Undead Signal

You play a radio engineer restoring the signal in overrun locations. The dead are networked by frequency: alone they’re just bodies, but when they align into a poker hand they become a coordinated threat that hits you at the exit. The whole game is one equation. Threat equals the sum of the five zombie ranks times a poker multiplier, so you win by subtraction: kill the big ranks to shrink the sum, or scatter the structure by breaking a pair and splitting a straight. It’s Balatro run in reverse. The enemy builds the hand and you deconstruct it, and the theme is the mechanic, because breaking their connection is literally restoring the signal. Under that sits a push-your-luck economy: digging for loot feeds the horde’s pool, loud weapons draw extra cards, weapons break, and a swing that doesn’t kill gets you bitten. I spent about five days on the rules alone before any build, working through written drafts and archiving the dead ends, then balanced the shipped game with an automated bot playing three hundred seeded runs per config until the funnel hit its targets. It’s live on Wavedash with ten achievements, two leaderboards, cloud saves, and player identity. My fourth shipped game, and the hand-drawn zombie portraits are mine.