Salary Zombies by Scrawny
Life in the office is a slow turn-based crawl to your inevitable demise, at which point your remaining assets will be divided among the other salary zombies roaming the halls. The best you can do is to at least get a high score before you join the ranks of the unliving. Wear a snazzy rootin-tootin cowboy hat and do your best
How to play: - Keep an eye on your action queue. Use WASD to direct your action - After you take any action, so do the zombies

Where I'd take this with more time: - More actions (potentially gathered during the run, like a deckbuilding game) - Different enemy types - Upgrades maybe? - Different levels with themes and gimmicks?
Edit: Ported to WebGL
| Link | https://bitbucket.org/Scrawny_/ld50/src/master/LD50/Assets/ |
| Link | https://scrawny.itch.io/ld50 |
| Link | https://scrawny.itch.io/ld50 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/salary-zombies |
Ratings
| Overall | 174th | 3.682⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 186th | 3.614⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 48th | 4.068⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 108th | 4.045⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 231th | 3.636⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 284th | 3.25⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 224th | 3.114⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 187th | 3.5⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 24🗳️ | 31🗨️ |
The concept is amazing. It has enough randomness to be endless, yet I feel like I can considerably alter my chances at getting a high score by thinking through my actions.
I assume the current actions are chosen at random. I would love to see it not be random and use some kind of algoorithm so that the player can expect some actions to happen at least every once in a while for sure.
But yeah, just amazing!
I liked how easy it was to pick up and learn. My only real issue was that sometimes you lose due to RNG.
I think it would be really good if there was a hold slot, like modern tetris, where you can press a button to store a move for later, and it swaps with your current move.
An expanded version of this with deck-building and the choice of a few actions could be a best-seller. Incredible work!
@tellyhead Genuinely a great idea, that would add so much depth, wish I had thought of that
why did i think that door is exit?
and best result is 11 000+
One suggestion for a UI improvement... I found that I kept thinking the top next action was the current action. It might be less confusing to show the current and next actions all in the same list, but highlight the current one. Something like:
#### Action Queue
- > **Shoot** <
- Block
- Move
- Move
Thanks for the entry!
Very interesting game! I really like the forward-planning aspect. There's something very satisfying about chaining actions together and narrowly avoiding your brains being eaten.
Also, kinda got myself cornered a bit here...

But in general this game is very good. It's easy to pick up, fun to play, and thematically works pretty well.
I think the only real critique that can be made is that it could be nice to have some features for mitigating the RNG a little bit, as others have suggested. I don't know if such mitigation is strictly needed, but it could make the game more fun. One idea I can contribute there is that perhaps moves could be generated using a "grab bag" approach like modern Tetris games--essentially, modern Tetris games have RNG that will never generate a long sequence of S and Z moves, and a similar concept could apply here, where the RNG is designed so that there is a nice balance of actions available at all times.
My first score was 6927, my best so far is 7011.
One thing I like in particular as I play a couple more rounds is how paying attention to when the zombies are attacking gives you a lot of information and a lot more options. I didn't really realize exactly how the zombie attacks work when I first played, but their attack freezes them in place for a turn which can be exploited in some interesting ways.