In most management games, you tell your units what to do and they do it. In Zombienautics: Mission Control, your crew is dead, and the dead do not take orders.
So we built the crew around stimuli instead. Every crew member follows light, sound and movement, weighted by how recently they were reanimated and how hungry they are. You don’t command them; you lay out a path of lamps, buzzers and lures and hope they follow it.
The first playtests were chaos. A crew of four once took eleven in-game hours to walk to the airlock because someone had left a monitor on in the galley. We kept it in. That’s the game.
Next time: building spacecraft without life support, and why the hatch is the most important part of the ship.