Undead Signal

You are a radio engineer restoring the signal in locations the dead have overrun. The horde deals itself poker hands. Whatever survives to the exit forms its best five-card hand, and that hand’s threat hits your health. You have two ways to lower it: drop the sum by killing or shrinking high ranks, or break the structure by scattering a pair or splitting a straight. Breaking their hand is fixing the bad connection.

Every verb costs something. Digging for loot feeds the horde. Loud weapons draw more cards. Weapons wear out, and a hit that fails to kill leaves you open to a bite. Rank doubles as health, so shrinking a zombie can accidentally complete three of a kind and raise the threat you were trying to lower. That interaction was never designed. It fell out of two rules colliding, and it is the one players quote back to me.

I spent the first five days of the jam on rules alone, killed three drafts, and locked a design document before the build. Balance came from a bot playing 300 seeded runs per configuration: the win rate went from a measured 19 percent to 37 percent across two tuning passes, and those reports still re-run. The postmortem has the numbers.

The September update, the Survivor’s Table, rebuilt the interface around one idea: every question the player has should be answered where they are already looking. Drag a weapon onto a card and the forecast appears beside the target. Right-click any card for a full-art dossier. Hover a keyword and its rule appears. Thirty-one terms and ten hand patterns live in a field guide. The game runs on Wavedash with ten achievements, two leaderboards, and cloud saves.