Xoobis

Zombie Wonderland 2 is a frantic adventure starring our zombie cleaner, Chuck, and his beloved shotgun, Betsy. This time he’s going through the ends of time to get rid of those pesky zombies once and for all!

Visit Niceville again and meet some other memorable characters, some amazing new locales all the while shooting bizarre anti-zombie weapons, changing special bullets and protecting your client’s belongings.

All new: 10 levels, 26 zombies, 20 weapons!!! Travel through time, visit new locations, see old friends and new.

http://ZombieWonderland.com

We just moved to our new office in Venice Beach, California!

Xüber — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 22:50:44 +0000

Xoobis is proud to announce our new office located in Venice Beach, California!!! We’re very excited about our new location – but who wouldn’t be a block from the beautiful California coast! Plus there’s always the world famous Venice Beach.

It’s been a crazy few months as we’ve pushed hard to deliver the most amazing sequel ever in Zombie Wonderland 2. The new office gives us a creative and exciting environment with stronger collaboration and efficiency – while still having fun. At Xoobis our people are everything! Quality of life, following our gaming and artist passions, and truly enjoying our friends and co-workers are the best rewards themselves.

Zombie Wonderland Lite available at the App Store!

Xüber — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 19:26:06 +0000

There’s a new Lite Version of Zombie Wonderland out! If you haven’t had a chance to play the game, check it out at the App Store! It’s Free!

Development Diary #1 — The Birth of a Zombie Cleaner!

Xüber — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 19:33:34 +0000

Development Diary

Hooray! Awww…. Hooray! Awww….. This is our journey so far. It’s been a long haul, and there is still so much left to do. The story is an epic struggle about small wayward iPhone developers giving birth to a baby that started as a cute, cuddly little 3 month iPhone project and became a hulking 7 month-long monster. It’s been exhilarating, with lots of lessons learned. Overall, we are so thankful for the amazing opportunities that have come because of this.

A Little Background

Alex Hard At Work!

The idea for Zombie Wonderland was born soon after finishing a series of console games working for a large studio, and after finally having the time to do some original IP. We were at a street fair, and found a little vendor with really cool keychains, some of which were little cute bloodied monsters with big heads. This got us thinking…

The original idea was an 8 page document with a slightly different game on it. It’s still full of ideas that we may yet implement, like new maps, characters and weapons. But, looking back over it, it’s amazing how much a concept can evolve in a year. Much of that is due to discovery in how many resources, like time and money, it takes to implement certain ideas. And what makes a game fun.

What are we using?

Skype is the communication tool we use. With us in Los Angeles, but we are working with people from all over the world. Our publisher is in Great Britain, programmers in Nova Scotia, artists in Miami and San Francisco, the music came from Finland.

The downside of all this are the working hours. Most of our resources are up when we should be asleep, so we end up working late into the night almost every night! Sometimes as late as 5 or 6 AM. For our next projects, we are definitely going to work towards getting to a more regular schedule. 5 meager hours of sleep a night for months at a time are not that healthy.

Other than that, we’re using the Unity engine to build the game. It’s a very popular engine used by games like Guerrilla Bob, Predators and some of the coolest stuff on the App Store. Unity is really efficient. It enables 3D games on a phone! And Zombie Wonderland would not have happened without it.

For task management we’re using Google Docs, and for source control we’re using Subversion. Simple and easy! We’ll likely be upgrading a bit once we have some studio space, but for now, it’s perfect for our needs.

Chillingo

Chillingo called us out of the blue based on some screenshots we took. We had sent them out, and a friend tweeted about it. That tweet got picked up by a game reviewer in the U.K.…which is how Chillingo found us! All from a couple of screenshots. Never underestimate the power of telling your friends about your game. You never know what might happen.

The Launch!

The game hit the app store on June 11. Alex was up all night hoping that everything would go off without a hitch. There was a terrifying moment when Apple removed ZW from the store an hour after release, but then it appeared again four hours later without much explanation. We still have no idea what happened. At least we can say we have a real zombie game, one that was born, died and came back to life again!

In the days that followed, ZW got featured in Apple’s What’s Hot list—which in turn shot us up to #6 on the app store. We started getting ratings and feedback, and all looked promising. Even bad reviews were asking for more!

We immediately recognized that 4 levels were not enough for the hungry masses. We also ran into an interesting skill gap between people who are avid gamers, and people who aren’t. In one category, people found the game slow in the first few rounds. The other group liked the game, but found it a little too hard in later levels. Both groups mentioned that the game could be longer. That means that they were enjoying it. You know, time passes way too fast when you are having fun.

Since Launch

It’s now been two months since ZW launched, and we just released both the iPad version and updated the game to version 1.1, with a revised gameplay balance, some extra Chuck (our main character) thrown for good measure and some polish on existing weapons.

The big time-sink that wasn’t anticipated was that Apple doesn’t allow the same code for the iPad and the iPhone selling separately. This is so that if people buy the game on one device, they have it for the other device already, if there is no change in content.

Some other developers have avoided doing this by naming their game “HD” for the iPad version. They then would add a new set of levels or something that would make the game different than the iPhone version. We opted not to do this, because we wanted to keep Zombie Wonderland consistent and a single contained experience.

You may ask, “But what’s the time sink here?” Well, originally, we had 2 versions. One for iPhone/iPod Touch, and one for iPad, using the same code base and duplicated content in different resolutions. With the aforementioned rule, Apple required that we convert the code to one Universal Binary version, which took weeks to finish, as the main code was meant for a single platform, and we had to split a lot of hairs to get it to work as a Universal Binary. Interesting fact is that the game textures for the levels and characters are the same on iPhone and iPad, so what you see on the small screen contains the same information as on the large screen. Alex hates conflicting pixel densities.

On top of all of this, iOS4 came along with the iPhone 4 and bugs crept up on the older hardware because of the new system’s more demanding memory requirements.

As we were in hell anyway, we decided to hug the devil, so we tweaked the gameplay and added some new effects. It now runs more smoothly on the older platforms, the weapons got a little overhaul, and we made it more frantic from the get go.

Today to Day

Right now, as I write, Alex is hard at work creating power ups for the next version, the so called Wicked Spirits. You know, when you kill undead people, they let go some little twisted souls. And when you touch then, cool things happen. Some good, some really bad.

Oh yes. One final note. We’ve sold almost 100k copies of ZW in the first 50 days since launch. AWESOME! Thanks to everyone who is making this possible!

Thanks for reading our development diary. If you have any questions about the game or independent game development in the time of mobile, give us a shout.

Want a 30% Discount to the Appshow?

Xüber — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 01:30:07 +0000

Hey! Remember that thing about us going to the LA AppShow on Tuesday the 27th at 7:30 pm at Eater LA in Santa Monica? Weeeellll, if you want, you can enter in the discount code “ZombieWonderland” for 30% off when you go here to get your tickets! Sweet!

Zombie Wonderland is Headed to the AppShow!

Xüber — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 02:37:24 +0000

The San Francisco AppShow, one of North America’s coolest mobile app shows, is coming to LA and yours truly is going to be there!

Not only are we going to be there, but we’re doing a presentation in front of some of the biggest people in the industry. This is so exciting, that I tried to go find a logo for the AppShow to put up for this post. Funny thing, I couldn’t find one. So, I took a screengrab of their header and stuck it up there.

Appshow…You know what this means?!?!? Huh?! DO YA? Actually, I don’t know what it means either, except that it’s big, and Chuck’s gonna hopefully go global. We’ll see.

Here are the details:

It’s at Eater LA (3321 Pico Blvd. Santa Monica) starting at 7:30pm on Tuesday the 27th.

Tickets are $20. Lots of folks will be showing off some cool apps. Hope to see you there!

Vote For Your Favorite Zombie Wonderland Level!

Xüber — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:05:30 +0000

We’ve posted a poll on the Zombie Wonderland website. Please head over there and pick your favorite level and/or leave comments!

Zombie Wonderland is Top 10 on the iTunes Store!

Xüber — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 04:41:51 +0000

After just a week from being released, Zombie Wonderland has jumped to the top ten most popular paid apps on the Apple iTunes Store!

We’re not resting while there are still zombies out there to clean up. So, if you haven’t already, be sure to pick it up from the iTunes Store while it’s hot!

This is an amazing achievement for our first title, and we want to thank everyone who had a part in making this happen!