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[Ant]

Well I started this late and not sure if my RSI riddled hand can cope with a month of dev but I bloody wanna mak a gam!

• Game Maker
• Zombie survival. Each night you exit from your cosy mountain cabin down into the town for supplies to replenish your weapons and stamina.
• Focused much more on exploration and shrewd use of items rather than just blasting everything in your path.
• Most things will be selectively randomised.
• Explore different areas (streets, forests, etc).
• Simple RPG stats/skills. Improving stats/skills will be based on finding items.
• Health + Stamina bars to keep topped up.
• Combat will probably be a bit stealthy in the town. Guns damage more and use no stamina but draw the attention form zombies further away (less of an issue inside).
• You can only venture out during the night (I wanted to test out some lighting effects) and it will be constantly snowing just because I've always wanted to make a snowy wintery game around Christmas.
• Not sure on the monsters... mutated Resident Evil style zombies sounds interesting but I might just stick with the retro Night of the Living Dead style zombies... either way I want lots of variety!

Download latest build here: http://www.box.com/s/k4r0gcltst1yytrq8vmv


Player Controls
Arrows - Move in eight directions.
F - Shoot.
D - Interact with world object.
S - Run.
A - Open Inventory.
QWER - Use quick items.

Inventory Controls
Arrows - Move selector.
F - Equip Item.
D - Select Item. Move selector to another slot and press D to swap or F to combine.
S - Drop Item.
A - Close Inventory.
QWER - Assign quick items.

[anonymous]

very cool! I like the style a lot.  looking forward to it.

[Ant]

Thanks Tor@noko.

I started the engine early on in the week so I've made a few inroads into the nuts and bolts. I've got a basic streets area going, the idea is that there are 8 parts to the room which will have a random shop/fence/etc. Only a few of these will be explorable each time after which you return to your cabin.

I've put up a download though there's not much to see/do yet. You can move using the arrows and sprint with the A key. Zombies will move towards you and push you back if they touch you but that's it for now. I'll be working more on the basic zombie stuff next like some of their basic behaviour and shooting them up.

By the way I'm totally up for any and all suggestions, even if it's small stuff like making a few pixel tweaks to how the zombies look.

[Ant]

Well in the end I just did some gubbin stuff, added foreground objects, fake HUD, added a speech script which you can see by pressing S on the dead body and mostly working on the lighting. You can press L to toggle through a few different lighting items.

I'll keep the first post updated with the latest download. Hopefully tomorrow I'll get around to killing zombies.



Not sure whether to have a single stamina bar or split it into separate Health and Stamina bars.

[jotapeh]

I like the way this looks, creepy but good!

[Ant]

Thanks jotapeh.

Today I worked on some basic zombie behaviour and added a couple of pistols to test shooting out. The zombies now start unalert, but if you come within a certain distance and they are facing you, or you shoot them, then they become alert and follow you everywhere. You can press K to toggle through Empty/Beretta/Magnum though I haven't done the damage system yet, the beretta just does a constant damage while the magnum is there to test headshots.

What I'm thinking for damage is you make a random score out of 100 when you attack. The higher the score the more damage with each weapon having their own thresholds and chances of missing (there will always be at least a 5% chance of scoring a critical hit and miss). Being close to target gives you a bonus to your score. Each group of weapons will also have a stat which will also give a bonus when increased.

[anonymous]

I love what you are doing with the different choices of lighting

[mikejkelley]

I don't typically like stuff this lo-fi, but I like the atmosphere.

[Ant]

Thanks chaps.

Today I just added the reload code for the pistols and now the zombies shuffle about randomly when they aren't alert. I have work commitments over the next couple of days so probably won't make much progress.

[Ant]

Merry Christmas Folks!

Well I've been beavering away at this as I wanted to get something out before Chrimbo that at least begun to resemble a game rather than just an engine test. I've nearly got there and uploaded the new version though it's still ropey (I'll be taking a couple of days off). Just a few items are in but the very basics of exploring is there. So each night you head into the streets and up to two of the stores can be entered (the ones with lights). The shops are just a simple room so far with food in and a random item so you can see some of the other items. After you've explored everything you head back to your bed to sleep through the day. You can pick up dead zombies ears but they can't be used right now, they will be the form of currency which you can spend on items (though exploring will be the main way of getting stuff).



Things on my oh ma gawd need to do this right now list:

• Add a bunch of items.
• Spruce shops up. Add different types of buildings.
• Add store to spend zombie ears on (expensive but useful if you want a specific item).
• Add area outside of Cabin. You'll need to keep this clear otherwise you'll have to deal with zombies breaking through your cabin door.
• Add rifles (shotgun will be common, automatics not so).
• Add some more zombie variants (fat, frail, heavily infected, etc)

[ignaciobalbuena]

This looks promising! I'm at work right now, I'll download the build later and comment!

[Ant]

Well I'm gonna have to wrap this up due to work. Didn't get nearly as much done I had hoped but it's somewhat a playable game... just. Just worked on adding a few more weapons and items, added a store to spend ears on and worked more on the zombies, like making them react to gunshots, adding a more heavily infected type (just a skin swap for now) that's faster, tougher and has better senses, and sometimes zombies will now get back up or start the room down and get up if you get close.

[anonymous]

I had a hard time playing, it was running really slow.  What do you think is hogging all the resources?  Though my netbook is no beast.

Things I liked:
survival and atmosphere.
zombies

Things I didn't like:

The controls were a bit annoying.  I thinking it would have helped to stick to less buttons, and use sub menus for combining and other actions.

Sound but I think that's obvious.

Also I think it would have helped to have some confirmation if you could perform an action, like pick an item or enter through a door.  Maybe not confirmation maybe indicators? 

[Ant]

I had a hard time playing, it was running really slow.  What do you think is hogging all the resources?  Though my netbook is no beast.

Pretty damn sure that's down to the particles. I had to faff about a fair bit testing the snow/blood to make sure there wasn't any slow-down on my comp, which is a shame because I wanted Kill Bill levels of gore. Oh well, this was the first time I've used a weather effect so not sure if I'm doing particles wrong or Game Maker just has terrible performance for such things. I just uploaded a new version which will stop creating the snow emitters on room start if you press Z (it's a toggle so press again to compare).

zombies

I'm really bored of zombies so I'd like to do some sort of twist on them. I saw an indie film not long ago that had zombie-vampires which was an interesting take. So at first they are really slow typical zombies, but later on they turn more and more into hunched, agile sons-of-bitches.

The controls were a bit annoying.  I thinking it would have helped to stick to less buttons, and use sub menus for combining and other actions.

Well the reason I wanted a separate run button was that I hoped to make the melee more of a smooth beat-em-up, but at the moment it's clumsy and mechanical feeling. So a separate run button would make easier to do special moves like dodges and charges. But yeah I agree the inventory screen controls are all over the place and need a sorting out.

Also I think it would have helped to have some confirmation if you could perform an action, like pick an item or enter through a door.  Maybe not confirmation maybe indicators?

Yup I'll definitely add some Resident Evil style items flashes to indicate what you can pick up since I want to make the environment a lot more messy.


Also, if I continue development sometime I'm not sure whether I'll stick with the really low lo-fi style, might bump it down a scale so it more resembles Call of the Wild so I can get a bit more detail in (I think the zombies' heads especially currently look quite naff and it was bloody annoying trying to sprite tiny items with such huge pixels).

[mike_st]

Like the idea of this game but there were few things that made it hard to play:
- whenever exiting building I get a series of errors about missing sprites or sth but I clicked ignore and the game went on.
- there's a lot of trouble with picking items off the shelves. Most of the time i stand right by the item I want to pick up and an empty inventory shows up. Always had to change position a few times before I could finally pick up an item.
- I found all sources of light other than the lantern useless as I completely couldn't see my surroundings, imo its better not to use them at all.

[Ant]

- whenever exiting building I get a series of errors about missing sprites or sth but I clicked ignore and the game went on.

Ah thanks I think I sorted them out. File updated.

- I found all sources of light other than the lantern useless as I completely couldn't see my surroundings, imo its better not to use them at all.

Hmm... I just added a faint aura around the player which should make it easier when trying to pick up items. I guess I could widen the light beam on the torch/beamer but I'm not sure if monitor brightness is playing a part here. You should be able to see a zombie with a torch before it sees you.

- there's a lot of trouble with picking items off the shelves. Most of the time i stand right by the item I want to pick up and an empty inventory shows up. Always had to change position a few times before I could finally pick up an item.

I had a play around with the code which seemed to help but it did still sometimes do this and I haven't got a clue why.

I'll post the code here just in case somebody can see the problem. What's happening in the code is that when the player comes close to the shelf it adds the shelf's vPickUp item into the vPickUpInventory array which is used to show the item when the inventory screen pops up when you check the shelf. If the player moves away from the shelf then it deletes the vPickUp from the array. I ran the game through the debug and noticed that sometimes the shelf will not add the vPickUp to the array even though the vAdded will change to 0 which signifies it should have added it. No idea what the problem is.

Code:

// Add PickUp to vPickUpInventory when colliding with Hero
if distance_to_object(Hero) < 2 and vAdded = -1
{
  for(i=0; i<12; i+=1;)
  {
    if  global.vPickUpInventory[i,0] = iI_Empty
    {
      global.vPickUpInventory[i,0] = vPickUp;
      global.vPickUpInventory[i,2] = 0;
      global.vPickUpInventory[i,1] = id;
      vAdded = i;
      break;
    }
  }
}


// Remove dropped resource from resource pile
else if distance_to_object(Hero) > 4 and vAdded >= 0
{
  global.vPickUpInventory[vAdded,0] = iI_Empty;
  global.vPickUpInventory[vAdded,1] = 0;
  vAdded = -1;
}