I spent pretty much the entire weekend working on Zed Invasion, and then Monday happened. The more I thought about the game while I was at work, the less happy I was with what I was building. Not because it wasn't working. It was. I just didn't want to make another Android game. Lonely Ranch Games isn't a mobile game studio.

So I killed it.

The old version of Zed Invasion is officially archived, and I started over from scratch. It's Tuesday morning now and somehow I already have a "working" prototype of the new version. Zed Invasion is now a PC RTS. Think Command & Conquer meets Warcraft, except you're commanding the military against a Zed outbreak. Build a base, train troops, upgrade shit, and wipe out the Zeds.

Right now it's still ugly graybox stuff, but soldiers can be selected individually or as a group, ordered around the map, and told to attack Zeds. Zeds hunt soldiers on their own, soldiers fight back, and if a Zed gets the killing blow, the soldier gets infected and comes back as another Zed. I can even drop a barracks onto the map and watch the construction start.

There's no economy, no troop production, no objectives, no win condition. Basically no actual game yet. But yesterday morning Zed Invasion was a dead Android game I didn't want to make, and today it's the foundation of an RTS I actually want to play.

Yeah. This feels a hell of a lot better.