While I love game jams, the itch to start a longer term sanity project has been gnawing at me lately... so I finally decided to listen to it! I want to use this project as an excuse to try and learn new things, so I decided to try something I've never done before:
an online multiplayer game. The plan is to make it using
Construct 3.
I want to make an infection game like one of my favorite multiplayer mods ever,
Zombie Plague for Counter-Strike 1.6. It's a cool mod where one player starts as a zombie and has to infect the other human players to turn them into zombies. But how will I make my game special?
Thing is... I hated most of the ZP servers I found. They were bloated with extra weapons, zombie types and power-ups and most of maps heavily favored humans over zombies. What I want to replicate with this game is the one server I loved. It was quite unique compared to other servers: it used the vanilla version of ZP, and only used traditional CS 1.6 maps. The latter in particular sounds a bit weird, but hear me out, it improved the gameplay in multiple ways.
An important aspect is
darkness. Zombies are slower than humans and can only use melee attacks, but their great advantage is having night-vision. Humans have to use flash lights and light grenades to see something, but since both were limited resources choosing when and where to use them was exciting. The problem is that most ZP servers I visited had enough lighting for humans to see zombies without items, thus killing any need for resource management and weakening zombie's main advantage.
Why were traditional CS 1.6 maps good you wonder? Because of their
multiple routes. By having 2 or 3 roads to any location, there was no perfect place to camp as a human and zombies could attack from multiple directions, increasing the stakes and making it exciting. What I hated about zombie specific maps is that there were too many areas with only one way in/out, making it easy for humans to spot zombies and shoot them down before they even got close.
So that's the plan... but I have to learn multiplayer first! I'll be sharing my slow (but hopefully steady) progress with that here, and eventually I'll move on to developing the actual game. Wish me luck!
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