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[Rumrusher]

dang the shovel makes digging really slow I also see you swap the week crouch attack with the standing hand attack which makes digging even more of a pain. using the shovel for attacking like you said is true not a good zombie killer, nor creates a push back or stun to allow you to kite one.

[Geti]

lalala machete and more resilient terrain.
shovel is also buffed.

Seriously though the machete is a little unbalanced, if you're good you can kill a zombie with maybe one or two hits taken.

[Geti]

Mixture of real life stuff and general lack of time has been keeping this slow, however I've got some vegetation sprites mocked up that I'll be moving into the game soon, once I've figured out how I want to code the vegetation objects. This terrain engine poses so many problems with that kind of thing.

I'll likely get a drafted design doc up before then though, and clean up the site. I might get a blog happening on the homepage, depending on the time commitment.

I might end up putting off vegetation to quickly implement mouse-based construction of forts, and maybe a prettier HUD (though considering the amount of spriting that's unlikely) because I'm going away for a week this coming weekend and it'd be nice to leave you guys with something to do.

[Geti]

It's a start. Everything is way, way too fragile at the moment. It'll be playable likely tomorrow night if I can tweak it right, otherwise by the weekend. It's just currently not fun to try to build things and them not support themselves when you think they should, or support themselves when you think they shouldn't, but it's nice to see something unnatural in game.

[sereneworx]

I find it very difficult to discern your player sprite amongst the background and ground tiles. Everything is too similar in brown. And while that may be intentional, it gets in the way of readability.

[wedieyounge]

looking good! awesome idea and concept!

[Geti]

I find it very difficult to discern your player sprite amongst the background and ground tiles. Everything is too similar in brown. And while that may be intentional, it gets in the way of readability.

Really? I've got the current player wearing light blue to ease people into a game without an overlayed HUD, most of the other characters will be quite a bit darker.. I might think about adding a "highlight" option or similar at some point then, thanks.

looking good! awesome idea and concept!

Thanks for the support

[Geti]

"Debug mouse" tile construction is in. I'm expecting there to be a million or so bugs and annoyances, post them and any other feedback you might have. I'll polish the items a little (there are a few issues with how they hit things at the moment that need to be straightened out) and get vegetation done before I leave for a week, hopefully.

[jethrolarson]

Looking pretty cool. I was wondering if a 2D minecraft would work, and I guess you're going down that path.

I think I'd make it so that you couldn't see what the ground tiles are until you've exposed them. So if there's a bunch of earth that you haven't mined it would be "mystery brown" or in some kind of fog-of-war state. This would also reduce the visual complexity of the screen which is pretty busy given how you've textured the ground tiles. You could then add devices that reveal squares that haven't been otherwise exposed.

[Geti]

I'll probably go that route at some point but for now I'm focussing more on the functional and less on the graphical side of things for the time being. Not being able to see where mineral deposits are would make mining a lot more interesting. It's also been requested that I make something that can detect how close to falling a tile is, which I'll probably do once the game in earnest is complete and I'm just adding fun functionality and polishing.


a cool screenshot from some other forums.

[Geti]

Got a little carried away testing out the limitations to celebrate the site looking less terrible. Very little coding was done today on this, a little might get done tomorrow night before I depart for a week though.

[Rumrusher]

wait so f-k re the different keys to use for building...
and you added a code that makes building more of a game of tetris than anything?

[Geti]

Quite a few bugs have been fixed, and the items now work on a raycast rather than relative positions. This means that firearms will be possible soon, hooray! Support hasn't been raised on the various tiles yet though, I need to do a bit of work on the actual support algos before tweaking those values (to prevent a lot of stuff from behaving badly).

Now, I'm going away for a week, I might be able to get a bit of work done on this but it'll be away from the computer (I probably need it).
I'll do quite a bit of design work on it though and hopefully I'll get the vegetation coding done when I'm away (if anything just to make the levels more interesting), though no promises.

oh also I got some work done on making unexposed tiles unseeable but I really need to soften the effect before I release that, sadly. However, I now know of an option for the super-sonic indication setup which won't take a horrid amount of time, so that's one step closer too, for all those of you that want it.


Rumrusher I don't see what you mean with the tetris..?

[Rumrusher]

that the blocks all seem to have a limit to their building even if their supported by other blocks.
a bridge tile can take up half a screen on it's own but any wall block can only hold up to 3 tiles of it self before breaking away.
this makes building a Tower Above ground close to impossible considering the limiting ways one can connect each piece with each other. Which is why most of the picture seem to be Holes in the ground fortified.
Now this might be me complaining about how the lack of info where I should be screwing around with how many ways I can build traps with this.

[Geti]

Made good progress over the last few nights, managed to get some time to work on it around seeing a million people (exaggeration) and driving 400km (not exaggeration) and got vegetation drafted (I want to do a lot more with grass and flowers, and I haven't even touched on trees yet :|) and made a basic "you can only see the surface of the landscape" thang, which took way, way too long in hindsight. I've got to reconsider some support stuff to get supports working over a much larger distance and actually doing good things for the background of tunnels, but the stuff I've added does a few good things for the atmosphere without changing the gameplay very much. oh, oh, also made "dust" gibs for damaged terrain, which prevents gravel showers from killing you so quickly but sort of makes killing zombies with cave-ins near impossible, so I'll see what I can do next time I get some time to work on it.

Working on getting a load/save system happening too. All I've managed to do inthusfar though is make the saves take a lot of time to load (much larger file) but actually loading the saved level didn't work at all. Only ~10min have gone into trying to get that working though, so no biggie. I'll work it out.

@rumrusher: Indeed, it's a problem and it'll require some work with the support system to work out. Towers are something I definitely want to be possible, so the current underwhelming support bugs me too.

[Geti]

UPDATED

Comments on the new stuff welcome.

The medical side of the game is going to be very important. Think medkits, disinfectants, maybe splints and whatnot if I ever split actors into components. Essentially, keeping your medical supplies in order will be important if you decide to take the zombies in melee, but there'll be a lot of other tactical opportunities (pitfalls, spikes, guns, bombs, mines, running like a bitch and trying to collapse the terrain on them) to prevent the "slash slash slash run heal slash slash" option from being the only one.

The "vanilla" (read: not needing unlocks) .22 will be a single shot bolt action deal. There'll be mag and clip-fed stuff too though. I'm not sure about what I'll do for shotguns at the moment... They're awesome and all, but I don't think straight raycasts will cut it so I'll need to get some sort of decent particle physics system happening (the current system doesn't work at high speeds).

uh, yeah.
oh, screenshot, this is about as long as the grass gets for the most part.

I'll get onto having grass grow and a spore dispersal system and whatnot soon, going to fix some bugs and maybe get onto the .22, but I'm bloody tired from flying today, got up at 5am, got home at 5pm. ugh.

[Geti]

UPDATE
Enjoy your gun. You've got 50 bullets on you at spawn, and it's fired single shot. There are some issues I'm going to work out soon enough, and I need some feedback on whether the current 30 degrees of aim difference is acceptable or if I should increase it to 45. I'm considering putting more aim angles in for firearms, we'll see what comes of that though because unless I change the system that would be a horrible amount of spriting. Sprites are placeholders, as is the bullet line.

Oh yeah, you can hit esc to drop back to the main menu as well.

[Geti]

Holy shit stats are cool today.
Average play time: 22:54!
For a flash game that I'm in the middle of making, ~20 minutes per person isn't bad at all. Yesterday (with half the people playing it) the average was more than 24 minutes!

Tiles destroyed to date: 314,511!
Zombies killed: 32,373!
All that for 1,455 deaths, in 2,017 games and 1,120 loads. Sure, it's nothing on a big release by Andy Moore, but I'm stoked that something I've only spent a few weeks on can keep people occupied for so long. I've got over 190 logged and processed hours (processing takes about a day) of play time. That's more than twice the time I've spent making the thing all up. Huzzah!

[PANPOMMA]

I enjoyed it, but it, and this feels strange to say, it feels too balanced. It feels fair. Zombie games should make the player feel uneasy, unsafe and on edge.
My suggestions are:

- Buried dead. There should be a small chance that you dig up a zombie, this means that underground holdings are no longer completely safe. They could even be a weaker type, having rotted down to skeletons.

- Unundead. Again, a small chance, but if they're walking dead in the first place, why shouldn't some of them just get back up after a while?

- Digging is too easy, I would add random hard rock to the landscape, forcing the player to make changes to their mining plans.

- Finally, zombies that can climb, jump and sprint would be fun. You can make them weaker like the buried dead if you like. This is to make higher safe havens unsafe. Oh and too give them a creepy vibe, maybe they don't care about themselves, jumping from high places and throwing themselves against gunfire and traps.

[Geti]

Thanks for your thoughts!

The problem is that i'm trying to keep some form of gameplay happening while implementing everything, so at this point (while I've only had the time to sprite two actors) the way I've tried to keep it kinda fun is to keep it balanced. Once the stamina and infection systems are on their way the game will get quite a bit harder, and probably a lot less fair.

However, some of those suggestions are very fun sounding. I'd thought of unundead before, and I'm definitely going to add more types of zombies. Digging is going to be slowed down quite a lot very soon, once there's a semblance of the construction system, but a more interesting subterranean layout would definitely be a good thing.

I very much like the idea of buried dead.. I might make it so there are some randomly buried skeletal zombies in earth and mud to keep the player on their toes, but also possibly mass graves filled with a good 4-10 zeds in some areas which the player could stumble upon.

thanks again for the in-depth comments.