Interview with Zombie Battleground Game Director Roy Shapira — Part 2: How Do the Zombie Abilities Work?
Roy Shapira is the Game Director for Zombie Battleground. He is interviewed by Extranji, an active member of the community, to talk about the process of creating each new card for the game.
This is Part 2 of 3 in a series of interviews. In this clip, Roy talks about some of the zombie abilities and exactly how they work.
Check out the other two parts here:
Audio Interview (13 min.) — How Do the Zombie Abilities Work?
Transcript
Extranji: So when do Entry effects trigger? A lot of zombies have these Entry effects and there are a few ways for zombies to enter the field. You’ve got Reanimate in the Life faction. Do Entry effect trigger in those cases or is it just when you play the card?
Roy: Right. The Entry effect is usually triggered once you actually play it manually from the hand into play. If you have a Summon or Reanimate, then once it Reanimates, it Reanimates with nothing in the ability or no Entry ability.
Extranji: Right, that makes sense. I can see there would be a lot of some weird edge cases if a zombie were to retrigger its Entry effect on Reanimation or something. It would get kind of weird. So Entry effects happen when you play the card, and maybe there will be a few exceptions, but that’s mostly how it works.
Next on my list is, when do rank buffs apply? Because with Entry abilities, you can either have an Entry effect happen first and then your rank buff happens and maybe that can change the state of the board in between, so it’s like…
Roy: That’s a pretty good question. Rank buffs usually apply to cards that are already on the board. Once you play the card, it looks for cards in play, applies the rank buff, and then it goes into play and does the Entry effect. So if its Entry effect is to bring another card in, the new card doesn’t get the effect.
Extranji: Ok, yeah. I was looking at Zquall. That’s an exciting card. I think it’s really cool. It pulls these other cards out of your hand, but if it can’t trigger the Entry effect, that definitely gives you a smaller set of cards that you want to hit with it. That would have been pretty intense. A little bit too much for one card to do.
So there was this item revealed: Bat. And it says that it Distracts a zombie. Let me read the text here. Yeah, it says, “Two damage to a zombie and Distract it”. I’m kind of a stickler for wording and so there’s the difference between abilities and zombie types. Where you’ve got stuff like Guard, Blitz, and Destroy, that are abilities that a zombie can have. And then there’s types that are Feral, Heavy, and Walker. My question is whether Distract would interact with types at all?
Roy: That’s a fantastic question. Distract is kind of like an attack. So imagine that you have an attack and the attack makes someone dizzy. Let’s go to a regular situation where you have this bodyguard and he’s blocking the way into the club. You whack him over his head. What does it matter how big he is? You just walk around him, right? It’s exactly the same thing.
So if you have this [Heavy] zombie, and you whack it with a Distract, his ability — Heavy — doesn’t work anymore so you can just go around him. So it doesn’t work.
On the flipside, Guard, is a [special] ability: it absorbs your first attack. So if you whack Guard, Guard disappears but the zombie itself is unaffected. Guard blocks this entire attack.
Extranji: Interesting.
Roy: So Guard is pretty powerful. That’s why Air zombies are fairly weaker than the rest of them… because of Guard.
Extranji: Yeah, that makes sense.
Roy: If you put an Air Officer with a Toxic Officer, the Toxic Officer will be stronger every time.
Extranji: Right, right. Just in terms of their raw stats.
Roy: Yeah, exactly.
Extranji: Cool. Okay. Next on my list, we’ve seen a few cards revealed with the Blitz ability on them. We’ve seen BurZt, I think is going to have Blitz, and Azzazzin in Toxic. BurZt is in Fire. And additionally the Fire faction rank buff gives Blitz. So Blitz lets you attack the turn you play a zombie, but not the enemy Overlord. But then there’s also the type Feral, which does let you attack an enemy Overlord.
So next question is, if a zombie somehow has both Blitz and Feral. Either you give it via the Fire faction or some of the cards we’ve seen revealed right now show that they’re Feral and have Blitz so I wasn’t clear on that… But if one has both Feral and Blitz, which one takes precedence? Can it attack the Overlord or not?
Roy: Well, if it has Feral it shouldn’t get Blitz because Feral is like the big brother of Blitz. It’s an upgraded Blitz. Blitz can give you the ability to attack zombies and Feral gives you the ability to attack zombies and the Overlord. So if you have Feral, Blitz doesn’t take any effect.
Extranji: Ok. And in the Fire faction, I imagine, that won’t be too uncommon because you’ve got a lot of Feral zombies just as base and then the Fire faction rank buffs give Blitz. So you’ll be giving your Feral zombies Blitz left and right… but —
Roy: Yeah, but you’ll have to consider that when you use them and use the rank ability on Walkers.
Extranji: You have to strategize.
Roy: Exactly. The idea of the rank buff is to get your [Fire] zombies and put a pepper in their butts to get them to move.
Extranji: Next. So we’ve got this card, Vortex, which is one of the Water Generals.
Roy: Yeah, this one is interesting.
Extranji: His text says, on Entry he replaces all ally Water zombies in play with stronger ones. So that wording is just super intriguing. What is a “stronger” water zombie?
Roy: So basically the idea of this one is, the maximum number of cards you have in play — that he can affect — is five. Otherwise, it doesn’t have any place to land on.
Extranji: Right, because there’s a six zombie limit on the board.
Roy: Exactly. So if you land, and you have five other zombies, it [puts] all these zombies into the graveyard, and instead of them, he summons five cards with at least one goo cost more than the ones that he sent to the graveyard. And when I say “at least”, if you don’t have any with that goo cost, he will bring another one with a bit higher goo cost.
So for example, if you had a bunch of cards with goo costs 2, 2, 2 and let’s say 3 and 4. You scrap all of them, put them into the graveyard, and instead of that, [it] will try to find a 3, 3, 3, then a 4 and a 5. If you don’t have a 3, then he will bring a 4. If you don’t have a 4, he will bring a 5. So on and so forth.
Right now this card is in the balance phase. I’m considering that instead of taking these cards from your horde, as it does right now, he will take it from the Library. But it is a big question because it might get it to be too powerful.
Extranji: Yeah, that would be an interesting deck building challenge. You have some low cost Water zombies you want to play on the boad to upgrade with Vortex. But then you want to have just maximum cost Water zombies in you deck, leftover in your horde.
Roy: Exactly. But on the other hand. If you’re unlucky, you have an unlucky hand…
Extranji: Right. If you draw them in the wrong order.
Roy: If you draw them in the wrong order and you drop it, and he’s like [failed drop sound effect]. You have nothing to show for it, and you can’t even upgrade any of them. So right now it’s in balance, still in testing. It’s one of the newer cards that we just put into the Alpha, and we’ll see how it goes. It’s a fairly interesting one. I hope that it will play just right. It’s like those cards that you build a deck around.
Extranji: Yeah, definitely.
Roy: Going to be an interesting one just like Goozilla and Gargantua.
Extranji: You can say that this Water General’s effect is pretty “splashy!”
Roy: Haha! Well, I think Tzunamy takes on the splashy side, but yes.
Extranji: Alright, next on the list. There’s a card in the Life faction called Blight. What Blight does is, after a Delay of a few turns — it says three right now — it will place two 4/4 copies of it into play and then Destroy the original Blight.
What I was interested in was like, so you play your Blight, you play your Heavy zombies around it to protect it so that your opponent doesn’t kill it and it eventually splits. You’ve got your two 4/4 Blights. After a delay of 3 more turns will you have 4 Blights?
Roy: Nope.
Extranji: Ahhhhhh. Too bad.
Roy: Basically, think about it this way. Blight is like a pod. It has these weird plant zombies inside of it. And once it hatches, you’ll have two plant zombies roaming and they will be completely different than the original. They will have no abilities, just stats.
Extranji: I see. Okay.
Roy: Does that make sense?
Extranji: Yeah.
Roy: They will be called Blight, but they will be kind of like a Blight minion. But this is also a card still in the balance phase, so we’ll see how it goes.
Extranji: Cool, cool. So next, there’s this one card that the community sort of latched on to in early Alpha. One of the big content producers made a whole video about it. It’s called Sapper, also in the Life faction. And Sapper was this 4-goo 2/4 [zombie] and whenever he attacks… the text says, “Restore however much damage he deals to his Defense”, but in the game it was actually adding it on top.
Oneandahalfpint made this video where he put all these buffs, he put Chainsaws on [Sapper], he would play Puffers to buff its Attack and he would get this gigantic Sapper that was 20/99 in stats.
Roy: That’s awesome! Hahaha!
Extranji: So is that how that works?
Roy: Actually the Restore ability, what is does, it just Restores the Defense up to its original maximum. Unless you buff its Defense and the maximum was raised, he will only go to his original 4. Rather than unlimited.
It was just a silly bug. It’s actually kind of funny. It was always on the to-do list and it kept getting bumped. We said, “Yeah, we have to fix Sapper but we have so many other things that we need to take care of. We need to make sure that this is working, that is working, and so on.” Version 1.4 was right before PvP so we were so… we are still busy to get PvP working. Hopefully PvP is going to get into the next version, so…
Extranji: Ooooh.
Roy: Crossing fingers that we can start fighting one another, which is going to be pretty awesome.
Extranji: You heard it here first.
Roy: Haha! But yeah, we are super excited to get PvP going, so other things kind of got cut down to lower priority.
Obviously, as a Restore ability, It’s supposed to bump it up to maximum.
Extranji: Although if you have Sapper a Super Serum or buffed his health with other Life zombies then you can make him stick around for a while.
Roy: Absolutely. But then you get a Toxic guy and he will just Destroy it.
Extranji: Yup. Haha.
Roy: Haha. So there’s always an answer if you remember all the abilities and all the things.
Extranji: I like all the different kinds of counterplay there is. So early on, Sapper’s stats, I think he was a 4-goo 2/4 and right now, on the website, he’s showing up as a 5-goo 1/4. So he got hit by the nerf bat a little hard. I thought that was kind of funny.
Roy: It might be too harsh. He might get some of his stats back. But we’ll see how it goes.
Extranji: Yeah, definitely.
Stay tuned… There’s more to come!
Hope you enjoyed Part 2 of this interview.
We’ll be coming at you with more content each week, so let us know in the comments if you have any burning questions you’d like to hear Roy talk about in more detail.
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