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[saibot216]

Everything just looks so awesome so far!

[Geti]

Sorry for the slow progress, I'm overseas Playable build with walking, jumping, shooting and endless hordes maybe coming in the next 2 weeks, but probably after that when I'm back home.

I'm interested in what TIGSdenizens feel a zombie game should amount to - a survival sim, a shooty bloodfest, or what? I feel that zombies shouldn't define what the game is really, though I tend to like games where the zombies function as a pressure on the player to do something and I think that's what'll probably happen here. I think a lone zombie should be a threat to a player with only melee weapons - you should be able to knock them back and potentially beat them to death if you have a sharp edge or a heavy item but you should ideally be running away as much as possible and avoiding conflict. I'm concerned that might murder the "fun" of the game though.

[Relix]

I'm interested in what TIGSdenizens feel a zombie game should amount to - a survival sim, a shooty bloodfest, or what?

Survival sim, imo.
There are enough zombie shooting games, but no survival sims with forts and item crafting/scavenging, I'd like something like that. If there are abadoned houses, I want to build my castle inside them, not into pre-defined places. If there are shopping malls filled with zombies, I want to sneak around them for suplies and maybe to find other survivors, not to get "Kill 1,000,000,000 zombies in 10seconds" achivements.

But that's just me.

[Netsu]

I'm interested in what TIGSdenizens feel a zombie game should amount to - a survival sim, a shooty bloodfest, or what?

Survival sim, imo.
There are enough zombie shooting games, but no survival sims with forts and item crafting/scavenging, I'd like something like that. If there are abadoned houses, I want to build my castle inside them, not into pre-defined places. If there are shopping malls filled with zombies, I want to sneak around them for suplies and maybe to find other survivors, not to get "Kill 1,000,000,000 zombies in 10seconds" achivements.

But that's just me.

Yep, I feel the same way. And I think making even a lone zombie be dangerous could turn out great. You should be running away or defending, definitely not attacking.

[Cosr]

Another yes to the survival sim. Not that bloodfests can't be fun, but there's probably enough of them.

Personally, I tend to get excited at the prospect of survival horror games that promise to actually be about survival (and horror, as opposed to just being an action game with jump scares; the horror of survival?). Not that zombie games are necessarily survival horror.

[BlueSweatshirt]

Technically, you probably should still be able to engage in uber zombie killfest.

You should give the player real problems though, which make this less viable.
e.g. only having so much ammo.
And also death is true death. You die and the current game is over. It forces the player to value their life.

[Geti]

I've always been a believer in perma-death so I'm glad you've brought that up. I'm interested in seeing if preserving the world in a current save could work - when you die, the world itself doesn't change except you're dead. If you can only "start the game" in one of a few preset locations within the world (perhaps unlockable over the course of the game) then that could promote playing the world more than the character while still making you value your life - dying would mean you'd have to scavenge back your keys, items and ammo from your body, which might have left the area!

This does mean that a player's fort stays put even if they die, however I don't think "story mode" is going to encourage staying in one place forever. A well-made fort might let you survive for days on end but won't progress the story any more.

"Survival" mode certainly wouldn't give the player the ability to play the same area again though, ideally that would be on a random map with a more or less equal distribution of resources.

[Lizardheim]

Could always have different versions of survival, like successive survival etc.
DF like passaround game.

[BomberTREE]

So have you guys started working on an engine yet? 

[Geti]

Yes.



It's a start, just pulling the basics together to actually use the graphics in something, no support code or aiming code yet <_<

[BlueSweatshirt]

Tangent:
What OS/Shell are you using? That looks interesting.(and somewhat dated, graphically)

[Geti]

Arch Linux. Haven't re-cusomised this lappy yet so settling for matte black everything

WM = Openbox + Panels = tint2 and conky + wallpaper = nitrogen. DEs are for noobs. Thinking of migrating to pekwm soon and getting a more programmable panel like bm or pypanel.

[BlueSweatshirt]

Oh nice. 

Sorry for pestering you, but what setup do you use for flash development? I haven't really found any good ways to develop flash on Linux, and I'd really like to.

[EDIT]
That's hardcore. I'd die without a DE of some kind.

[Geti]

Flex for building, Geany for coding. That applies on windows as well. I just use the CLI tools, you don't really need much else (mxmlc + the base class to compile + any arguments. I've statically linked the runtime shared libs there because of a flash player bug that may or may not exist anymore where embedded text files caused a lockup. Not so fun.)

I pixel in Photoshop when on windows/mac and Gimp under linux. Sound usually goes through audacity at some point.

I'm mostly kidding about the DE comment I think they go more or less against how I believe UNIX should exist though, as they aren't exactly easily interchangeable. When you split them up into a Window Manager, Panel, Wallpaper Manager and Compositor you're closer to my ideal system - you should be able to substitute a different binary in any of those slots without compromising anything else (eg swap openbox for dwm or pekwm, conky and tint for bmpanel, xcompmgr for compiz etc.) For the most part you can do this with a DE like gnome, but as all the software is designed to work together you'll be missing functionality anyway.

/rambling

[BlueSweatshirt]

The ranting is fine! I'm really interested in that kind of stuff. I've always been too scared to get myself to use anything but a full DE.(same with command-line tools, actually, but it looks like I'll be giving those a shot before too long.) The idea of having such a fragmented desktop experience feels kind of intimidating to try to work with. The stuff does interest me, though, and I almost feel like trying to take a shot at one myself.(for some reason, UI design fascinates me.)

[Geti]

Update game-wise. Now has zombies in game (no pathfinding yet, just left and right movement + autoattack) and shooting those zombies, no UI though.


CLI tools are a piece of piss once you start actually using the command line for anything. Seriously, all I do to build flash apps is point mxmlc at the root class (the one that extends FlxGame in flixel apps). I use CLI tools for updating this laptop and half the time to halt the damned thing because it's faster than clicking a few buttons in a menu.

One of the best things I've done for my knowledge of computer science and my comfort with a black screen and blinking text is making myself install and use Arch on a low-end laptop for a while (it's now my distro of choice). After you run the installer you end up with essentially a clean UNIX box with pacman and the core utils - you install everything including X, your drivers, and the software you'll use from day to day. The end result is knowing exactly where everything in your computer is, and exactly what everything on your computer does. Even if you installed the xfce (or Gnome, or KDE) you'd still have the experience of setting up an environment that those would be able to run in - you'd still have to dig around in config files and compile things. It's worthwhile if you've got a week or so spare to pull everything together.

[Netsu]

I'm rarely interested in the platformers posted on TIG but I really can't wait till it looks like the mockups
BTW is this tint2?

[Greg Game Man]

Looks fun! I always dig your colors geti, also imo the hud looked best just as the plain gun, it doesnt need to draw the eye too much (only white on screen) because you can see what gun your guy has pretty easily, and one click of the mouse will let you know.

Every dev dreams up a zombie game, i hope yours will bring something new to the table

[Geti]

BTW is this tint2?

...Is what tint2? My lower panel? Yes it is.

@Greg Sergeant: I've dreamed up a good number of zombie games now, hahah. We'll see how it works out as a collab I think I'll do a slight overhaul of the HUD to reflect how the items will be used more later on if I can stand pixelling with a trackpad <_<

[saibot216]

IMHO, I think it should be scaled down a bit. I like my pixels looking as crisp as an autumn day!