Month: June 2018

S7 M19 & M20 Released

What’s that I see up ahead? Is that a tantalising cliff-edge to hang off? Ah! It’s the final two missions of Season Seven: Part One!

Distress calls, booby traps and daring escapes await in this week’s missions: Free Falling and Disco Inferno, which are now available in the app. 

You can download both missions from the ‘Missions’ tab of the app. If you’re a Pro Member, you can download and play both missions immediately. Otherwise, you can use your free weekly unlock to play either one. 

With the release of these two missions, that’s a wrap on the first half of Season 7! We’ll now be on hiatus while we finish production on the next set of missions, meaning this will be the final weekly mission release for a little while. 

As always, let us know how you enjoyed these missions in the comments! 

S7 M17 & M18 Released

Cue up the brass and guitar for this week’s missions, Paradise By The Dashboard Light and Inside Out. You’re not being dropped into the Kalahari Desert armed only with a toothbrush and a packet of sherbet lemons… but it isn’t any easier.

You can download these missions right now from the ‘Missions’ tab. If you’re a Pro Member, you can download and play both missions immediately. Otherwise, you can use your free weekly unlock to play either one.

As a reminder, next week will see the release of the final missions of the first half of Season 7, after which we’ll go on a hiatus while we work on the second half.

As always, please let us know what you think!

Our Casio Competition Winners!

I’m very happy to announce the two winners of our Casio competition: Dan Foley from Ontario and Thomas Heath from the UK! Both Dan and Thomas will each receive a Casio Smartwatch WSD-F20 Pro Trek Smart for sharing a ZR run log tagged with #zrcasio. 

The Casio WSD-F20 supports Android Wear 2.0 and has water resistance, advanced low-power GPS, and an incredibly rugged build. Plus it won a CES 2018 Innovation Award for Wearable Technologies! Find out more from their official website.

Here’s Dan with another Doggo Five in the background:

And Thomas in a race:

But there’s more!

We also have two more Casio smartwatches to give away to two long-time members of the Zombies, Run! community, who’ll be able to share what it’s like to run with the watches. I’m really pleased that Mary from the UK and Robin from Texas will be the recipients of these watches.

Here’s Robin with a classic ZR running visor:

And Mary in her European Rescue Force shirt from the Spring Virtual Race last year:

Thanks to everyone who took part in our competition by sharing their runs with #zrcasio, and congratulations to Dan, Thomas, Mary, and Robin. We hope you’re all enjoying Zombies, Run! 7.0, and keep running through the rest of 2018. Raise the gates!

State of the Township: Spring 2018

Welcome citizens! It’s been a while, hasn’t it? For most of this year, we were hard at work on Zombies, Run! 7.0, which launched a couple of months ago and included a full redesign that made it faster and easier to run. We also spent a lot of time updating and improving our systems to cater for GDPR.

Rather than spending a lot of time looking behind us, I want to talk about what’s coming up next in the Zombies, Run! world. But first, I want to say farewell to a few people at Six to Start who left the company since our last update – Lou Atherton, Brad Porter, Alex Benini, and Stephen Charman. They were all immensely helpful in the development and support of not just Zombies, Run! but our other apps including The Walk and Racelink, and we all wish them well in the future.

Technology

Zombies, Run! 7.0 saw an almost complete rewrite of the front-end of the app (the bit that you can see and interact with, rather than the back-end, which would include things like the “run engine” that schedules missions, clip playback, and chases), particularly on iPhone. This didn’t just make the app look prettier – it will also make it easier to add new features and improvements in the future.

One of the new features coming this year will be an all-new Statistics screen. It’s inspired by the clean design style we’ve used in the rest of the app, and adds a whole host of new information, including Personal Bests.

We’ll also be working to improve Accessibility on both iPhone and Android, particularly for visually-impaired players. On the iPhone, this will include major new features made possible by iOS 12’s new Siri Shortcuts, which we can’t wait to show you later this year.

Speaking of which, we’ll be updating all our apps to be fully compatible with iOS 12 and Android P (aka Android 9.0). This always involves more work than you’d expect, but it’s something that all app developers have to do to keep things running smoothly.

Finally, we’ll be reviewing our Apple Watch and Android Wear support. We know there are connectivity problems between Zombies, Run! on the Apple Watch and the iPhone, and we’re hopeful that WatchOS 5 might help with this.

Story

I’m really enjoying Season 7 so far – without spoiling anything, I think it’s one of our best, and occasionally I reflect on the fact that Naomi and her writers have been able to maintain such a high level of quality for seven years. Take that, TV shows! And there’s still a lot more twists and turns to come this season, since we’re not even halfway through yet.

Next month, our Halloween Virtual Race will be going on sale. If you like Jurassic Park and Westworld, then you’ll love this year’s story – and we’ll have some great new types of gear on sale, with brand new designs. Plus, we’re bringing back the ARG and website for this race!

Last but definitely not least, our Board Game will be getting a whole new set of side missions and stories, along with feature updates and bug fixes. We’re really pleased with how much people are enjoying the gameplay and story, and we think these updates will make the game even more fun and easier to play.

Beyond 2018

I’m really happy with this year’s release of Zombies, Run! 7.0. It’s not just a redesign – it makes the app easier to use for all players, new and old, and it fixed a lot of long-standing bugs. These improvements have been reflected in our buoyant player numbers and our steadily increasing subscriber base (which continues to be the very best way to support Zombies, Run!). And with the Accessibility and Statistics improvements we’re releasing later this year, all the core features of the game will be fully up-to-date and future-proof.

So, what comes next? We have big plans for 2019 that will bring major new features to the app, reaching areas we didn’t cover this year, and we’d like to give them all the time we have. There’s nothing to announce now, but stay tuned – and stay safe out there!

– Adrian Hon, CEO and Lead Designer at Six to Start

S7 M15 & M16 Released

We hope you’re ready, Runner Five. This week you’re going to be appropriating an oil refinery and giving Veronica a boost, in Long Train Running and I’m The Shark In The Water.

You can download these missions right now from the ‘Missions’ tab. If you’re a Pro Member, you can download and play both missions immediately. Otherwise, you can use your free weekly unlock to play either one.

As always, please let us know what you think!

S7 M13 & M14 Released

What a day, what a lovely day! We’ve got some well-meaning arson and a road war with this week’s missions – Castle’s Burning and Caravan of Love.

You can download these right now from the ‘Missions’ tab. If you’re a Pro Member, you can download and play both missions immediately. Otherwise, you can use your free weekly unlock to play either one.

As always, please let us know what you think!