sheep-level which disappoints me a bit (not "disappoint" as in "Are you blind, or what?" but more as in "Damn, I think we hid it too good").
We wanted to implement a full "sheep-mode" with "BaaAah"-descriptions and -perks, besides the already implemented "Baah"-moans and attacking zombie-sheep. But as we did not have enough time on our side it now is just a sheep-level.
So if you want that "extra"-bit of zombie-sheep experience (actually this one could also be dubbed "Hard Mode") here is one small hint to find it:
You can activate the sheep-level from the Credits-Screen. (This one is also hidden, but if you have played our other/previous games [except VoCFI] you should be able to find it [as we are always hiding our credits-screen... at the same place]).




What's left for me to say is:
Thanks to Richard for the PyWeek! - I really like this competition and we will definitely participate in the next one :D
Congratulations to Super Effective (On the way to a "Winning Spree", eh?) and Universe Factory! - Nice games you did there :)
Thanks to all participants! - (As always) There were a lot of pretty/good/excellent games this PyWeek, which I enjoyed to play :)
Thanks to all who rated our game! - Your feedback was appreciated and will be considered for this and future games ;)
Thank you very much - to all of you!












Sooo... who has seen the new Star Trek movie? ^^