State of the Township: October 2015

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Welcome, citizens! We’re delighted to have over two million Runners Five in Abel Township now – it’s humbling to see Zombies, Run! having an impact on so many people. 

We’re excited to share our roadmap for the next two months to all our new Runners,, along with our stalwart Pro Member supporters. It’s because of all your support that we can keep developing and improving Zombies, Run!, so we think it’s only fair to tell you how we’re planning to do it.

It’s been a good couple of months’ development for the game: we’ve been able to add almost all the features we promised back in August. Just as importantly, Zombies, Run! is more stable than ever: our latest iOS 4.1.8 update has 99.8% crash-free sessions, and Android 4.2.2 is at 99.4%. Thanks to Mo and Jeremy for their hard work!

Along with our diligent devs and QA, this improvement is also thanks to our iOS beta-testers, who help us quickly identify bugs while rapidly adding new features (particularly useful due to Apple’s 1+ week review time). We’re also launching a similar beta-testing group for Android.

New on Android

New on iPhone

New on Zombielink

Next on Zombies, Run!

Here’s what we’re aiming to add or improve in the next two months – as ever, it’s an aspiration, not a promise! Development is unpredictable, so we do sometimes slip behind our roadmap a little way, but this is the plan for the next two months as it stands:

iPhone

  • Training Plan
  • Apple Watch support
  • Improved Codex
  • Secret Project!

Android

  • Resumable race missions
  • Related downloads view
  • GPS tracking improvements
  • Mission Clip playback
  • Set distance/time for story missions
  • Avoid interrupting songs
  • Improved Base Builder
  • Training Plan

ZombieLink

  • Codex
  • Email updates
  • 5k Training app support

Virtual Race and ZombieLink

The popularity of the Virtual Race really took us by surprise – who would have thought that Zombies, Run! players would like running in the real world, eh? As such, we ended up building more technical infrastructure than first we anticipated, which has slowed down development on ZombieLink in particular. 

Why particularly ZombieLink? That’s because our web developer, Marcel, was tasked with setting up our payment and shipping gateway, along with the entire microsite for the Virtual Race and the new Rofflenet forum. That’s a lot of work that needs to be rock-solid!

We appreciate this delay will feel annoying for those not participating in the Virtual Race, but the new features we’re developing, like a real-time world leaderboard, will eventually be seen by everyone.

Rofflenet Forum

One of the new features we developed for the Virtual Race was a private forum, Rofflenet. The community that’s developed there has been fantastic – members are swapping training tips and running stories, organising real world meetups, speculating about the story, and posting amazing cosplay pics. And people have been really helpful and kind with their feedback.

We intend to keep the Rofflenet forum live beyond the Virtual Race, in preparation for our 2016 Virtual Races (more on that later!). In time, we may invite all Pro Members to join as well, but that would require deeper integration with ZombieLink and more moderation resources. For now, we want to take things slow and steady so we can keep the quality of conversation really high and make sure we don’t take on more than we can handle.

FYI, we’re using the free Discourse forum, is a very powerful yet friendly piece of open-source software. We highly recommend it for your forum needs!

The World of Tomorrow

Now that we’ve brought Interval Training on Android and improved music playback on iOS, we feel like we’ve finally completed the first big phase of ZR4 development. So now it’s time to think about the future! Here are the things we’re thinking about for the next big phases of development:

  • Base Builder: Along with new buildings, we want to make the base gameplay more interesting and dynamic. This is going to be a long term goal that will span ZR4 and ZR5.
  • Achievements: Our new version of Achievements will live on the apps and be tied into Apple’s Game Center and Google Play Games, meaning they’ll be more social than before. While Achievements aren’t planned for the next two months, they’re still high on our list.  
  • Social/multiplayer: We’ve been thinking about this for the past four years – it’s a very tough problem in terms of game design and fitness motivation. It’s still high on our list of long-term goals and we’ll be thinking about it even harder next year
  • Zombies, Run! Expanded Universe: We’ve previously mentioned a book, which we’ll be talking about more very soon, and there are other things that are definitely happening. 
  • Season 5: …is coming in 2016!
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