Supply Box Sale!

We know how it is. You’ve spent all this time running for Abel Township, bringing back food and books and sports bras. Keeping people fed and clothed and entertained. But what does Runner Five get? A few words of thanks and another mission.

Not any more. Now you can bring back some supplies of your own, and at a $5 discount! How do these sound?

Runner 5 Sweatband to keep you cool.
Reversible silicone wristband to identify you to other runners.
Runner 5 Run Log Notebook, complete with doodles from all your favourite Abel residents.
Four high-quality supply icon fridge magnets.
Tough-as-nails Radio Abel coaster, perfect for a hot cup of tea after a good run.
Awesome “Abel Township” fabric patch, so you can wear your heart on your sleeve.
Two gorgeous vinyl stickers: “Semper Currens” and “Radio Abel”.
Three beautiful pin-badges: “Raise The Gates”, “Runner 5” and “Abel Radio”.

We only have a few supply packs left, so head over to our shop and use the voucher code SP5 to claim your $5 discount and get some sweet, sweet supplies all for yourself!

March Community Roundup

Collected a Sports Bra by Run-like-a-zombie

It’s Friday! That means it’s time to grab the curly-wurlies hidden at the back of your desk drawer, put your feet up and enjoy a relaxing look at the month-that-was in the Zombies, Run! fandom.

News

Six to Start is coming to New York! If you fancy coming to meet us for a drink or two, we’ll be at Stitch Bar, 247 West 37th Street in Manhattan from 7.30 on March 31st.
It was Runner Five’s birthday! Also we gave you a sneak peak at our In-App Mission Previews.
We officially announced Season Four! This was the big one, with a huge amount of detail in the announcement post and our follow up about Season One.

Audio Highlights

Up next, we have some utterly fantastic audio fan works this month. For obvious reasons, we’re huge fans of audio here at Six to Start, and it’s incredibly exciting for us to listen to such incredible audio created by our fans!

Radio Breet broadcast their pilot episode this month – a really exciting original work which gives us an entirely new (and grisly!) spin on the “people in a comms cabin” idea. A lot of love and attention has clearly gone into making this, and its well worth a listen! We can’t wait to tune in to the next episode.

Mary Crowell sent us this astonishingly catchy number about all the trials and tribulations of being Runner Five. I’ve woken up three times in the past week with this one stuck in my head. Amazing. Also, don’t say I didn’t warn you about this earworm.

Rolling on with the musical theme, check out this window-rattling remix of Season Two Mission Twenty [WARNING: SPOILERS FOR S2M20]. There’s only one thing we like more than a bit of heavy bass, and that’s listening to Major De Santa kicking ass. So you can imagine how excited we were to get both things in the same white-hot audio wonder. Excellent work, GoAbelRunner5!

Finally, we have your monthly installment of Podcast Detected! This time, the team are taking us through all their most emotional moments from the past three seasons, from weeping when Maxine hears [SPOILER REDACTED] to getting angry at [SPOILER REDACTED] and being relieved when Eugene [SPOILER REDACTED]. As usual, it’s massively enjoyable and great fun to listen to, even if this episode stirred up a lot of strong feelings! For the record, I miss Mildred Van Der Graff as well.

Art Highlights

There’s been so much amazing art from our fans this month. Here are just a few of the pieces we’ve gotten a real kick out of.

Tiny Sam Eats a Cake by Did-you-reboot.

Limelight by Soupwhale.

I’ll Spin For You by Crownleys.

Fic Highlights

Holy wow has this been a month for Radio Boyfriends-related fic and feels. Check this stuff out:

This Hunger-Games themed fic about all our ZR favourites is utterly heart-breaking and fantastic. Oh god. So good. Great work, straydog733!
Compass by chosekiei is a wonderful fic that really captures the fear and tension of those early days post-outbreak. Lovely stuff!
Finally, this piece by Thisislizz gives us an intriguing and emotional look at Runner Five’s inner life both before and immediately after day zero. The structure of this piece really amplifies its emotional impact nicely – read it!

As usual, if there’s anything you’d like to recommend for next month’s Community roundup, drop me a line at matt at sixtostart dot com.

Back to the Future: Season 1

This Spring isn’t just about just about launching a brand new set of awesome, heart-pounding, tear-jerking missions in Season 4. It isn’t even just about how we’re polishing, tweaking and improving every aspect of the game.

We’re also going to improve Zombies, Run! for all those poor souls who’ve yet to become Runner 5 — in other words, for new players. We want to shorten the time from “who’s this Steve Yoo person?” to “I AM RUNNER FIVE”. One way is through our “Next Time on Zombies, Run!” preview clips — and another way is by improving Season 1.

This Spring, we’ll be tweaking the order of Season 1 to give new players the best introduction to Abel Township we possibly can. In fact, this change actually partly restores the order in which some of the missions were originally written. Here’s what we’re talking about:

“Distraction” will now come before “Lay of the Land”, so that there’s an opportunity to get used to how the app works with a classic, dramatic mission before we get into the more cerebral world-building.
“Supply Run” and “A Voice In The Dark” now come directly after “Paul Revere”. This lets us spend a little more time getting to know the settlements around Abel before we move into ahem – other plotlines – ahem, and it also means new players get to experience the wonder that is “A Voice In The Dark” a little earlier.
“The Old Mill” now follows on from “A Voice In The Dark” immediately. This gives us a smoother development of Abel’s relationship with New Canton. Also, as some of you eagle-eared players may have noticed, the first scene of “The Old Mill” references the events of “A Voice In The Dark” as having occurred very recently, so this change restores that little bit of continuity.
“Recovery” and “Tess” move down the order to follow on from “The Old Mill”, introducing the bigger-picture plot only once we’ve already established the main conflict for the season.
Finally, current missions 10 – 15 (”Back to School” through “Scouting Mission”) all move down one spot in the order to make room for the above changes.

That may well be hard to visualise, which is why we’ve made this handy diagram!

We’re excited about these changes, and we’d love to hear what you think. Let us know in the comments!

Wow! Spring App Sale!

You’ve heard about Zombies, Run! Season 4, and the super exciting new features coming in our biggest update so far? Good. To celebrate, we’re having a big ol’ sale on a huge selection of our apps – but move quick, as it ends on March 18th!! Prices listed in USD.

Step Buy Step [iOS]

$0.99 (Was $1.99)

This is no ordinary pedometer. Join dozens of creature companions on a journey where every step counts!

The Walk [iOS / Android]

$1.99 (Was $2.99)

A bomb explodes in Inverness station, and you’re given a package that could save the world. An exciting adventure that rewards you for walking more!

Zombies, Run! 5k Training [iOS / Android]

$0.99 (Was $1.99)

Want to improve your running and need some extra guidance? Our couch-to-5k program is a great way for beginners to get started and train up.

7-Minute Superhero Workout [iOS / Android]

$1.99 (Was $2.99)

Superheroes aren’t born, they’re trained. With our innovative motion-tracking technology, turn your home workout into an action-packed adventure!

ZombieLink Update

Update 3:30pm GMT: Service is now restored – you may sync and download missions to your zombie heart’s content!

Update 11:30am GMT: Content delivery is now fixed, so you can once again download missions. The rest of the functionality is incoming!

Unfortunately we’ve been informed that there’s a hardware issue with one of our critical servers at Linode, which means that it’s not currently not possible to log in to ZombieLink or download missions.

This is super annoying and we’re doing what we can to resolve it. We’ll post updates here as and when we have them. The good news is that we’re also in the process of rewriting ZombieLink for the release of ZR4 so it’ll be much more resilient in unexpected situations like this.

March 3rd: Scheduled ZombieLink Downtime

Even the sturdiest machines need a little tune-up every now and then. And while our web servers are some damn sturdy machines, we are going to need to take them offline for a bit of a spit-and-polish this coming week. We’re working hard to minimise disruption, but here’s some information on when Janine’s going to be tinkering about behind the scenes, and what that means for your ZombieLink service.

All times are UTC.

March 3rd

03:00 – 05:00: Reduced performance on ZombieLink

22:00 – 00:00 – All Zombies, Run! online services will be unavailable. This includes run log synching, mission downloads and the ZombieLink website.

23:00 – 01:00 – Reduced performance on ZombieLink, Six to Start and Zombies, Run! home pages will be inaccessible.

March 6th

09:00 – 11:00 – Some graphical assets will be missing from ZombieLink.

Again, we’d like to thank you for your patience while we perform this essential maintenance.