Ever hear of 7DFPS? If you haven't, well, now you have, and here's a quick rundown. It's a friendly competition where contestants have seven days to throw together a free to play FPS. Name kind of makes sense now, huh? No rules, just creativity, and this year saw some pretty impressive entries. The competition even caught the attention of famed Minecraft creator, Markus "Notch" Persson, who hobbled together his very own entry, Shambles.
It's straight forward zombie shooter where you try to take out as many of the green meanies as you can with your basic assortment of anti-zombie equipment; pistol, shotgun, machine gun and what have you. While doing your best to put down the hungry horde, the undead beasties are attacking armed and unarmed NPC's alike, which leads to the horde growing ever larger with each passing second.
It's a mad scramble sort of game, completely different from that of Minecraft, but it's fun in its arcade style, rushed madness. The zombies are a lot quicker on their feet than Romero once had them, always fast to follow. Zombies aren't the only danger though. If a stray bullet smacks an armed NPC, he won't hesitate to open fire on your sorry butt. Eventually though, you'll be forced to take the fight to these armed folks, as that's the only way to re-stock ammo. Likewise for health, which you'll have to grab from killing civilians. It's an clever balance act really, try to defend humans to keep the zombie numbers down, or take 'em all out and reap the drops for yourself?
In the end, it's worth spending a few minutes to see what else Notch is capable of, plus it won't pester you to plunk down a few bucks for more weapons or ammo like other free games. But regardless of your opinion, it looks like we can expect more games like this. Not shooters necessarily, but smaller games far from the ginormous scale of Minecraft. Notch admitted he enjoyed the hell out of making the game, writing in his tumblr, "Last week, I participated in the 7dfps and made a hectic shooter greatly inspired by Doom, called Shambles, and it was some of the most fun programming I've done in many months. This is what I want to do. I want to do smaller games that can fail. I want to experiment and develop and think and tinker and tweak. So that's what I'm going to do."
All the best Notch, we look forward to more.