Development Info DoubleBear Zombie Question

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Tags: Annie VanderMeer Mitsoda; DoubleBear Productions

This time Annie <a href="http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,1440.0.html">raises</a> a question:
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<p style="margin-left:50px;border-style:solid;border-width:1px;border-top-color:#ffffff;padding:5px;border-right-color:#bbbbbb;border-left-color:#ffffff;border-bottom-color:#bbbbbb;">Hey guys - since Brian's feeling under the weather (and we're still putting together our next developer spotlight), I thought I'd do a short post to get discussion going. I'll keep it simple and provocative - in the zombie apocalypse, who would you save?
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Please - keep this to people you PERSONALLY KNOW ONLY, who are within 15 miles of you (I'd want to save my parents, for example, but I couldn't list them here because they live over a thousand miles away). Would you save your sibling, or go mercenary and protect your apartment's custodian because they know how to fix everything? Remember - you can't save everyone... for the sake of discussion, let's say 2 people max. Beyond that... and they have to fend for themselves...
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Possible second question: if the person you wanted the most to save WAS actually very far away (see my parental example) would you risk trying to reach them if there was no other way to contact them, or stay put and hope for the best?
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Who would you save?
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Spotted at: <A HREF="http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,1440.0.html">Irontower Studios</A>

 

[Luzur]

why she stop posting here?

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Stay put. I'm not a hero to be able to fend off hordes, and can't save anyone if I'm dead

Unless there's a stealthy way to do it, but I assume everywhere is crowded with TEH ZOMBINES

 

[Zed]

I wouldn't save any of my family. Just painful to save 1-2 from your family and then hang around them when you know the rest is dead. Better that just all of them die and you start a new survival life, and actually focus on survival.

I'd save a random hot babe and... another random hot babe.

 

[Azrael the cat]

My wife, obviously. Even if we weren't married she'd be a good choice: engineering is one of those knowledge/skill sets that is at least moderately useful in any crisis (securing buildings, identifying structural weakpoints, breaking into things, getting the water running and the lights on, etc) and absolutely vital if you want to survive for long after the immediate zombie crisis has passed. At some stage, you're going to want to have running, drinkable, water and a working sewerage system, or else it's going to get REAL uncomfortable once that toilet stops flushing...(not to mention, you're going to want folk that can build basic appliances from scratch, and outside of engineers there's not many people that have that breadth of basic applied science).

This next choice depends on the kind of zombie apocalypse, and I'm making an exception to the 2 people rule as I wouldn't take these in lieu of people (if it came to a choice). If we're talking a Romero-style zombie crisis, where zombies are slow, only eat/attack humans and only humans are rising from the dead, then I'd actually take my 2 cats in their carry boxes (assuming that slow zombies means I'm not running for my life - think a 'dawn of the dead' scenario where there's time to get of the city before things really fall apart). They don't require much food, can live on dried food, and - more to the point - once the immediate zombie crisis has passed and we're scrounging in a P-A world, domestic cats would revert to the role they had for the past thousand or so years: as working animals needed for the important task of keeping rodents/bugs out of your food-storage and hence lessening the chance of disease. In the meantime, my keeping them would be based purely on the contingency that they're easily transported and not a target (hence 'may as well' take them), and can be set free if necessary outside the city where they'll have a strong chance of survival (cats survive TOO well in the Australian bush - we actually get genuine plagues of them outside the cities).

If we're talking Resident Evil style attack-all-mammals then I'd mercy kill them. If we're talking the possibility of psycho-fast-hard-to-spot-zombie-felines then I'd kill them out of concern for my own future safety.

If we're talking the REMAKE of Dawn of the Dead with fast zombies, then obviously taking pets isn't an option when running for your life. But if we're serious about that one, all I'd do is make sure I'm not at the epicentre and then be relieved that any disease that spreads and kills that fast (a zombie 'outbreak' that relies on person-to-person transmission, unlike the unexplained everyone-rises that Romero used, would have the same vectors as any other contagious disease) could never become a world-threatening plague. Within days the outbreak would have ripped through its local population centre and then run out of available hosts to spread through. With an incubation period that short it couldn't even spread by plane-flight - any aircraft that took off with an infected person on board sure as hell wouldn't be making it to Australia. Now...if there's a 5 or 6 day - or even better, a 5 or 6 week - incubation period, THEN things with fast zombies might get tough

Back to slow zombies, and who is the 2nd person? Hmmm....I'd want to find someone with medical expertise; I've got a few friends who are doctors, so any of them would be a good choice. Another option would be a friend of mine who's an army officer (intelligence division) - knowledge of weapons and military tactics might help, but that's only going to be of great use in the extremely unlikely event that we can get our hands on some guns. Australia has major gun control, and unlike the US that doesn't mean that 'only the bad guys have them' - because gun control is everywhere in Australia you don't have the problem of someone just going interstate to buy from a less regulated jurisdiction. That and when they brought the restrictions in, they bought up and destroyed a huge chunk of the unlicenced guns, so there smply aren't that many guns in Australia outside of the military and cops. Which means that survival is going to be purely an avoidance game.

Mind you, the lack of guns would be more than made up for by the isolation, huge distances between towns and huge rural agriculture industry. It would be almost impossible for the zombies to spread across the country, rural towns would be easily defendable safe zones, the food producing areas would be largely unaffected and the lack of guns means less problems amongst the survivors (difficult for a small bunch of thugs to impose their will on others / difficulty in taking other people out means people are forced to put up with and work with each other).

 

[Azrael the cat]

why she stop posting here?

Well, having a job might be a logical explanation. Otherwise you could just take the word 'she' to refer to any female that has ever posted at the Codex, and choose a random one of the following as a perfectly plausible explanation:
- poorly disguised outbursts of desperation from other codex members every time you post;
- links to rape porn, assertions that 'x' game would be better with rape in it, enthusiastic threads about hentai rape games, requests by others for you to translate said hentai rape games (following by them citing another hentai rape game as an example of 'not too bad a rape game' when trying to convince you to change your mind)
- the word 'rape' being used as a all-purposes punch-line;
- nazis appearing in a role other than video-game villains;
- inability to type having clawed one's eyes out after clicking on the in that gamecrushes thread;
- tranny jokes starting to seem like they might be onto you;

...we're a happy little community. Why would ANYONE leave

 

[SerratedBiz]

I'll never leave you. I promise.

 

[Luzur]

why she stop posting here?

Well, having a job might be a logical explanation. Otherwise you could just take the word 'she' to refer to any female that has ever posted at the Codex, and choose a random one of the following as a perfectly plausible explanation:
- poorly disguised outbursts of desperation from other codex members every time you post;
- links to rape porn, assertions that 'x' game would be better with rape in it, enthusiastic threads about hentai rape games, requests by others for you to translate said hentai rape games (following by them citing another hentai rape game as an example of 'not too bad a rape game' when trying to convince you to change your mind)
- the word 'rape' being used as a all-purposes punch-line;
- nazis appearing in a role other than video-game villains;
- inability to type having clawed one's eyes out after clicking on the in that gamecrushes thread;
- tranny jokes starting to seem like they might be onto you;

...we're a happy little community. Why would ANYONE leave

well of course you got to have a tough hide to post here, but i just want that Wizards Crown remake.

 

[Berekän]

why she stop posting here?

Everybody leaves us, it's just a matter of time

 

[Yeesh]

Who would you save?

Christ I'm in the city. I won't be able to save myself, let alone anybody else. Thank goodness zombies are fictional.

 

[Morkar Left]

The building I live in is pretty save; besides my roommates and me there is only an office (and soon a medical practice in the same building but no direct entrance to our apartment), so no infestation inside. And we could keep away the zombies from our apartment easily; stairs are the only access and we´re protected through three doors (plus two swords at our disposal, but sadly no chainsaw).
Food would be a real problem; we´re used to not storage a lot of it because we´re having three super-markets less than five minutes away.
My relatives are too far away, so I would be mostly on my own with my two roommates.

 

[Gragt]

I'd save my ferrets. The rest can die.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

I'd save my ferrets. The rest can die.

they are mustelids, not rodents

 

[Gragt]

Exactly my point.

 

[ChristofferC]

My sister.

 

[Fat Dragon]

I'd fight my way to California and rescue Avellone.