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[dent2]

Maybe the easiest way to describe the game is "multiplayer real-time CDDA", but really it's more like a combination of Project Zomboid, CDDA, DayZ, and RimWorld.

I've been working on it for a while now so it's already a playable game with a dedicated official playtesting server.

The intention is that it's a simulator, so a lot of things are realistically modelled. When you eat food, it goes in your stomach and will take time to digest. Having a full stomach will make you sleepy. The calories from the food will be stored in your body. You die not from a simple hunger meter, but from running out of stored calories in your body.

You need to sleep. Whether you can sleep or not is determined by many factors, including the time of day (circadian rhythm) and the amount of daylight, consumption of caffeine or sleeping pills, your heart rate, how excited or anxious you are, etc. A full night of sleep lasts 2 real-world minutes about every 22 minutes or so. Since this is a multiplayer game, you will likely be chatting to your friend while doing this, or just studying your stats and making a plan for the next day. In playtests so far, it has not been a big deal. But it does mean that you are vulnerable, so pick your sleeping spots well.

Melee combat is based on the physics simulation - in particular, the amount of kinetic energy you built up. So if a zombie is standing directly in front of you and there's no space to move your fist, you will not hit them very hard.

Mood and stimulation are central resources. Spend too much time near zombies and hear them groan, and you will be anxious. If you are overstimulated for a while, you will get tired and will need sleep to recover from this.

Inventory is simulated harshly, but realistically. You can currently carry only one item per hand (in the future, slightly more). You need a bag immediately if you want to carry things with you. If you've played NEO Scavenger, this will feel a bit familiar.

Carrying heavy weights in your hands will tire out the muscles of your hands. You will need rest. But getting a full night of sleep will restore those muscles and make them stronger. The same goes for your legs.

Guns are also simulated harshly, but realistically. You need to reload each cartridge into a magazine, one-by-one, and you need to manually insert the magazine in your pistol. This can make for some quite stressful situations when you need to reload but your hands are full.

PvP is always on, and so is permadeath. The experience is a bit like DayZ. You have to watch out for bandits who might be after your things.

You have to keep up your mood by reading magazines on topics interesting to you, or eating chocolate, or getting exercise. You can take anti-anxiety pills if you cannot sleep. Every night you'll likely have dreams which can impact your mood positively or negatively.

It's still very early, but the game is playable and recently the average playtest session has lasted 2 hours and more.

There's also a lot of interesting things happening on the technical side. The game is written in a fault-tolerant version of Lua inside a C++ virtual machine. It's basically an Erlang-inspired environment where everything happens in many small concurrent processes (for example, each network message spawns its own process), and so errors are quite isolated. The server used to crash at the smallest typo, but this new architecture means it basically does not crash. If anybody is interested, I can share more detail on this.

For graphics, I guess you could say there almost is none. Everything is made up of colored rectangles. Eventually I'll add proper graphics but the focus has been on developing deep gameplay.

Hitting a zombie with a water bottle


Crime scene full of shell casings after a gunfight


The inventory UI, in the dark of the night


Cornered by zombies while trying to get some sleeping pills


Just a normal day


A section of the world map. Ugly, but playable for now


I'm looking for playtesters on the closed playtesting server. Send me a DM on the forum or Discord.

Discord: https://discord.gg/t8zszUznXY
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ZomWorld/

I'll be posting further updates and commentary here, on top of my usual devlog on the Discord server.

[dent2]

The focus of the next version is clothing and a small rebuild of the sound system. Turns out my calculations for how far sound propagates were wrong, plus the client did not actually use the decibel loudness values I had configured on the server-side. Those are used to calculate how far zombies can hear you. Now these values match up.

Hearing loss in particular is one of the things I've been wanting to build for a long time. The only other game I'm aware of that simulates it is an Arma 3 mod (apparently).

Working on sound made me realize there are so many sounds missing that I probably have to focus on it at some point.

Clothing was also something I've been wanting to add to the game for a very long time, so I'm pretty pleased I finally got around to it.

Would be nice to showcase here with screenshots and video, but I think I'd rather do an occasional bigger video, rather than with each post.

0.1.11.0 notes:
1. Implement wearable objects and clothes
2. Add mood penalty when naked or topless
3. Worn clothes drop on the ground when a person is killed
4. Rebuild sound system - sounds now play much closer to their real loudness values, the same as zombies hear it
5. Fix missing 3D spatializer for various sounds (gunshots, zombie moan, etc)
6. Redo footstep sound calculation, use more realistic cadence
7. Implement hearing loss when shooting guns without ear protection

New objects:
1. Wrist watch
2. Jeans, cargo pants, T-shirt, fishing vest
3. Tool belt, pistol and revolver holster, magazine pouch, knife sheath
4. Sleep mask
5. Earplugs

New sounds:

1. Heartbeat when heart rate is up
2. Tinnitus on temporary hearing loss
3. Dry-firing pistol and revolver (the click when you're out of ammo)

[dent2]

0.1.11.1 notes:
1. Add backpacks. Cannot use them while wearing
2. Fix grabbing
3. Add furniture back into houseJa
4. Attach backpack to player's physics body when worn
5. Implement firearm sights
6. Add sound when zombie receives damage
7. Add negative mood event when killing a zombie
8. Increase knife effectiveness
9. Add negative mood event if sleeping with clothes on
10. Enable turning/aiming when not moving
11. Add sneaking move speed
12. Make mood penalty from killing with a knife much worse than when shooting
13. Implement opening and closing containers
14. Require revolver to be closed to shoot and open to use ejector rod and make a bunch of objects closeable
15. Implement chamber and slide for pistol
16. Implement holding slide open to see chamber contents

[dent2]

Realised I have forgotten to post here. The focus has been on more detailed firearms plus a lot around combat (making getting hit with a bullet cause pain + ways to manage that pain to last longer in combat, etc).

Release notes for version 0.1.11.2:

1. Implement drag-and-drop for moving objects around
2. Don't show magazine contents if magazine in pistol
​3. make gun sights into two separate lines to more closely approximate real sights
4. Rotate player body using angular impulse instead of setting the angle manually as that breaks the physics simulation
5. implement alcohol and drunkenness
6. Implement stumbling when walking (walking in slightly different direction) + add vodka bottle + shooting becomes unstable depending on alcohol levels
7. Split 9mm pistol into two different pistols
8. Implement pain and painkillers
9. implement stimulation, alcohol, and painkiller decreasing pain perception
10. ​​​​​​​Implement bleeding injuries for zombies, they will bleed to death
11. Implement playing different sound when moving objects around, depending on material​
12. Add new sounds related to pistol, magazine, cartridge, holster, shots landing, etc.
13. Move shell casing when it's ejected from the pistol
14. Use the pain system for zombies
15. Implement shooting through windows
16. Add sounds for opening and closing certain objects (ammo boxes, backpack, gun case, etc)
17. if you rack the slide on an empty magazine, lock the slide back automatically
18. add button to remove a magazine from pistol. The magazine drops on the ground with a separate sound if the other hand is not free
19. Add sounds when clipping objects to the tool belt
20. Add sounds when wearing or taking off clothes
21. Implement two types of ammo - full metal jacket and hollow point​​​. FMJ bullets penetrate several targets
22. Rename the revolver to a specific model
23. Add sounds related to the revolver - opening-closing, reloading, using ejector rod, etc
24. change colors of ammo boxes so you can identify them from distance​
25. Make zombies move faster - this required a partial rebuild of the physics involved
26. make zombies not see behind them
27. Adjust many balancing factors - too many to list here
28. implement canned food that you need to open with a can opener (beans, pineapple)
29. ​​Implement bottle opener for beer
30. Make shooting a person's hand do damage to the person
31. Rebuild UI rendering system for higher performance. Should be much more stable on macOS now
32. Fix many, many, many, bugs​

[dent2]

This build adds a lot of new items, especially pistols. Worked on detailed simulations of pistol mechanics, including adding a thumb safety and a hammer. Now when you put a pistol somewhere, there is a small chance it will accidentally go off. The probability depends on a bunch of different factors, including whether the hammer is cocked or not, whether you're putting it in a holster, etc.

Interesting highlights from version 0.1.11.5, in no particular order:
1. Add different footstep sounds depending on the ground you're on
2. Add Partimov pistol

Comes in a fully kitted-out gun case:


3. Add caffeine tablets
4. Add soda bottle
5. Add hunting vest that is slightly smaller than fishing vest but is the same color as grass (so acts as camo)
6. Spawn all characters with an ID card

Since I've decided the game takes place in the country I'm from (Estonia), the ID card includes randomly generated names. Currently the last names are literally all just names of trees and this is not too far from reality.

It serves as world building but I have a few other purposes in mind for this in the future.



7. Add speed reloader for revolver
8. Implement accidental discharge when putting a firearm in a container
9. Implement shooting double-action (less accurate)
10. Implement thumb safety
11. Add M1911 pistol
12. Add Beretta 92FS-style pistol with a decocker safety
13. Add SIG Sauer P226-style pistol with a takedown lever (decocker)
14. Add firearm operating instructions to gun cases

Pardon the poor word wrap, will fix that later:







The Partimov instructions are particular:





15. Implement extending hand when shooting

Previously the gun was just next to your body, like you were shooting from the hip. It now extends smoothly - looks like an animation but is actually all physics-based, so the physics body is moving because of a force applied to it.

The gun looks a bit stupid currently because it's using the same dimensions as it is when the object is on the ground - lying flat on the side. I'd have to "virtually" rotate the gun while it's in the player's hand by choosing different sides to use for the dimensions. Haven't gotten around to that yet.



16. Don't allow to open-close or see contents of backpack worn on back
17. Move line-of-sight slightly inside walls so you see the color of the walls

A little hard to see, but you can see the thin outlines so you know those are actually walls or objects you can't see over:

[Ga-Vin]

This is such a cool concept, I love games like this.
What if you added parasites? 

[dent2]

Thanks!

You mean parasites like ringworms? The game is very reality-based, I'm not including any science fiction elements at all (so in that sense the comparison with CDDA is not that direct).

Here's the release notes for 0.1.11.7 (no screenshots this time):

Major new features:

1. implement chamber pressure and bullet muzzle velocity simulation depending on the specifics of the cartridge (including properties of the gunpowder), the firearm's barrel

2. Add SIV Essig in .357 SIG (a cartridge that is as powerful as .357 Mag)

3. Calculate gunshot volume from chamber pressure

4. Make loud noise cause pain, and make hearing loss go up slower

5. Pain decreases sleepiness until very high level (at which point it makes you pass out) + redo how pain perception works + make it decrease quicker

6. Usability improvements to drag-and-drop (can now drag anywhere on a window; drag outside of windows to drop an item; drag on an object in a container to move it into the same container)

7. Make zombies only be able to bite people who are standing in front of them (and fix their field of vision, it was off by 90 degrees)

8. Implement basic failure to eject - if this happens, you will have a shell casing stuck in your pistol, the solution is to rack the slide

9. Make hearing loss depend on the duration of the reverb (much stronger indoors)

10. add sonic boom from supersonic bullets

11. Redo bullet damage calculations. Bigger, faster bullets should now do exponentially more damage (e.g. .45 ACP, .357 SIG, .357 Mag should be much stronger now)

Minor features, bugfixes, and balancing:

1. Fix objects not showing up properly after dying and creating a new character

2. Make cargo pants bigger so you can fit some pistols in

3. Do the "slept with clothes" mood event depending on how long you sleep, instead of all at once

4. Add exception not to shoot shooter's own hand

5. Assign buildings, not spawn points, to people. You should not keep spawning right next to other people now.

6. Don't show mood and stimulation in the top left corner if they're in the green (around 50%)

7. play tinnitus sound only starting from a certain hearing loss threshold

8. Sort mood factors by their impact in the mood window

9. Make hearing loss drop quickly if it's low and much more slowly when it's high

10. Make the character drink water quicker

11. limit how many holsters and sheaths can be worn on a tool belt

12. make fishing vests less common on zombies. make them also spawn with hunting jackets sometimes

13. move caffeine and zolpidem impact directly to sleepiness instead of through sleep pressure. you can now see their impact in the sleep window

14. sort wearables in predefined order of body parts in the wearables menu

15. Adjust food and drink spawn rates, mood and stimulation amounts

16. Adjust many, many, balancing factors and fix many small bugs