Bite the Living

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🧟 Bite the Living is a real-time-strategy game where you control zombies and attack humans.

Play

Play in your browser:

Or download for desktop:

How to Play

  • Left-click and drag to select one or multiple zombies
  • Right-click to move the selected zombies
  • Defeat all the humans before the zombies expire

Features

  • Strategic zombie control - Select individual zombies or groups with click-and-drag
  • Enemy variety - Face regular humans and armed gunmen
  • Upgrade system - Choose permanent upgrades between levels (speed, health, damage, healing, line of sight)
  • Progressive difficulty - 10 levels with increasing challenges
  • Smooth camera controls - Edge-of-screen camera scrolling for large levels

Background

The game was made for Pixel Game Jam 2025, which the theme was From the Dead.

We ideated on Excalidraw and decided to go with a reverse zombie game where you control zombies and attack humans (similar to Infectonator).

We chose KAPLAY as the game engine because prototyping is fast and it handles 2D pixel art. The game was bootstrapped from kaplay-template.

We used the assets:

We added the characters:

  • Zombie
    • Spawns when Human dies
    • Loses health over time
    • Does damage when it collides with Human
  • Fast Zombie
    • Spawns when Gunman dies
    • Shares similar properties as Zombie except it moves 1.5x faster
  • Human
    • Moves away from zombie
  • Gunman
    • Shares similar properties as Human except it doesn’t move
    • Shoots at zombie every 3 seconds (with friendly fire)

The player can choose one of two rewards after each level (except the tutorial):

  • Increase zombie speed
  • Increase zombie health
  • Increase zombie damage
  • Increase zombie heal after beating a human
  • Increase line of sight so zombie moves to human if it’s within a distance

The game has 10 levels. The initial levels are tutorials for the controls and mechanics. The later levels required strategy to defeat humans with a horde of zombies.

Check out the game and let me know what you think! You can find the code on GitHub.

Credits

Art

Music

Sound

Development