Today, we are raising our guns to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of "Splatter - Zombiecalypse Now!" Throughout these ten years, we've experienced it all, and today we would like to share some details about our journey!

Before Splatter became Splatter, it started as a GameJam project in 2010 when it was still called Splatterwelten, a wordplay on our long-term RPG project back then called Splitterwelten (Shard Worlds). The engine and game were coded in one month, levels were created in TileEd, graphics were made by our friends and partners, and the audio came from free collections. The first iteration of the game even featured (our attempt at) Old-EnglishMen style text writing, which was later ditched in the real version. The few sentences displayed after dying are the only remains of that attempt. And the funniest part was the zombie noises, which were made by us. Players even mentioned that the zombies had an audible dialect of Eastern Germany we still ask ourselves how groaning and moaning can have a dialect. A few years later, we presented Splatter at the very first IndieArena booth at Gamescom 2013 with an improvised separation from the rest of the titles due to its age rating turning out to be P16. Splatter - Zombiecalypse Now was released on June 4th, 2014. Levels and design were completely overhauled compared to the 2013 version, and it contained two new levels. One of them being my personal favourite: the Lighthouse level. That level had it all: a turret scene, a small Half-Life 2-style riddle to move a container aside, and Steve, that slightly weird guy you can force to face the horde along with you. And the audio part this part is massive. [quote=Thomas - Lead Game Designer] "It's hard to overstate the effect of good speakers on storytelling. When I first heard my own words in the voices of professional speakers, I was thrilled. Splatter had 1,200 lines of dialogue even after several passes to shorten it, and the speakers seemed to 'get' the characters in a way I never dared to dream of. One of my inspirations was Max Payne II, and now hearing my own Max character scoffing about humanity was a feeling hard to compare to any other achievement in my life, including my wedding. Please don't tell my wife." [/quote] There was a lot happening since the release, including some adventures with a small US company. But in the end, in 2019, we were contacted by the Polish publisher Untold Games to port the game to the Switch. After some back and forth, they achieved this in 2022, which is quite a feat as Splatter uses a custom engine in C++ and my code is mostly in German. Apart from all of that, there is one crucial thing without you, the players, we wouldn't be here. THANK YOU for being a part of our world!

We hope that you enjoyed this decade, and we are looking forward to the upcoming years of Zombiecalypse!

[ 2024-06-07 10:15:20 CET ] [ Original post ]