Zenzizenzic (playable!)

[Zenzizenzic]

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DOWNLOAD THE GAME
direct download / 59mb size / zip folder
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Hi! I'd like to present Zenzizenzic to you, an abstract high octane twin stick shoot 'em up currently in development for PC.

Zenzizenzic is a fast paced twin-stick shoot 'em up. Weave through intricate bullet patterns, destroy enemies and bullets and rank your score among the greatest and beat various challenges. Play with up to two players and use a variety of weapons to blast thy foes to smithereens and clear a path to victory.

I'd love to receive feedback. This build is meant for bug testing and balance testing (as well as, hopefully, enjoying it of course!). Things to look out for:
- Do the controls function as expected
- Do the weapons function as expected
- How does it perform concerning PC performance (CPU load)
- Does the balance between easy, medium and hard feel right
- Can you beat the top highscore(!)
- And so on

Input on possible new, awesome weapons or other aspects of the game is always appreciated! It might be added to the game!

It's optimized for an XBox360 controller, so if you have one, plug it in. It can also be played with mouse and keyboard however. As it's a Unity game, installation is not required.

Thank you so much if you took the time to give it a spin!







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Without any practical knowledge on game design and development, except for what was garnered over the course of 15 to 20 or so years of playing games, I set out to build a game myself. I didn't know a damn thing, except for what feels right and what doesn't in a game.  

It was Novemeber 2012, just graduated and unemployed, when I installed Unity3D, the well known video game development engine. Pleasantly surprised with the relative ease of moving around and messing about in the engine I started to learn some coding.  By going through some tutorials and with the help of the Unity community I was able to get a fairly decent footing on how to work with the engine. I was still horrible at it though.  

The game to be build would need to be fairly easy to make (due to my lack of skills), but should feel really tight to play and be a challenge to beat. The genre which came to mind was a 2D shoot 'em up. It's a genre I always had a fascination for, imagining really skilled people maneuvering through a veritable murderous maze of bullets in a vertical scrolling environment.  

The plan was to start with a limited scope, a simple idea. Just a single level, a couple of shooting abilities, points and that's it. Not surprisingly, all the while still unemployed, that limited scope was gradually expanded until hardly anything of it remained.  Additional movement controls were introduced, more weapons were added, challenges, difficulties, 2 player gameplay, bonus levels, and so on. "Luckily" I was still unemployed, giving me the time to do all this stuff.  

The graphics always remained to look prototype-ish though. That's something I didn't want to mess with. Firstly to prevent me from crapping all over it (I'm no graphical artist), and secondly to save time. I dubbed the project Zenzizenzic, it's a mathematical term referring to squares and stuff, which fits the theme of the game.  

Bignic, known from the awesome game Zombies., was willing to lend his music to Zenzizenzic and the pieces started to come together and an actual game was starting to take shape.  

A couple of months and lots of probably poor coding later, I'm able to present you this as the demo of Zenzizenzic, my first venture in game development and design. Hopefully in the next few months I'll be able to finish Zenzizenzic up and offer you the full game. But for now I hope you're able to enjoy this brief taste of many things to come!  

~Ruud Koorevaar

[Zenzizenzic]

Blogpost 8 Feb 2013

It was just a few months back when I started tinkering around with Unity 3D, a game development engine. With no previous experience of actually building games, coding and design, I hopped in, pressed a couple of buttons and added some code which I politely nicked from a tutorial while having no clue what any of it actually meant. A bit of messing about later and I actually had a somewhat functional game; a player controlled ship, shooting, bullets, a level, enemies and even a boss. Of course it looked like shit, but hey, it worked. And then it struck me. Here I had the ingredients to actually make something engaging, challenging, fun in a genre of which I always had a slight fascination for: a shoot-em-up, or shmup. I was going to build one of those I told myself, and while I’m at it I’m going to learn about Unity, coding and game design. That’s the course I set out to undertake. And this here is where I’ll be sharing some of the stuff that I come across while building this shmup, which I dubbed Zenzizenzic.

You can check me out on Twitterif you’d like to keep up to date through that channel. A Facebook page is up, although it’ll look rather bleak until I get some basic art assets into a semblance of readiness and toss them up there. But there’s that as well. Pick your poison!

Next time I’ll chat about what I foresee Zenzizenzic to (hopefully) eventually be! Stay tuned.

For the time being, here’s a bit of a teaser of Zenzizenzic in its current prototype-ish form.

[Zenzizenzic]

For today here's a bit more extensive basic info about the game and how it's turning out. Next week hopefully some video footage (for which I just created a YouTube page). So then I hope to have some concrete stuff on which you guys can comment on.

Blogpost 11 Feb 2013

So what's Zenzizenzic actually about? In the previous post I described a bit of how I came up to the point where I started messing about with this project. But it's probably quite useful to open up the curtains a bit and spend a few moments on explaining what the game is actually about.

In short: high octance and reactionary gameplay. As mentioned before, it's a shmup; a genre which per definition is quite fast paced. If you're a stranger to the genre just think of the old games like Asteroids, maybe R-Type rings a bell. Otherwise, think of crazily skilled (probably Asian) people maneuvering their ship through an insane maze of oncoming bullets on an arcade cabinet. Zenzizenzic floats around in the same space as those types of games. Your ship, bullets, kill or be killed; that's it. Of course, there's a bit more to it than just that, which I will uncover in detail over the upcoming weeks. But let's take a look at some of the basic aspects of Zenzizenzic.

Zenzizenzic is a twin-stick shmup for the PC which is controlled with a PC compatible Xbox360 gamepad. This means that movement and aiming/shooting is done with both the analog sticks on the gamepad and that you have full freedom of movement on a 2D playing field. It also means that keyboard and/or mouse control is not supported, as it would plainly feel awful. You simply need more analog input than what the keyboard/mouse can support. Not making compromises there. I'm purely developing it for the PC as well, since I basically have no clue yet how to make it Xbox360 (for example) compatible. It's also just a lot easier for me and for you guys from an accessibility viewpoint. Although the Xbox360 gamepad is a bit a hindrance, but that's just something we'll have to deal with.

Zenzizenzic is about pushing yourself and your ship to their limits. You can customize your loadout with a variety of synergetic and multipurpose weapons before starting a level, either alone or with a (local) buddy. If all works out from a technical point of view, the levels will be dynamic in such a way that the difficulty will adjust to some degree based on your performance, or whether you are there with a partner or not. This will mostly be centered around giving the player(s) more stuff to shoot at (or be killed by) if they do well. But more details will be saved for a specific post on level design!

I'm not an graphical artist, so the style of the game will be minimal, as to minimize the risk of me crapping all over it. I'm going for a primarily grey-scale colour setup, with the important bits (like enemy bullets) being highlighted with bright colours and sharp shapes. Simple, but hopefully effective! Of course everything you see of the game these few weeks is prototype stuff, so nothing is necessarily final.

Concerning sounds, there's nothing there at the moment. I haven't been able to spend much time on that aspect just yet, but I'm sure I will in the near future and spill some of it over on here!

Stay tuned. No screenshots this time around, but hopefully next time I'll have a bit of gameplay footage ready!

[Zenzizenzic]

First gameplay video is online. Go check it out!

http://youtu.be/J5eiKekgIWk

[Zenzizenzic]

New blog post added where I take a look at how I approach the level design.

[mjmjr25]

Cool stuff, thanks for sharing.

[Zenzizenzic]

Cool stuff, thanks for sharing.

Thank you for listening! :D

[sosoyo180]

How did you come up with the name?

Oh, and the game looks like a lot of fun.

[Zenzizenzic]

How did you come up with the name?

Oh, and the game looks like a lot of fun.

I sometimes used it in MMORPG's and the likes as a character name, without actually having a single clue what it meant. Probably at the time I saw it on some list of weird words or something, while trying to figure out a name for a character. But while thinking for a name for this game I eventually came back to Zenzizenzic, since I thought that it kind of sounded fitting for a shmup; it sounds fast. But I figured it might be smart to look up what it actually means, and a bit of a lucky coincidence followed that. Zenzizenzic features a lot of squares, as you might have noticed, and the term 'zenzizenzic' actually refers to a mathematical term of the square of a square, or the fourth power. So well, lots of squares and references to squares, and I figured "heyu, it actually fits thematically as well in a way". And that was good enough for me. But above all I like the look the word (although it's a pain in the ass to type it quite often, because you always have to glance over it twice to make sure it's actually spelled correctly!).

And thanks!

[sosoyo180]

How did you come up with the name?

Oh, and the game looks like a lot of fun.

I sometimes used it in MMORPG's and the likes as a character name, without actually having a single clue what it meant. Probably at the time I saw it on some list of weird words or something, while trying to figure out a name for a character. But while thinking for a name for this game I eventually came back to Zenzizenzic, since I thought that it kind of sounded fitting for a shmup; it sounds fast. But I figured it might be smart to look up what it actually means, and a bit of a lucky coincidence followed that. Zenzizenzic features a lot of squares, as you might have noticed, and the term 'zenzizenzic' actually refers to a mathematical term of the square of a square, or the fourth power. So well, lots of squares and references to squares, and I figured "heyu, it actually fits thematically as well in a way". And that was good enough for me. But above all I like the look the word (although it's a pain in the ass to type it quite often, because you always have to glance over it twice to make sure it's actually spelled correctly!).

And thanks!

Wow, that's an awesome coincidence, I really need to figure out what a 'sosoyo' is.

If I ever decide to make a game, i'll be sure to get your opinion on a name!