Tag: zombie

Dead Rising

Reviews

This week’s Zombie Wednesday is going to stray, just a little, from my thoughts on the Zombie MMO I would design, and take a look at one of the best Zombie games I’ve seen in a long while: Dead Rising. Taking a look at this game shows alot of the play style elements that I want in my own game, minus the shady organization giving you missions. If it can be picked up, it is a weapon or it is food.

One of the things that I love most about it is the variety of zombies. Some almost run toward you, some shamble, some barely even notice you at all until you get right on top of them, some grab at you slow, some lunge quick once you are in range, and more, and any combination of those. It shows that much can be done without breaking the traditional zombie standards.

Personally, this is the first time I’ve encountered the “Save progress but Start over” type of game. As you level and learn new tricks, you can save your game and keep going, and if you die you have the option of loading that save and losing everything you’ve done since then, or saving your character progress and starting back at the beginning. This method results in some odd happenings sometimes. My brother, for example, was playing and got to a point where the main character is kidnapped and all his possessions, including clothes, are taken. The result: when he started the game from the beginning, all the opening cut scenes featured our hero wearing only his boxer shorts.

All in all, the game is great. The only thing it lacks is multi-player, but rumors abound that it might be coming in the Platinum Edition of the game or as downloadable content. If you love zombies, the game is worth it, even at twice the price.

Zombies: Dialog and Quests

Gaming

After mulling over the ideas in this post over at nerfbat, I thought I’d tackle it as it concerns my game design.

How would I present dialog? Well, thankfully I get out of part of it in that my only NPCs are the undead and all they do is moan. Of course, that brings up an interesting idea of do I display the moans as text or just audio that gets louder the closer they are and the larger the crowd? I like the idea of audio, even directional audio, but there might need to be an option to turn on text, just incase deaf people might want to play and not play as a deaf person. It is a role playing game, after all.

But if there are no NPCs, how will there be quests?

To understand the drive of the game, you have to understand the backbone driving force of the game: the tamagotchi.

Essentially, its a much more complicated version of that simple child’s toy… but if you boil it down, so is life and my Zombie MMO is really nothing more than a Life Simulator in a world of the undead. SimRomero, if you will.

Your character will have a stat sheet where you can monitor and manage things like how much you eat per day and how that affects your energy levels and overall health. You’ll be able to see how long your food supplies will last given your rate of consumption, and a projection of how long you will last without food given your current level of health. There might also be things like progression bars toward dementia, which can be reduced by human contact or reading books or listening to music, basically anything other than dealing with zombies.

So where are the quests? In a way there will be two sorts of quest like devices in the game…

The first will be player designed, largely including trade. If you have a stash of salt, a ton of it, and you have a need for other supplies, you will be able to set up a trade mission where you will trade X salt for Y other product until you have Z of said product. Players who stumble upon your safehaven while you are offline will be met at gunpoint and offered the quest. It will jot down in their notebook what you are looking for and what you will give for it. The twist here is that since you can specify a cut off point, like say you want oranges, 6 at a time, stopping when you have 4 dozen, its possible that player may find 6 oranges, return to you and find that you’ve already hit your limit of 4 dozen and are no longer taking oranges in trade. But that’s okay, its not a total waste since he can use the oranges himself, or in another trade.

The second will be presented in a “kill sheet” style, where you can earn Xbox360 style achievements by doing things. Kill 100 undead and you might get a title. A second title might be waiting at 500, a third at 2000, and so on. Have you been well fed for the past 30 days? Title. Killed another player? Title. Killed 100 other players? Title. Survived for a year? Title. You get the idea… As part of this, the game will include online profiles of players through the website, even the ability to make message board signatures that will include your stats (like the Xbox gamer tags). And of course, the system will include an options for hiding your profile completely, or making it viewable only to people logged in and on your friends list.

It sounds overly simplistic, I’m sure, but that’s the goal of the game: simple and fun. I don’t need to be a WoW-killer, I just want enough people playing so that maybe I can quit my “real” job.

I Hate Spam

Random Thoughts

The canned meat food product substitute is okay, and should the world go zombie overnight, you can bet your ass that I will be down at the Safeway hoarding the precious little tins of yummy life sustaining goodness. But when it comes to the internet, I hate Spam.

My blog here isn’t awfully popular. Even so, I get on the order of a hundred spam comments a day. Thankfully, being the slightest of blips on the radar means that my spam filter catches 99.999% of them. Once a week or so, I’ll have a few make it through, and I delete them within a day. One day, if I ever get an audience, I may have to install more protection as Akismet may not be enough. Sadly, it probably won’t matter since there are people like this out there.

Of course, emails are another story. I get over five hundred a day. Again, my filter gets alot of it, but some makes it through every day.

Then there is the joy that is fake websites designed to get you to click ads. Jeff Freeman has a run down of a particular offender related to gaming news.

And finally, there are the people out there who click on this junk… if you need viagra, see a doctor, don’t click a link in an email or on a website. Same goes for all the other drugs… and for loans, go to a bank or other lender, not something from your inbox especially if it is not actually addressed to you! People… PEOPLE! Please… pay attention, be responsible.

Buckwheats for the lot of them.

Zombies: Crafting

Gaming

How exactly would one go about building a game where the player can do anything they want?

Well… you can’t. Seriously, unless you want to be Second Life 2, you have to exert some content control over what the players create. That’s why I have come up with a two pronged assault…

First: a lengthy beta period. The original people brought into beta will serve two functions, the first being to test the game for bugs… but the more important function is to “think shit up”. Want to build a weapon by attaching an ice skate blade to a hockey stick? Sure, sounds good, recipe inserted into game and now everyone can get an ice skate, a hockey stick and some duct tape (or string) and make this new weapon.

Second: the design tool. We won’t allow players to design their own models directly, but they will be allowed to submit suggestions. Suggestions will consist of two types “Assemble” and “Dismantle”. The dismantle submission will be accomplished by having the player drag the item model, for example: an ice skate, into the model window and then in the provided text box explain “I would like to be able to remove the blade from the ice skate.” The game designers/admins will review the suggestion, and if approved will create new models for an ice skate blade and an ice skate shoe without blade, and then add the new dismantle recipe to the game (and to the patch notes, “Ice skates can now have the blade removed from the shoe”). For the other side, they’d drag the models for the ice skate blade and the hockey stick into the design window, align them as desired, attach them with tape (or string) and then in the provided text box explain “Would be used as a weapon.” Again, the designers/admins would review it, if approved they would need to add the new assembled model, animations for using it, alternate uses for it if they think them up, item statistics if they are required, and slap it into the game (and the patch notes, although since part of the fun of the game is to figure stuff out, assembly notes might be intentionally vague).

This way, you give players the ability to create what they want, but we retain control of what goes in the game and how, mostly so we can prevent player_x from inventing yet another in a long line of freaky sex toys. Sure, it is labor intensive, but since I plan for the game to have no bugs, my CS people will need something to do. 🙂

Zombies: Replenishing the World

Gaming

One concern that has been brought up by the few people I have discussed this game idea with is: How do you replenish supplies in the world?

This is a very complex issue, that after much though has a very very simple solution, and that is: You don’t. Not directly anyway.

To be honest, one of the problems I have with many games is the endless respawn of stuff. Now, I did say this would be a world of endless zombies, but all my zombie spawns would be “at the edge of the world”. Anywhere a “populated” area meets an “unpopulated” area is a potential spawn point for zombies because they are wandering in from other areas. But monsters and items fading in to view appearing out of thin air while the player watches… not in my game, its immersion breaking.

As for food and other supplies that players go after, in their area they will eventually scavenge it clean, at which point they’ll need to either a) start with the farming, b) widen their scavenging routes, or c) move somewhere else. If they choose a, then there is no need to handle any replenishment of supplies, they will find make them themselves. If they choose b or c… well, you don’t want the world to eventually be totally picked clean, so what you do is, when an area remains “unpopulated” for a length of time, you reset it, and everything goes back to like it was on launch day.

By design, the game will take care of all potential issues except for player memory. Players who used to live in the area that haven’t logged in will have eventually starved to death (as mentioned before, the game is going to have a level of persistance not used in very many games, when you are offline your character is still living), which is one of the factors in deciding to reset the area. However, nothing could be coded to prevent a player from remembering that they used to live in that area but had moved out. They’ll remember clearing the mall and eating all the food, perhaps even burning it to the ground, but suddenly upon area reset the mall will be back and stocked (with supplies and zombies).

The only real issue facing the game is making sure there is enough world to support the players, but that’s an issue that would have to be planned for but addressed only if the game exceeds expectations.

Zombies: An MMO Idea

Gaming

If I could design an MMO, completely from the ground up and I had full control, what would I do? Easy. Zombies.

First off, there would be only one world, and the world, in effect, would be as large as the real world. It would not be a zoneless game, but for most people it would feel like it. When you log in for the first time, you create a character, no classes, just a person (using the obligatory super cool character creator with eleventy billion combinations of body parts and textures and clothes), and you choose where you are going to be from (a nice world map with glowy red dots for player populations, so you could decide to be where there are lots of people, or where there are no people, or somewhere in between). You would also choose a “player type”. This “type” would decide if you are issued a house or if you are given a list of dwellings of appropriate survivor capacities that are currently open to new members (if you pick a type for a size of group to which none is available, a new one will be created for you and new players will begin joining you shortly). In game a player can always choose to change their “type” by simply leaving their current group and joining a group of another type (or if you have decided to abandon people and go it solo, you have to clean out a house and bar the doors for safety).

Welcome to a world populated by endless zombies. You and your group (or just you) need to implement and maintain defences as well as gather survival supplies, food, fresh water, broken pipe replacements, clothes for the winter, a way to stay cool in the summer, weapons, etc etc. And of course the zombies need to be killed, because zombies tend to bunch, and if you don’t keep an eye out you’ll be surrounded and starve to death before you know it. Zombies tend to walk, but some will run when they see food. Rarely do they think, but once in a while they’ll be accidentally crafty. Log in, survive, log out… but don’t forget to make sure you’ve got food before you leave, you might starve while you are gone (working in groups helps, if your mall has 24 residents you can afford to not log in for a month as long as the rest of your group keeps you fed, but be careful, if you don’t pull your weight, they might feed you to the ghouls).

When you are logged out, your character is an NPC in defence mode. Unless other members of your group are online to manage the perimeter, its assumed you will warn people trying to break in and kill them before they succeed.

If a place gets too overpopulated by players, not only will you run out of zombies, but you’ll run out of food, unless you start farming, but farming (unlike your home) isn’t safe and you might get robbed. Get enough people working together and you might rebuild a city, at least until people stop logging in… dead players becomes zombies, and your city might be destroyed from within.

And what about player death? Well, a player can only have one character at a time. If they find out friends or coworkers play, they can always travel to them… if they can survive the trip that is. Death is death, and you have to roll up a new character, but without levels in the game, the only thing you’ll really have lost is your home and your possessions (given to your groupmates if you had any, left for scavengers if you didn’t).

What can you do besides fight zombies and survive? Well, anything you want to really, as long as you are also fighting zombies and surviving. Rebuild a PC and get a working satellite dish and some power and you can hook up to the remains of the internet and communicate with others, even play games… or play games with your group mates or other neighbors when you have them over for tea (or they get cut off while scavenging and needed a place to hide until daybreak). Depending on bandwidth and licensing issues, run your own TV station or radio station… publish a newspaper. Rebuild a car and go for a drive (be sure to lock the doors).

Essentially, Second Life… but with zombies!

Hot Fuzz

Reviews

My super secret special contact (my brother’s wife) came through once again with free passes to see a movie screening. This time, from the guys who brought you Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz.

What Shaun did for zombies, Hot Fuzz does for buddy cop films.

Nick Angel (Simon Pegg) is an overachieving London cop. In fact, he makes everyone else look bad, so they ship him off to a small village far away from London. Danny Butterman (Nick Frost) is a local cop with no real ambition, but has a love of action films and a father who is the head cop in town. The locals are pretty lax on the letter of the law, but Nick refuses to change his attitude. And that’s when the murders begin… of course, everyone else in town seems to buy them as accidents, but not Nick and Danny.

All in all, seriously funny. I was laughing through nearly the entire film, while at the same time being thrilled with chases and gunfights and explosions and an unravelling mystery. Edgar Wright directs a top notch film, he and Simon can really write great comedy, and all the actors pull it off in style. If you liked Shaun of the Dead, you’ll like Hot Fuzz too.

As a bonus for the night at the movies, Simon, Nick and Edgar were all in attendance and did a wonderful Q&A afterwards. Fantastic!

World War Z

Reviews

On my ride in to work this morning, I turned the last page of Max Brooks’ new zombie effort entitled World War Z.

If you are familiar with Max, it means you have read his other book, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead. From his simple descriptions of what a zombie is and how to handle them, Max expands outward to create a world where the zombies have already come, and they have already pushed us to the brink of oblivion, and we have recovered. Ten years after the war with the zombies, the author is publishing a collection of interviews gathered while working on the official government report of the war.

Brooks paints a vivid picture through the eyes of his subjects that allows you to see everything from the common man to the army grunt to the war profiteer, in many nationalities. Whenever I have discussed the theoretical of zombie attack, most people scoff at it saying that it just couldn’t happen. Max’s book illustrates exactly how we could manage to lose to an enemy that is slow and uncoordinated.

This book is truly an excellent read, and well worth the money and the time. Two big thumbs up.

Dead in the West

Reviews

At the recommendation of a friend in a comment on this very weblog, I have read Dead in the West by Joe R. Lansdale.

Undead things are afoot in the town of Mud Creek and the Reverend Jebidiah Mercer figures this might be his chance to redeem his ways. This book isn’t your traditional zombies, but sometimes that’s for the best. It was a good quick read (despite being listed on the site for a week, I actually read the book in about three to four hours). I’d be interested to check out some of Lansdale’s other works.

So it gets a thumbs up from me.

Nightmares

Random Thoughts

Since I was very young, whatever age I was in the fourth grade, I have had nightmares. When they first started, I would, as is often depicted in movies, awake in a cold sweat, sometimes even screaming. The nightmares ranged from monsters in my closet to alien abductions to demons and ghosts. As I got older, they got worse, and more frequent. What started as a fairly rare thing became almost nightly, and then it was nightly.
One time, in high school, I tried to avoid my nightmares by not sleeping. That lasted about three days, then I succumbed. After moving out on my own at 19, I tried it again. Seven days without sleep, and I started to halucinate. My nightmares, not being able to torment my sleep, came to get me while I was awake. At ten days, I was literally out of my mind. Somewhere, stuffed in a box in my closet, I have pages of … text that I wrote. I don’t remember writing that stuff, in fact I can’t even read most of it. Its largely not in English. But what I can read of it confirms to me what I do remember, I was scared, really really scared. After ten days awake I finally passed out. I slept for two whole days and had to make many apologies for missing work.

Since then, I still have nightmares, well, what other people would call nightmares I guess. However, they have lost one quality: they don’t scare me any more. Night after night, I dream of apocalyptic worlds where zombies eat human flesh, worlds overrun by powermad dictators and their ruthless armies, jungles overrun by monsters and beasts. I dream of death and destruction, often involving people I know and love, and every morning when I wake up, I wake up calm. In ways, I have even come to find comfort in my dreams. In zombie filled cities, I team up with other refugees, friends and family, and together we fight the undead. They die, I die, and in the dream the emotions are there, its not like I’m some automoton just mowing down zombies. But the emotions of my dreams no longer translate to my sleeping body.

Why do I bring this up? Ever since I “broke” my nightmares, its hard to keep those thoughts out of my head. Its not as if I am some kind of mental defective, and I’d never actually act on or try to carry out the things I imagine. But I’ll be standing on the street and see someone walk in to traffic, at which point I’ll imagine them being hit by a car or truck, or that having stepped out into the open the monsters or zombies see him and move in for the kill. The good side of this is that I never lack for things to write about. The bad side is that I often can’t stay focused in one line of imagination long enough to craft it into a story worth selling. So I have these folders on my PC and stacks of paper in boxes and drawers full of short snippets, vignettes, that I want to use but just can’t seem to make sense of…

Anyway, enough rambling out of me.