We're really really pleased and proud to present a guest post from our good friend Pany at the oh-so-talented UrbanSquall ( Developers of Battalion:Nemesis amongst other great games ) not to mention the words behind the always essential GamePoetry blog.
Enough of my introduction, on with the show:
Zombieland: Bonesnap Boulevard
Intro:
This is a really late post-mortem for Zombieland which was completed at the end of the first quarter 2007. Zombieland is an endless side scrolling shooter written in ActionScript 3.0. The game was written with the Flash IDE 9 Alpha, and was completed before Flash CS3's official release date. The game is still playable at http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/378688
Zombieland was essentially a critical flop. It didn't garner enough eyeballs to warrant a sequel, and despite some really creative ideas, and the flawlessly crafted graphics, people who played the game had a hard time coming to grips with the flawed weapon implementations, gameplay experience and jarring audio. It was a fun project that was executed in a very short time period, but a few missteps ultimately damaged the gameplay experience considerably.
What Went Wrong:
1. Audio. The music in the game is at too high of a volume, and the compression was set too high. The result is that long before you ever see anything approximating a mute button you are assaulted with an overwhelming blast of scratchy static-riddled music. I suspect many potential fans of the game were lost in the onslaught of those first few obnoxious seconds. The great sadness is that the music is actually pretty good. A few minutes could have fixed these problems very easily.
2. Questionable design choices. Random is not fun. The game uses a very basic algorithm for deciding what sort of enemies to spawn and at that frequency. I think this only barely worked. Static levels would have taken longer to produce, but would have been inherently more interesting. Combined with other design blunders, like the constantly moving forward main character, the weak default weapon, and shoddy collision detection, Zombieland scared off most players long before they could come to appreciate some of the funner aspects of the game.
I'd say our rushed development schedule was partly to blame here, but it was also partly a lack of objective oversight.

3. Syncing gameplay and animations. In Zombieland, the majority of events are queued off animations. Firing, reloading, taking damage are three examples where I let the speed of the action be determined by animations. This could have been fine, except it clashed horribly with the fact that the character is supposed to be constantly moving forward meaning we had to do ugly tricks to maintain the illusion. The result is that most core actions in the game are very unresponsive which multiplied the negative effects of poor collision detection.
This was just a naïve misstep that was avoidable with a very simple design change.
What Went Right:
1. Graphics. Tim Wendorf, the artist for Zombieland, nailed the visual aesthetic. The 2x look, combined with the slick character designs really make the graphics the best thing about this game. There is a distinct possibility the game got away with its crappy core gameplay mechanics during development simply because of Tim's quality graphics.

2. Inventive zombie designs. Again, I have to credit Tim's warped sense of humor for coming up with some of the more memorable moments in the game, like going toe-to-toe with a wheel chair zombie, or having to face a stream of zombie porcupines tossed by an angry zombie cowboy. The Zamboni Wamboni was all mine, though.
3. Quick turn around. The game took less than 5 weeks of near full time development. We didn't hit any snafus along the way and we delivered the final build ahead of schedule, despite the fact that I was still coming to terms with a new programming language (ActionScript 3.0) and a new content pipeline (bitmap tilesheets). We shipped the game with gameplay flaws that only became clear after the dust had settled and it was too late to do anything about it.
Scheduling wise, though, Zombieland was about as good as they come in terms of everything just coming together right.

Conclusion:
The hindsight of almost two years since the game's release has given me some time to reflect on why Zombieland failed to achieve the success I thought it was due.
The most valuable lessons I can take away from Zombieland, at this time, is that I should avoid integrating slick graphics early in the development pipeline, and instead focus on prototyping and nailing the core mechanic and avoid getting seduced by a pretty presentation.
A part of this is getting more feedback on the gameplay mechanic, especially in those earlier stages, which can help identify issues with a poor random level generation algorithm, or crappy engine limitations, like bad collision detection and animation-based timing dependencies.
I'm hoping fate allows me another opportunity to revisit the Zombieland setting, as I think it was under served by a few key bad decisions that spoiled an otherwise solid game.
Panayoti Haritatos / UrbanSquall