What is Zombie Holes?

Zombie Holes is a game idea created because I wanted to do a puzzle game, but also do it daily, like Wordle.

The basic idea is simple. You are surrounded by Zombies and they are Dumb! Along with that there are holes in the ground, and you must lure the Zombies into the holes without getting touched by one of them, or falling into a hole yourself. You beat the level when you finish off all the Zombies.

The game is turn based and the Zombies react to each move you make as a player. You can only move in the 4 cardinal directions and the same restriction for the Zombies.

There are two types of Zombie, and the only difference is in wether or not they prefer Vertical or horizontal pursuit.

Later levels could have appearing Zombies and appearing holes. And then inventory items such as Thumpers to attract the Zombie for a move, or Grenades to simply blow some up.

I have created 16 levels to test the concept out.

Starting with a low number of Zombies and a low number of holes, then increasing difficulty as the moves got more devious to get the outcome you want. For my final test levels I created the Thumper inventory object to see how well that could work.

I have designs for more objects such as Teleporters, Ice and the usual ground effect features from many games gone by.

Fable

How the Game Turned out

The game is actually quite fun to play and plays very closely to what I wanted in my original design. We even got to test the gameplay (having 16 levels helps here) with a bunch of friends. They all fared differently to each other on various levels, which was nice to see. Everyone was committed to completing the levels as well, which tells me we had something catchy here, and no one wanted to lose.

The Why did we shelve it?

So why did this game get canned? Put on the shelf, archived?

The answer is that I really wanted to make this a Daily puzzle game, but creating the puzzles took a Lot of trial and error. For example, I would create a layout, Zombies, Holes etc, and then test what I thought would be the puzzle answer. Only I had to keep trying other ways to complete the level, as there tended to be more than one way to do it. This made me keep trying and then modifying the levels to get them to be a certain level of interest and difficulty.

I then started work designing levels with more features and that took even longer. It was at this point I realized that adding more features made every level using them more complicated to make and test properly.

In the end the amount of time it was taking me to create the levels was too much. And as I did not have a generative way to create these levels (and I tried), I simply could not commit to that amount of time per level creation.

So the game is shelved, which is a bit sad, as it works the way I wanted, only… too hard to make levels.