Zpread

Jonathan Guernon

About this game

One bite, then another. Somewhere in a region of nine cities, two rings of countryside and three rings of wild, somebody has just been bitten. They keep walking for a while, dizzy, leaving drops of blood behind them. Then they turn, and bite in their turn. You are the government, and you run the dispatch.

ONE MAP, THIRTEEN TILES A SIDE

A hundred and sixty-nine tiles of streets, farms, forests, rivers and hills, stitched into one world with one street graph: cities with their own monument and twenty-one different attractions, a hospital, a fire station, two police stations, countryside with farms and hamlets, wild land with rivers that end in lakes before the towns. Thousands of people walking, traffic that queues, thirty-four species of animal, a day and a night, weather. Zoom out to the whole region; zoom in to one person and follow them.

WHAT YOU CAN SEND

The army by truck from the edge of the map, or by helicopter, four times faster and pricier. The police from the nearest station. The fire brigade for the fires that break out wherever there is chaos. An ambulance for somebody bitten, if there is still time: the countdown over their head says how long. Or mark them to be shot, and the nearest armed unit goes after them — before they turn, or after.

Quarantine zones that fence every street on their border; guarded quarantines with soldiers flown to every gate. Restrictions that send people home, where nothing can bite them, while the budget drains. And an extreme option: a strike that flattens a district, and everybody in it.

FIND THEM

Zombies leave a toxic haze along their route; the bitten leave blood. Both fade. The feed tells you where every sighting, bite, fire and arrival happened, and a tap takes you there.

THE Z BRIGADE

The dispatch grows with what you earn. At level two the brigade recruits residents off the street — in red, rifle in hand — and converts buildings into shelters that the neighbourhood runs to. At level three it establishes bases with its logo on the roof, its vans leave from them, and the army goes over to its colours. Somebody bitten who walks into a shelter turns inside it.

IT DOES NOT END WITH THE FIRST ZOMBIE

Bitten travellers keep arriving, more often each day. Nothing is won before the third day, and only when nobody bitten or undead is left. Every game starts somewhere else.

NO NETWORK, NO ACCOUNT, NO ADS

The whole game is inside the app: it asks for no permission at all and runs with the network off. French and English, switchable at any time. Made by one person, in Québec.