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[Jacob_]

This is an idea for a multiplayer game that I had 3 months ago, and I've finally started coding it. Here is the original concept image:

The class list is temporary, and they might be done away with entirely if they don't add anything to the game.


At the start of a round, all players will be human, and they will have 30-60 seconds to find a hiding spot. Then one player will be randomly chosen to be the original zombie, but their identity will not be revealed until they tag a human. The game ends when all players are zombified, or all of the zombies starve (zombies must feed every 5 minutes or so.) I used the same basic gameplay in a Minecraft server mod last year and it was pretty popular for the short time that it was online.

Current progress: Here's a screenshot showing the graphical style and the simple physics engine.

[Franklin's Ghost]

Sounds pretty fun. Like the mix of worms and team fortress with zombies.

[gecko]

looks really good.

Maybe you can add classes to zombies too, something like a minimal level system. the more humans you eat, the more perks you get as a zombie.

[Jacob_]

Never thought about classes for zombies. I do want to make it as fun to be a zombie as it is to be a human, just so being zombified isn't seen as "losing" and a reason to ragequit.

Entity-entity collisions are working in the game engine now:

[DustyDrake]

The art is placeholder art, right?
because the way the ground is higher resolution than the ground is kinda unappealing

[Jacob_]

The art is placeholder art, right?
because the way the ground is higher resolution than the ground is kinda unappealing

Are you talking about the hastily photoshopped image in the original post, or the video/screenshot? I'm planning on keeping that visual style for the sky and ground (other than the big gray block) and probably changing the character.

[Kurt]

I'm really liking the artistic style so far. Although in the video, it looks a bit slow. Was that just due to the recording software?

[Houndninja]

Sounds really cool! Keep us updated!

[DustyDrake]

Pretty sure I had the video/screenshot in mind. I meant how the ground has a lot of noise to the texture, and the player is flat and looks to be scaled to 2x it's original size.

[Jacob_]

Pretty sure I had the video/screenshot in mind. I meant how the ground has a lot of noise to the texture, and the player is flat and looks to be scaled to 2x it's original size.

Oh, I see what you mean. That image isn't the final character, but I'm unbelievably bad at drawing humans so I might keep the style if I can get it to work.

First update in a while. I decided that it would be worth learning C# for this project, since it's pretty similar to Java but is quite a bit faster. Now I can get rid of the scaling (you can see further around you now, which will be helpful in busy multiplayer games) and add hundreds of moving objects without any significant FPS drops, and using the XNA framework makes some things much easier than plain Java2D.

I'll post a video of the C# engine tomorrow, along with the beginnings of the weapon system.

[Jacob_]

Here's the demo video: