Most people join the zombie committee and end up hauling canopies. Jeff Steele went home and built an augmented reality video game.
Jeff is on the Zombie Bike Parade committee. He is also, as of this month, the founder of Xtra Round Games, a brand new Davis game company. Those two facts are related, and the story behind them is our favourite kind.
It started small. Jeff was going to put a code at the festival so people could try a zombie game he had been tinkering with. Then he kept building. He rebuilt the zombie with eight times the animations. He added levels. He walked out to Community Park with his phone and shot the game on location, on the actual grass our festival happens on, so the zombies you fight come up out of the same lawn you will be standing on.
Somewhere in there he looked around and noticed something. There are hardly any augmented reality games out there at all, and almost none that simply run in a web browser. “Such a weird niche to have a void,” he wrote. So he decided to fill it.
Then came the line in his last email that we have not stopped grinning about:
“So I’ve gone from ‘you can just post a QR Code at the event’ to, ‘gonna have a booth to launch my new business!’”
Jeff, we are proud of you.
The game: Davis Zombie Parade
Zombies come alive and attack in an augmented reality first-person “thrower.” Free to play on your phone, with no installation required. No app store, no download. You point your phone at the world in front of you and the zombies rise out of the real ground.
Your weapons are a water bottle and a carrot. This is a family game.
There is even a headstone in it, for one Doug Wheeler, “buried with the helmet he refused to use in life.” In a bike town, that may be the most Davis joke ever put in a video game. Wear your helmet.
You will be able to play it at the festival on Saturday, October 31. Jeff will have a booth at Community Park, and he is holding the launch for the day itself.
Xtra Round Games
Xtra Round Games makes multiplayer tabletop augmented reality games for businesses that want people to stay a while, plus bigger games for events, like ours. They are built to get people socialising in person, while still letting everyone hide behind their phone a little. Nothing to install, and they work on iPhone and Android.
Jeff is running a free pilot program right now: a business can try the system at their own place and see how it works, with no contract and no obligation. If you run a bar, a café or a taproom around here, that is worth a look.
And one more thing
Jeff is also helping run the Zombies Video Game station inside the Davis Arts Center on festival day, alongside Da Vinci’s Video Game Design Club. That is station 12 on the site map.
He is the kind of committee member every festival hopes for. Then he went and built us something nobody asked for, that everybody is going to love.
Thank you, Jeff.
Zombie Bike Parade Festival · Saturday, October 31 · 11am–3pm · Community Park, Davis · FREE.
