emptying my brain onto the internet since 1998…
With Monkey Island getting a remake/update/new episodes, I can only hope that Zombies Ate My Neighbors, another classic LucasArts game, gets the same treatment. Sadly, I don’t think it will. However, thanks to Tom Chick, I now know I can get the old game on my Wii.
It is something I suppose… but a man can dream…
It seems that some students and a teacher or two got together and wrote a book about infectious disease modelling.  Of particular interest is chapter 4, entitled: When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of and Outbreak of Zombie Infection.
You can purchase the book, and I probably would if I had an extra $90 just laying around. Â Or if you want you can read the relevant chapter here. Â But to boil it down, when looking at models of containment, cure and control, the best way to handle a zombie outbreak…
Aim for the head.
While visiting my brother this past weekend, he was offering up to me some of his graphic novels and trade paperbacks to read. One of those was Zombies! Eclipse of the Undead. I was going to borrow it, but ended up reading the whole thing before I left.
Its a fairly typical and fairly decent story. Zombies. In this case, people have gathered for safety in a local football stadium. The military has been ordered to pull out and leave the people to fend for themselves. Of course, all hell breaks loose.
One of the best aspects of this particular tale is the effectiveness of showing how simply not paying attention is the biggest killer when it comes to the genre. People get focused on one thing and forget they are surrounded by zeds, and then they get dead.
Overall, a good, quick read. I look forward to future Zombies! trades.
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As seen over on Fidget last week, Zombies!!!, the board game where you try to survive a zombie apocalypse, is coming to the Xbox Live Arcade (and the PS3 and PC, via Steam, but I don’t care about them).
I may never get my dream of a Dead Rising 2, but hey, beggers can’t be choosers. Â Zombies rule!
So, to begin, I need to identify tasks, and seeing as how I am sure I will miss something I’m posting this to get ideas.
In a world overrun with zombies, what tasks must an individual person perform to survive. Obviously, one must kill zeds, because while zombies are a finite problem (if the world population is 7 billion and you are the only survivor there can, at most, be 7 billion minus 1 zombies, since they don’t reproduce) they will cause issues if too many are waiting outside your door. Beyond that, there is gathering food, water, weapons, clothes, sanitation, entertainment and the extremely important activity of repairing the barricades.
Lets start a bulleted list:
Optional items:
I’m sure there are things I am forgetting, so if you have ideas, I’d love to hear them. However, I request that suggestions remain in the “one person all alone” realm as I plan on tackling that first before working on any kind of multi player aspect.
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.
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!
For Christmas this year I asked for a bunch of zombie books and superhero books, and I got some. One of the zombie books I got was The Rising
The book starts with Jim Thurmond, locked away in the fall out shelter he built in his back yard for Y2K. Jim decides he’s going to head outside and try to get away when his cell phone rings and just before the battery dies he hears his son, who lives with Jim’s ex-wife, plead for help, saying that he’s hiding in the attic, mommy is sick, and Rick (the stepfather) is a monster. This sets Jim off on a journey that takes him from West Virginia to New Jersey to save his son.
Jim isn’t the only character we meet. There is Martin, a reverend, who meets up with Jim fairly early. Frankie, a junky whore, whose trying to survive the living dead and kicking heroine cold turkey. And Baker, a scientist who might just be partly responsible for the whole damn thing. There are a number of other points of view, some very brief, to fill out the tale, and Mr. Keene weave the stories together beautifully (if rather depressingly), and keeps you at the edge of your seat wondering what could possibly happen next.
The book was so good, I ran out and picked up the second (and final) book, City Of The Dead
Now, I’m going to go into alot more detail, so I’ll warn you… ** Spoilers Ahead!! **
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