Dead Zone RTS: Ahmad Saeed

It was an incredibly fun experience vibe coding this game from scratch using Claude Code and Codex. It only took about four weeks in total. What a time to be a maker.

Zombie survival meets real-time strategy. Dead Zone is a browser-based game that runs entirely on the front end, rendered with HTML Canvas. To stay alive, you must fortify your defences against hordes of zombies, scavenge supplies, build your camp and keep it lit through the night.

Dead Zone RTS in daylight, showing survivors among guard towers, a clinic and other camp buildings — Building up the camp while it's still light.

Supplies have to be found and hauled back to camp. Sending people farther out can bring back more, but it also means running into zombies that have been waiting out there. Back at the base, there are walls, guard towers and places to train and heal your survivors.

Night makes things a bit more interesting. Vision shrinks, and defenders can only shoot zombies they can see in the light. Light towers and flares help keep the perimeter visible, so lighting the camp becomes part of building its defenses.

The same zombie-survival game at night, with the camp lit against a dark map and a warning of an incoming wave from the west and north — Night time, with another wave on the way.

Sprite animation

With no tooling other than those models, the graphics took several tries to get right. I went through some pains teaching Codex a strategy to create high-quality sprite animations of rigged 3D figures. It paid off in the end, and it's now encoded into a skill you can find here.

The game uses directional walking and running animations for its survivors and zombies.