We’re introducing 4 new weapons and 1 new power-up and each weapon will strengthen a certain skill that Hiro has.

• Axe: Increases Hammer Chop Strength and Range
• Dasher: Increases Dragon Dash Strength and Distance
• Deflector: Deflect Enemy Bombs!!
• Soul Drainer: Recover Health by Slaying Zombies
• Bonus: Want to use the Samurai Sword? You can now take them from Samurais by disarming them!

We’re still hard at work getting these weapons in and working, expect an update very soon! Until then here is some concept art of what’s coming

[Update 2014-10-03] The weapon update has been released on Google Play and the App Store version is being reviewed by Apple, it shall be released as soon as they are done!

The new scoring system is points based instead of kills based (though we still keep track of your kills), firstly this means that if you don’t kill a zombie but do manage to get a few hits in then you still get rewarded.

Secondly point rewards increase the more you use your special skills and also power-ups. The stronger the power-up the higher the score. We re-balanced all of the power-ups to take this into account and the game feels better because of it. More bang for your bang

The Google Play version is already live, and the iOS version will be live in a week or so as soon as Apple approves it. So if you’re an Android user you’ve got a head start on the points leaderboard, but expect some extra competition very very soon!!!

Oh, and we’ve given the UI a bit of a spruce up and here’s what it looks like! Hope you like it!

Combat

Combat has been the main focus of Zombitsu from the start and we always envisaged our zombies fighting back and keeping you on your toes, you are a ninja after all

Each zombie type now has it’s own special attack, while not every zombie will go on the offensive, some will and you’d better be prepared!

Watch out for the red exclamation marks…

Ninja Zombies

The weakest and also the quickest zombie.

Now armed with kunai (daggers) they can jump over gaps, off buildings and directly at you when you’re at eye level. A simple strike of your sword and you can dispatch them easy enough. That is if you’re ready.

 
Drunk Zombies

The slowest of the zombies can now attack from afar.

Armed with their wine flask and some flint they can throw bombs at you! Don’t worry though, they are not always a great shot (being undead and all) and tend to set themselves and other zombies on fire when they miss… But don’t relax too much, you’re still on their target list even when jumping!

Samurai Zombies

By far the strongest zombie to date.

Armed with a sword twice your size they will slice anything close by in two. Unless you use Dragon Dash or Hammer Chop a direct approach on them is not advised.

UI / HUD

We’ve changed the way health and mana work. No longer are they one and the same.

Originally they were connected and essentially gave you three lives, 1 from your mana and 2 from your health. Though this created a problem in making it impossible for players who get hurt even a little to find power-ups which require full mana to spawn.

Now you get three lives and a separate mana ring. Losing a life will not drain your mana, thus finding power-ups is much easier and makes the game more fun. Who doesn’t like throwing bombs at unsuspecting zombies more often?

Power-ups

So with the new stronger attacking zombies and UI changes things would have been a wee bit out of balance without taking another look at the power-ups.

So we’ve tweaked the power-up strength, time and range to ensure that you get maximum bang for your zombie killing needs

My personal favorites are the bomb and invincibility shield, watching a zombie jump into the shield, getting repelled into other zombies and taking them out just feels gooood!

Where Can I Get It?

The latest version (v1.3.0) is available for Android users and iOS right now!

Get it for Android here or iOS here and let the Zombitsu apocalypse begin!

For PaxAus I had our character artist Adi draw up four different designs that we could use on our badges, also with the intention that these would probably make good icon candidates.

From these designs I pulled out my best programmer art skills and drafted the following and put them to a vote in our local dev community, #2 was a clear winner. Plus using Hiro our protagonist does make more sense, along with showing that we having zombies through the name Zombitsu and sword fighting through our icon is a good mix.

But I wasn’t quite happy with how it looked on a mobile device, I felt it needed a little more punch. So I did some thinking and thought, well if we’re doing an anime themed game (i.e. Japanese) why not draw some inspiration from their old school flag too? This is the result and our new shiny icon!!

This is how the final 2d shaded sketch turned out:

Skipping forward a bit I thought I’d give you a juicy render of our first bad guy in 3d, The Ninja Zombie!

While this zombie may be the weakest of the lot, he is the fastest and if you let your guard down, just as deadly as the rest! Big ups to Alex our 3d artist for taking Adi’s 2d concepts and helping to bring them to life! Or is that afterlife?

In the next instalment I’ll post details on the other zombies and get stuck into the level design concepts, from very early and uh, the not so pretty (aka programmer art), to the current much much prettier designs

So the night before Pax, Troy and decided it would be a good idea to give our Zombitsu Pax build which was meant to be playable from start to finish in 15 minutes a go… 15 Missions, 15 minutes, easy right? The race was on!

Well 1 hour and 28 minutes later the race was over, in fact we had to finish it up on Friday morning :p

Not knowing what to expect of our first public showing of Zombitsu made for a bit of trepidation, this is how things looked before the crowds came in:

But things got busy, real busy! But the feedback and people were awesome! Just having you all play our game non-stop for three days was so much fun for us! Looks like you all had fun too.

All in all Pax was a great event, though we didn’t have too much time to do anything other than man our stand I did have the chance to try out a few other indie titles while I was there and the two games I will most definitely be hanging for are EPOCH 2 by Uppercut Games and Framed by Loveshack Entertainment. Both look pretty sweet and just show some of the awesomeness coming outa the aussie indie circles these days.

Following up on our concept art post last week, here are some more concepts of Hiro. We’re really pushing for an anime feel and hats off to Adi our 2d artist, he’s done an awesome job on the concepts! Which color scheme do you like the most?

But whats a main character without some bad guys to mix things up a bit? As you can probably guess from the name Zombitsu, the game has something to do with Zombies! Who doesn’t love Zombies right? Hiro!

I’ll post up some more concepts before we head off to Pax, so stay tuned

What is Zombitsu? Well it’s our latest title that we’ve had in development for almost 18 months now and is completely unlike anything we’ve ever done before.

Over the coming weeks we will be leaking details of the project here on our blog so stay tuned!

To get you started here is the first juicy leak, some concepts of our main character, Hiro.

Yup, thats right… Super Flick has now been ported over to Android and you can grab it on Google Play right now with any Android device running v2.2 or higher.

This is actually a pretty big milestone for us here at Ruma Studios, as now any new game we make will instantly be compatible with both iOS and Google Play. And yes, we do have a new game in the works due to be released verrrry soon.

More details to follow soon, in the meantime grab Super Flick for Android now!