Zombie Kill of the Week - Reborn News

Yeah, about that. I sort of may have lied about being back. I mean, I'm back for sure, but maybe not in the way you guys were expecting.

First things first, this announcement is actually not about ZKW-Reborn.
I have something else to show you guys..



The Walking Vegetables - Steam page

It's vegetables. Yes. You read it right. Moving on?


Nnno. It does not mean that. In case you haven't noticed, the profile and multiplayer servers are still running (see what I did there) and I'm still around, answering your questions and helping people out. So no, I will still support ZKW-Reborn. Afterall, I worked on that game for 6 years. I'm not just going to throw all that away.

What this DOES mean however, is that (again, if you've been living under a rock) I do not have any future plans for ZKW-Reborn. The game is finished in my eyes, and even though I had some big plans for future updates, I was not able to complete them, as I've been getting better and better with coding during the development of ZKW, and as it stands now, some of the code in the game is outright awful. If I were to make any big changes into the game, that would basically mean that I'd have to re-write the whole game from scratch. And that's not a really easy task to accomplish.


Ah yes, shall we move on now?





Is a game I've been working on with a friend of mine for the last year. It was supposed to be a small brainfart of an game, but then again, that's exactly how ZKW started it's life. Except, with one crucial difference.. Actually, two.

1. First of all, I'm not alone this time. Just think how good The Walking Vegetables can be, if I was able to make ZKW on my own basically? Now, I have two more people working on The Walking Vegetables full time! More on that later.. Stick with us..

2. Me. Yes, I actually did just do that, I listed myself here.
My coding skills have drastically improved from the times of ZKW. Even from ZKW-Reborn. I'm able to do things I couldn't even imagine doing when I worked on ZKW. Alright, I think that's enough for me to brag about myself..



Thank you!

So as I was saying, The Walking Vegetables started it's life as a brainfart. I wanted to do something else than ZKW, make something fresh for a while. I called a friend of mine, who I actually have worked with maaany years back. He told me he had this idea, this idiotically chaotic idea. Vegetable shooting. Shooting.. Vegetables. Because logic.
It was so stupid idea, of course we had no choice but to make it happen!

We started to work on The Walking Vegetables as a small free time project kind of a deal. Days went by, and I was asked to visit this local game event.
I rushed into one of those supermarkets, and got myself this shi..y clone xbox one controller, and made the game to work on a gamepad for the event.
I went there, and showed The Walking Vegetables.
And you know what?
People actually liked it. I mean, for god sake, one guy played it for over an hour and asked me where can he buy the game?
I didn't know what was going on. But later that day, I called my friend. Told him, that we had something in our hands.. Something much, much bigger, than we ever imagined (still talking about the game here guys. Stay in topic)

Thankfully, we realized that, and started to act on it.
Months went by, and we had tons of fun. Still Running team also grew to three people during the development. We got ourselves an in-house composer, who started to work on those radical tunes that can be heard in The Walking Vegetables.


Oh yeah. Sorry, I have this habit of turning everything into a wall of text.



The Walking Vegetables has a live Steam page that you guys should be checking out!
From there one can find even more of me blabbering about the game, and check out the radical gameplay trailer, and an actual animation that was made for TWV to tell everyone the deeeeep storyline behind TWV.


The Walking Vegetables - Steam page

And again, thank you all for sticking around! I've said this many times, and will continue to do so, but you guys are the reason why I'm making games. Stay awesome people!

Yeah, about that. I sort of may have lied about being back. I mean, I'm back for sure, but maybe not in the way you guys were expecting.

First things first, this announcement is actually not about ZKW-Reborn.
I have something else to show you guys..



The Walking Vegetables - Steam page

It's vegetables. Yes. You read it right. Moving on?


Nnno. It does not mean that. In case you haven't noticed, the profile and multiplayer servers are still running (see what I did there) and I'm still around, answering your questions and helping people out. So no, I will still support ZKW-Reborn. Afterall, I worked on that game for 6 years. I'm not just going to throw all that away.

What this DOES mean however, is that (again, if you've been living under a rock) I do not have any future plans for ZKW-Reborn. The game is finished in my eyes, and even though I had some big plans for future updates, I was not able to complete them, as I've been getting better and better with coding during the development of ZKW, and as it stands now, some of the code in the game is outright awful. If I were to make any big changes into the game, that would basically mean that I'd have to re-write the whole game from scratch. And that's not a really easy task to accomplish.


Ah yes, shall we move on now?





Is a game I've been working on with a friend of mine for the last year. It was supposed to be a small brainfart of an game, but then again, that's exactly how ZKW started it's life. Except, with one crucial difference.. Actually, two.

1. First of all, I'm not alone this time. Just think how good The Walking Vegetables can be, if I was able to make ZKW on my own basically? Now, I have two more people working on The Walking Vegetables full time! More on that later.. Stick with us..

2. Me. Yes, I actually did just do that, I listed myself here.
My coding skills have drastically improved from the times of ZKW. Even from ZKW-Reborn. I'm able to do things I couldn't even imagine doing when I worked on ZKW. Alright, I think that's enough for me to brag about myself..



Thank you!

So as I was saying, The Walking Vegetables started it's life as a brainfart. I wanted to do something else than ZKW, make something fresh for a while. I called a friend of mine, who I actually have worked with maaany years back. He told me he had this idea, this idiotically chaotic idea. Vegetable shooting. Shooting.. Vegetables. Because logic.
It was so stupid idea, of course we had no choice but to make it happen!

We started to work on The Walking Vegetables as a small free time project kind of a deal. Days went by, and I was asked to visit this local game event.
I rushed into one of those supermarkets, and got myself this shi..y clone xbox one controller, and made the game to work on a gamepad for the event.
I went there, and showed The Walking Vegetables.
And you know what?
People actually liked it. I mean, for god sake, one guy played it for over an hour and asked me where can he buy the game?
I didn't know what was going on. But later that day, I called my friend. Told him, that we had something in our hands.. Something much, much bigger, than we ever imagined (still talking about the game here guys. Stay in topic)

Thankfully, we realized that, and started to act on it.
Months went by, and we had tons of fun. Still Running team also grew to three people during the development. We got ourselves an in-house composer, who started to work on those radical tunes that can be heard in The Walking Vegetables.


Oh yeah. Sorry, I have this habit of turning everything into a wall of text.



The Walking Vegetables has a live Steam page that you guys should be checking out!
From there one can find even more of me blabbering about the game, and check out the radical gameplay trailer, and an actual animation that was made for TWV to tell everyone the deeeeep storyline behind TWV.


The Walking Vegetables - Steam page

And again, thank you all for sticking around! I've said this many times, and will continue to do so, but you guys are the reason why I'm making games. Stay awesome people!

and you have updated your Windows 10 to the creators update, then there's a very high chance that ZKW-Reborn (among some other games) can go into a plain black screen on startup, even though the game is still running (no pun intended) in the background, and you can hear the music.


The issue can be fixed in most cases, thankfully.
You need to go to :

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Zombie Kill of the Week - Reborn

and then find the options.ini file. Open this with a regular text editor app, and change the [WINDOWS] portion of the ini file as following:


[Windows]
CreateTexturesOnDemand=1
AlternateSyncMethod=1
VertexBufferMethod=1
SleepMargin=10


I know this is a stupid workaround, but as it stands, there's really nothing I can do to fix this issue. It's very frustrating for me as a developer, and I truly hope you will understand that this is not directly the game's fault.


As for right now, I, unfortunately, don't know. I have only now realized the link between the Creators update, and this black screen issue. I'm trying to look into it, and in case I find a solution (or if any of you know how to get around this) I will update this blog post to give the solution to you


If that's something you want to do, I'm not going to stop you from doing so.
But if not, no. You can still play the game on windowed mode just regularly. Alt+Tab trick doesn't seem to be working for most, but it's something you should try anyways.
For now, all we can do, is to sit tight, and hope that Microsoft will get this issue fixed. So keep your Windows up to date, in case the miracle happens!

ps: Here's some more info about the issue:

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues/W10-Creators-Update-broke-fullscreen-mode/td-p/5983995

and you have updated your Windows 10 to the creators update, then there's a very high chance that ZKW-Reborn (among some other games) can go into a plain black screen on startup, even though the game is still running (no pun intended) in the background, and you can hear the music.


The issue can be fixed in most cases, thankfully.
You need to go to :

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Zombie Kill of the Week - Reborn

and then find the options.ini file. Open this with a regular text editor app, and change the [WINDOWS] portion of the ini file as following:


[Windows]
CreateTexturesOnDemand=1
AlternateSyncMethod=1
VertexBufferMethod=1
SleepMargin=10


I know this is a stupid workaround, but as it stands, there's really nothing I can do to fix this issue. It's very frustrating for me as a developer, and I truly hope you will understand that this is not directly the game's fault.


As for right now, I, unfortunately, don't know. I have only now realized the link between the Creators update, and this black screen issue. I'm trying to look into it, and in case I find a solution (or if any of you know how to get around this) I will update this blog post to give the solution to you


If that's something you want to do, I'm not going to stop you from doing so.
But if not, no. You can still play the game on windowed mode just regularly. Alt+Tab trick doesn't seem to be working for most, but it's something you should try anyways.
For now, all we can do, is to sit tight, and hope that Microsoft will get this issue fixed. So keep your Windows up to date, in case the miracle happens!

ps: Here's some more info about the issue:

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues/W10-Creators-Update-broke-fullscreen-mode/td-p/5983995

So, as some of you already noticed, no-one was able to play the multiplayer for the last couple of days.
This was actually caused by me. I just updated the servers to a new version, and I kind of sort of maybe forgot to validate the new version number.


Servers are now validated, and in working condition, plus! if everything else goes according to plans, we should now have gotten rid of so called "ghost" players on the server. This basically means, that I won't have to restart the servers twice every week, but hopefully just once a month (for an example) should do the trick.
We'll see how this goes on the long run, but it's looking good so far (if you forgive me for breaking the entire multiplayer mode for the past few days)