Between outrunning zoms, dodging gunfire, and saving the world, it can be hard to keep track of all the supplies and artefacts you’ve found along the way.
To help out with that, we’re pleased to announce the return of the ZombieLink Codex! As well as seeing your runs and statistics, you can now check out every supply you’ve ever collected, and read all the details about those artefacts you’ve found.
Log into ZombieLink now to see which of the 100+ supplies and artefacts you’ve got so far.
As you’ve surely heard, entries are currently open for the Spring 2016 Virtual Race! You can find all of the details on the Virtual Race site, but in short, it’s a thrilling 5k/10k race you can run anywhere you are.
To whet your appetite, the 2015 Virtual Race is FREE for a limited period! Check the ‘Virtual Race’ category in the missions list for your free download.
It’s a race against time – and two rival settlements – to find some sweet treasure! There’s a vast booty of pristine candy that Abel Township residents are desperate to gain. Are you fast enough to win the day for Sam, and Abel?
If you can’t already see the ‘Virtual Race’ category on the Missions screen, simply restart your device, and it should appear the next time you run the app while connected to the internet.
Walk into the Six to Start offices, and you’ll be confronted by a literal wall of boardgames – everything from crowdpleasers like Settlers of Catan, Pandemic, and Power Grid to more modern games like Robinson Crusoe, XCOM, TIME: STORIES, and Tajemnicze Domostwo (aka Mysterium).
A great boardgame is a special mix of gameplay, storytelling, and social interaction.
We’ve wanted to create a tabletop game for a long time – some of you might remember our Nova: First Contact prototype that combined NFC cards with networked phones and tablets. Last year, we decided to take the lessons learned from that prototype and create a Zombies, Run! tabletop game, with Matt Wieteska (ZR Audio Director and Radio Abel writer) as lead game designer.
We can’t wait to share more details about the new game. It takes everything you love about Zombies, Run! – from its compelling characters and audio-driven story to its unique mixture of the physical and digital – and brings it to your tabletop. It’ll be an amazing experience for every Runner 5 out there – and for all the non-runners in your lives as well.
Our idea is so amazing, in fact, that it convinced the UK Games Fund to award us a grant to develop a prototype!
We’re very grateful to the UK Games Fund and the UK Government for this opportunity. This program is a fantastic way to support UK game developers like Six to Start, and a massive vote in confidence in our project. We couldn’t be more proud of the work we’ve done so far, or more excited to show it to you all when it’s ready.
We’ll post updates about the game to this blog, but to hear all the news, join our new ZR Tabletop mailing list!
In ‘main’ ZR news, we’re aiming to release our next Android update with Achievements in the coming 1-2 weeks, along with improvements to Training Plans and more!
Good news, trophy hunters: achievements have returned to Zombies, Run! Previously exclusive to the ZombieLink website, we’ve now moved them into the app for easier access. With full Game Center integration, you can share your successes and even challenge your friends.
Grab the latest 4.4.1 update for iOS and visit the Codex screen to see what you’ve already unlocked, and what’s left to earn. There are even a few secret achievements waiting to be found…
There’s a small selection of achievements to start with, and we’ll be continuously adding more. Fear not, Android runners: we’ll be bringing achievements to Google Play Games within the next few weeks!
Happy Holidays from everyone here at Team ZR! We’ve released a suitably celebratory bonus mission called Life Day, and you can find it right now at the end of the Season 4 missions list!
If you have a Pro Membership, you can download Life Day right now! Otherwise, you can use your free weekly unlock to download it for your holiday running.
Thanks to everyone who has played, supported, discussed, geeked-out about, and stayed fit with Zombies, Run! this year. We can’t wait to show you the incredible new things we’re cooking up for 2016!
2015 has been a tremendous year for Zombies, Run! – we released the fantastic Season 4, held our first Virtual Race with 2500 runners, and more than doubled our downloads to over two million. To top it all off, we made our apps better than ever with improved music playback, free Training Plans, Interval Training on Android, and Apple Watch support.
Not bad at all, we’d say! And now that we’ve squashed so many bugs thanks to our devs, QA, and beta-testing community, we’re able to embark on developing even bigger features than before – like our Training Plans.
New on Android
New on iPhone
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
Android
ZombieLink
2015 saw us launch Season 4 and completely rebuild the app. We’ll be honest – there were a lot of bugs to begin with, but today Zombies, Run! has never looked or performed better. We’ve reduced crashes, made the app easier to use, and added a ton of audio and running features. The app is in fantastic shape and the rebuild means it’s much faster for us to develop new features.
For our main app, 2016 is all about gameplay. Among the areas we’re interested in are the base builder, social/multiplayer features, and walk tracking.
Don’t worry – we aren’t going to wipe out your existing Abel Townships! Those will remain and simply get better. But we know a lot of players are motivated by improving their base and we think we can make that much more fun, particular if you do it with your friends.
Next year’s Virtual Races will get bigger and better, with more rewards and more excitement. We’ve been blown away by the demand for our Spring 2016 Virtual Race, and we’re planning to hold two or three over the course of 2016.
In 2016, we’ll also be completely rebuilding our 5k Training app, based on the brand new, battle-tested ZR engine. It’s likely that for both ZR apps, we’ll be requiring iOS 8 or higher; so if you have an iPhone 4s or above, you’ll be fine!
There’s much more that we have in store, like our upcoming book for Penguin, but we aren’t ready to share everything quite yet…
ZR is almost four years old. That’s like 40 internet years! In many ways, we aren’t an upstart app any more – we have well over 2 million players, and hundreds of thousands of people run with us every month. These are numbers we only dreamed of when we launched.
But here’s the thing. If you ask a random runner or gamer if they’ve heard of Zombies, Run!, they might say yes – but they probably won’t have tried it. And if you ask a random stranger, chances are they won’t even have heard about it.
That means it’s still early days in Abel Township. There are millions more people out there who don’t realise that running can be exciting, exhilarating, and most of all fun. We want them all to become Runner 5, just like you!
Zombies, Run! 