Zombie: complete.
Author: Adrian Hon
April Community Round Up
Community Roundup: April 2015
Dead Friends by Aria Bacon
It’s been a busy month in Zombies, Run! land: We’ve announced the release date for the All-New Zombies, Run! and Season Four, given you sneak peeks at new features, and shown off Shannon Ehrola’s absolutely incredible comics. But it’s not all about us. As usual, the ZR fandom has been hard at work creating amazing art, fantastic fics and just generally being wonderful. Here’s a roundup of all the best stuff from the past month. Check it out after the cut!
Art
This has been a totally incredible month for fan art, so I’m going to roll right on with the highlights. Check out all this incredible work!
Hanging Man by Templeait
Gal Pals by Skin–Stars
Valerie by madlyinlov3onda
Sam / Five by sapphiregamgee
Runner Five by poetiskt
Marmite by revivificating
Writing
With the launch of Season Four just around the corner, many of our fan-fiction writers have been looking back to the seasons-that-were and exploring some of the most exciting moments from missions past. Here are a few of my favourites. I’ve noted which pieces contain spoilers, so be careful if you’re not up to date. Give them a read!
First up, ZR Writer extraordinaire thischarmingand has some fun in this piece with something that happens nine times in Season Three. Spoilers for Season Three Radio
Next, soullessdaze is continuing their fantastic sequence of original-character-fiction. Spoiler Free!
It’s a question that gets asked often: “Why does Runner Five collect so many sports bras?”. Wonder no more, as straydog733 has provided the answer in this lovely piece. Spoiler Free!
Taking a look at some off-camera action from Season One, chimerafood has given us this excellent, harrowing piece about Sam and Alice Dempsey. Great stuff!
Finally sam yaos has written a fantastic poem all about the events of Season 3 Mission 46. You know what events we’re talking about. Spoilers for S3M46!
Other Fandom Things
Our final round-up section contains all the other interesting things I felt like including in the round-up, but didn’t quite fit in to the “Art” or “Writing” sections. Hence “Other Fandom Things”.
Here’s a really cool Runner Five cosplay from electricitytrick. I love this costume, and I think it’s complemented wonderfully by the photography – a great image!
Runner Five Cosplay by electricitytrick
The ever-hard-working Zalia has completed her latest round of curation for the Zombies, Run! delicious tag, which collects all the Zombies, Run! fan works from around the internet. You’re doing great work, Zalia, and the delicious tag is a vital resource for anyone who can’t get enough of the Abel Township crew!
Running can be hard work, as can surviving the apocalypse, which is why the brand-new Zombies, Run! positivity blog is a welcome resource for runners in need of some encouraging words. Great stuff!
Finally, sleepyempress has had a great idea for a community project: Draw Yourself as Runner Five Day!. We think this is a great idea and we can’t wait to see what you all come up with. As sleepyempress notes in the blogpost, this is open to everyone, no matter their level of artistic ability, so don’t worry if, like me, drawing isn’t your strong suit!
Phew! That’s a whole lot of great fan work to enjoy. If there’s anything you’d like to submit to next month’s community roundup, drop it in an email to matt at sixtostart dot com!
Zombies, Run! Comic Edition Part Three
Yesterday we gave you all a release date for the all-new Zombies, Run! and season four. Today we’re giving you an even better present: the third and final part in Shannon Ehrola’s amazing Zombies, Run! comic series. Check it out below and don’t forget to give Shannon the praise she deserves!
The All-New Zombies, Run! launches next Thursday!
It’s finally time. You’ve heard about the new features and the new interface, about our improvements to Season 1 and the Base Builder.
Now it’s time to tell you the all-new Zombies, Run! is launching on Thursday May 14th and with it, the first missions of Season 4!
The new version of Zombies, Run! represents the biggest set of changes to the app since we first launched back in 2012; it looks better, works better and has a whole raft of brand-new features. This really is the best ever version of Zombies, Run! and we can’t wait for you all to get your hands on it.
Get Tickets for our Wrap Party
To celebrate, we’ll be having our Season 4 wrap party in North London on Monday May 11th, and we’re giving away a handful of tickets to Zombies, Run! fans!
We can’t provide travel to or from the venue, but if you can get yourself there and fancy coming along to celebrate the launch of Season 4 with us, email matt at sixtostart dot com.
We’ll draw names out of a hat on Thursday May 7th and get in touch to let you know whether you’ve been successful, and where and when the party will be. We’re excited to see you!
Zombies, Run! Comic: Part Two
We always knew Shannon Ehrola’s work was something special — and your amazing response to her first Zombies, Run! comic proved it.
Never wanting to let good feels go to waste, we figured we’d keep the ball rolling this week by showing off the second of Shannon’s three awesome Zombies, Run! comics. So, here it is for your reading pleasure. Make sure you let Shannon know exactly how much you love it!
Base (re)Builder
Season 4 approaches, and with it, a massive update to the game you all know and love. You’ve heard about the reordering of Season 1, the myriad new features, and the brand spanking new design.
Today, we want to look at one more improvement: rebalancing the Base Builder.
First things first: Don’t worry! These changes will not affect your existing base. Anything you’ve built will stay built. Any supplies you’ve gathered will stay safely inside their stores. The following improvements will only affect runs completed after the launch of Season 4 and buildings built after that point.
OK, with those honking great caveats out of the way, here’s how we’re making your base builder so much better with the next update.
Rebalancing resources gained from runs: You’ll now gain three materials the first time you run any story mission, from the start of Season 1 right through Season 4. This should make runs more rewarding for new players, who otherwise had to do a lot of work to grow Abel. We’ll also be fixing a bug which has caused people to gain far too many supplies from some missions.
Result: No more massive surplus of supplies! No more materials drought in Season 1!
Changing building pre-requisites: A lot of people have told us that pre-requisites for buildings can be too complicated and difficult to achieve, especially in the early game.
We’ve taken a long, hard look at how a typical player progresses through the base builder and we’ve rebalanced the costs and pre-requisites to make this all a lot smoother and more intuitive. Taking Abel Township from a small pile of rubble to a thriving post-apocalypse metropolis has never been more fun!
With these changes, we hope you’ll find rebuilding Abel as enjoyable and rewarding as running to save it.
Zombies, Run! Comic Edition
Here at StS HQ, we’re always on the lookout for opportunities to show off fantastic work created by our fans, whether on Twitter, Facebook, or in our regular community round-ups. We’ve taken this even further by commissioning the amazing Shannon Ehrola (who you might remember from this favourite) to create three one-page comics that help explain the glory that is ZR.
We’ll be releasing the others a little bit closer to launch, but we just couldn’t resist sharing the first in the sequence with you right now. Check this out, and don’t forget to share the love with Shannon!
A New Point of View
This Spring, we’re planning an Abel Township-sized upgrade to Zombies, Run! Along with adding 40 new missions in Season 4, auto-playing of multiple missions, estimated run durations, and improved Spotify and Google Play Music support, we’ll be redesigning the app to make it easier and more fun to use than ever.
It’s tempting to redesign apps just for the sake of making them look shiny and new. The problem is that redesigns take time that could be used on other features, and they can confuse existing players. But there were a few specific issues we wanted to fix.
Note: These are all real screenshots (not mockups) taken from work-in-progress versions of the app.
For example, when you’re deep into Season 2 or 3, it can be difficult to remember what’s happened in the story without going to the ZombieLink website. By bringing back individual screens for each mission, we can now show longer descriptions of their plot, and you can also reveal a full in-app scene-by-scene synopsis once you’ve completed a mission.
Another issue is that Zombies, Run! can be difficult for new players to understand and navigate. We’ve streamlined navigation in the app so it’s easier to find and change run settings like Music, Tracking, and Zombie Chases, with more tips on how to choose the best settings.
Both new and long-time players will appreciate the changes we’ve made to our News and Help sections. Our redesign means they can now include images and links to useful and fun resources; and we’re adding a ‘Known Issues’ list so you can see which bugs and improvements we’re working on.
Yes, that really is a ‘Continue to Next Mission’ option; as well as a much more flexible way to control the length of your missions and runs. And thanks to popular demand, you’ll be able to turn off our new ‘Previously on’ and ‘Next’ on clips!
This is all aided by the fact that most phone screens have grown considerably larger. The first version of Zombies, Run! was designed for 3.5" screens; these days, a lot of players now have 4", 4.7", and over 5" screens.
We’re using that extra real estate to highlight important run options, and to include gorgeous illustrations for every single mission and running mode; not only do they help signal where you are in the app, but they also make sure the entire app is as atmospheric as our missions.
On Android, the entire app will be updated with a streamlined ‘Material Design’ that should work across Android 4 and 5 devices.
There are plenty more improvements coming to Zombies, Run! that we’re excited to tell you about in the next few weeks, so stay tuned!
ZR NYC
Picture the scene, if you will: exactly a week ago, a lovely bar in Midtown Manhattan, and the night closing in as a veritable horde of Runners 5 gathered to trade running stories, compare feels and discuss every possible aspect of everyone’s favourite post-apocalypse running app. It was the first ever official Zombies, Run! New York meet up and it was bloody wonderful.
Sean Palladino and Adrian Hon (Six to Start CEO & ZR co-creator). Image courtesy Sean Palladino – thanks Sean!
This is a post to say thank you to everyone who turned out to say hi to us, and to share a few glowing memories with those of you who couldn’t make it. You are all awesome, and it was unbelievably wonderful to meet so many fans of ZR and to put faces to names!
Swapping running stories. Image courtesy Adrian Hon – thanks, Adrian!
In no particular order, here are some of my best bits:
- Hearing everyone’s stories of getting fit with Zombies, Run! – you are all huge inspirations!
- Dorking out about some of my favourite pieces of fan work with their creators.
- Swapping Radio Abel playlist stories, especially the song Jack and Eugene met to.
- Pretending to understand the conversation while Alex (ex-ZR lead developer) talked mobile app development with some of the runners.
- Watching people react as Adrian gave out sneak peeks of ZR4.
- Sharing some of my favourite recording stories about how amazing all our wonderful actors are.
If you were there, let us know what your favourite part of the night was in the replies!
Zombies, Run! 