Undead Labs

using our brains to save yours

Dev Blog

Ground Zero

If the zombie apocalypse hit each of our hometowns tomorrow, what would the world look like? While some of us live in huge cities like New York City and Los Angeles, many more of us come from smaller towns — ones that are strikingly similar to those in Class3.

As an experiment, we’re creating an “Undead Labs Outbreak Map” to visualize where all of us would be holed up during an outbreak. Help our research by adding your city, state, and country to our short form here. Next week we’ll share the results, so stay tuned!

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No World Order

The setting is our world. The time is now, except everything’s completely gone to shit and it’s happened fast. You don’t know why or how any of this happened. The only thing you know is that dead people are up and walking and that, if you’re not careful, they will kill you too. Is the crisis worldwide or isolated? It’s hard to say. You’re cut off from the outside world and everything around you is in total chaos.

This is the starting point for our open world zombie survival game, code named ‘Class3’. If you’re a zombie fan, you’ve thought about this scenario before. There are three big elements. The first is the zombies themselves. You have to figure out how you’ll kill them, how to escape them, and how to avoid them in the future. The second is other people. They may want to help you. They may want to harm you. That’s where things start to get really interesting.

And then there’s that third element: the world around you. Maybe you’ve never thought of it in those terms before, but odds are the environment plays a key role every time you picture the zombie apocalypse. It’s not just a backdrop. It’s a place full of buildings to explore and loot, abandoned cars for making a quick escape, firearms to collect and use, food stockpiles to raid, hiding places to duck into, and propane tanks to turn into the world’s brightest and most short-lived zombie welcome signs. It’s a world of endless possibilities.

Today, I want to share our vision for the world of Class3.

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Wherever You Go, There You Are

If you’re a horror fan, I’m sure you’ve watched zombie movies and thought “I could survive a hell of a lot longer than those guys”. After all, you’re prepared for this stuff — you’ve got a baseball bat  by your door, a survival kit in your closet, and a plan. That’s great, but won’t do you much good if you’re not home. And it’s not like the zombie apocalypse is going to send out a Facebook invite in advance, which means that most of us would have no idea where we’d actually be when shit hit the fan.

Take a look around. It’s pretty crazy how many places would completely suck to be in or around if zombies started running (or shambling) around — no matter how prepared you think you are.

Case in point: It’s my job to think about this stuff all day, but this weekend I found myself in a situation where I’d have been zombie chow if things went south.

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The Human Element

If the world was going to end tomorrow and you needed to get out of dodge, who would you take with you and why? My fourth grade teacher had us play this game a few times. She’d write a list of possible candidates on the board, and to really make us think, tell us that our life boats could only hold five people. We’d break into teams to discuss our options. Should we bring the doctor or the farmer? Would we rather have someone who could cook and sew, or someone who could build a house?

I didn’t think about it at the time, but at its core, this was a logic puzzle that distilled each person’s value down to one thing: the skills that they possess. When you’re thinking about building your “dream team” for surviving the zombie apocalypse in Class3, or if you’re debating what skills you think you’d need to survive, it’s easy to base your choices on similar logic.

You can try to picture a “dream team” of fellow survivors with the training and experience necessary to cover all your needs for weapons, food, water, clothing and shelter. That sounds good, but people are more than just a collection of skills.

When you really dig into it, you’ll see that this approach is missing one very crucial thing — the human element.

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