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Zomberg

2016 · Design & development

A top-down survival game played almost entirely in the dark — the flashlight cone is the interface.

Everything the player knows comes through a narrow cone of light. Health and ammo sit at the edges of the screen; the rest is darkness that could be empty or could not be.

Limiting vision does the work that a horror soundtrack usually does — though there is a soundtrack too, and I wrote it. Composing for your own game is a rare luxury: the music can be built around the pacing instead of the pacing being cut to fit the music.

It is a v0.1 alpha, and it shows its age honestly: designed for a 640×480 window, which is why it now runs inside a frame of that size rather than stretched across a modern display.

It also solves a design problem cheaply: you never have to make the world large, only unlit.

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