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Max Holliday
United States
Ogden
UT
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Okay I’m not a blogger, so this is all new to me. But I’ll give the old college try! Unfortunately I pledged Delta Tau Chi and got in…
‘Eaten by Zombies!’ is my first game. I’m a Scorpio, I teach Graphic Design & 3d Animation, I also like long walks in back alleys in the middle of the night. Some say I have twisted or sick sense of humor, others know this to be true… ummm… this isn’t going right…
Haya kids! My name’s Max Holliday and some say I’m a game designer, do you want to be my friend?!... ummm… no…
Okay let’s just talk about ‘Eaten By Zombies!’ or ‘I hope you get Eaten by zombies!’. As you may have guessed I’m not normal and nether is anything I design… I hope that’s a good think! The game started as a simple idea with no real plans for most of you to ever see it (although that changed very quickly!) I wanted to design a game mostly because I wanted to get into Graphic Design/Art direction for board games. I thought what better way to do this than to just design a game and do all the GD myself, that would surely get me a job!… okay did I mention I may not be right in the head ether…
I had started working on a worker placement game with a card drafting mechanic for making a hero. In the game you would place a worker each turn on a different location of the city for influence. The idea being that each player is a hero trying to prove their selves and boasting about their great deeds while trying to align themselves with which ever god the ‘people’ chose to be there patron god to end the game… I got feed up and quit after about 4 months!
So I started thinking about making something else... it needed to be simple to play… Something I could do lots of design work on… and it needed to be something I get people to play! (this becomes funny later in the story…) Seeing I walk home from work twice a day and walk to work twice a day I get a lot of time to talk to myself… wait! I mean ‘think to myself’ I asked myself three things:
-What game do you love the play the most right now? Dominion- I hadn’t gotten Sea side yet, but love how the game played.
-What kind of theme would I like to design for? The answer to this really any came when I could answer the next question.
-And finely What do I love and what would love to make a game about?
This really wasn’t as strait forward as it now seems… I’ve always loved zombies but not so much because I love ‘zombies’ (although I do) but because I love George Romero films! There is something about his style that I dig… what can I say.
As I was walking through the cemetery I cut though on my way home from work, partly because my little sister, little brother (although no one ever called Zack little he was 6’ 3” 30 stone!) and both my grandparents rest there and because it shaves 20min on my back and forth commute each day. I thought why not just make a deck builder with zombies! But not just deck builder with zombies crammed in (like the hoards of zombie re-themes everyone seems to be doing right now) but a game that felt like a zombie flick.
The dread, the anxiety of knowing you're F'ed from the get go! I went back to all my movies and re-watched every Zombie flick I had... I'm not even going to tell you how many that is because you'd just call me a lire! Went back to old screen-plays I had started but decided there were already to many zombie flicks out there so I never finished any of them. I started the game design from the stand point of lets write a zombie script but as a game that never played out the same twice!
So after moiling over the idea for a month or so, I made up a proto-type on lined paper and slipped it into a deck of magic cards. I sat done on the living room floor and played the first game… it worked sort of it needed work but it worked. I was so proud of myself, I’m such a genius, I’m so clever and unique! And then someone posted Zombinion… and I stopped working on my game for a few weeks… not that my game was anything like Zombinion in any way but the fact that someone else was working from the same place crushed me...
next time...
'How Stella got shamble back!'
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