Corpse Crew Alpha Version 0.4A (Want your input)

[Korgan]

CLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVE!

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Don't get dragged into silly plotlines. Uncertainty is a good way to keep a player on his toes. Same with adding all sorts of features like martial art styles. From what you said so far I gather It shouldn't be about players taking out zombies stylishly with kung-fu, it should be about desperate survivors doing all they can not to become another fatality. Thirdly writing out a few rules and let the player work within them is an awesome idea. Emergent gameplay is a nice buzzword, but if you can get it to work it actually is pretty cool.

Really like the stuff you're saying here Cleve, looking forward to a decade of waiting.

Who would seriously run at a ravenous dead man without a weapon in his hand, a dead man that spreads infection through it's bite? That's baloney, I don't know why they put that sort of stuff in zombie movies. Like you're going to backpunch a creature that feels no pain and put him in a chokehold when he's already dead. You know perfectly well a person would run a country mile and wouldn't dream of putting their hands near that creature so it could bite them. Martial arts is up there with that Fulci movie that has a battle between a shark and a zombie. It's loopy.

The funny thing about emergent gameplay is that you can even see it at work in a total crap engine like FPSCreator, where the physics engine is the only fun thing about it. Even in FPSCreator, the challenges that come from things like using a plywood plank to walk between windows in buildings a couple stories aboveground is cool. All it takes is a bit more flexibility and pretty soon you're doing some very cool things with physics .... i.e. pushing a refrigerator down a flight of stairs at a bunch of zombies coming up and creaming them.

I saw a mod made with Newton once where you could connect electrical cables to a plug in the wall and then to anything made of metal, turn the power on and fry anything that touched that metal. I bought an electrical plug 3D model for this very reason, planning on doing that in this game. You do the same thing with water, you've got amazing gameplay that can occur just about anywhere. The player sees a plug on the wall and instead of just a decoration it's a whole strategy emerging - get zombies to follow me through shallow pool you have dropped cable in, turn on power when you're on the other side. That emergent game play.

 

[Andhaira]

Will gameplay be first person or third? Or both?

 

[nomask7]

Is this one of those threads where Cleve asks for ideas so he'll know what not to use (i.e. to get rid of cliches)? In that case, I realize that my contributions are an embarrassment to Cleve, since they are actually good ideas that he'd like to use but doesn't want to since they're public domain now. On the off chance that I'm wrong, I'm going to elaborate on one of the less obvious improvements I have suggested:

Radio transmissions could reveal the current biggest spawn points and where they will appear next (i.e. the movements of the biggest zombie mobs)

It's reasonable to assume that the military follows the zombie herds through their satellites, and projects future trends in their movements. (The military could actually be a slave takeover government in the prison moon modelled after Detroit.) The player would know where the biggest mobs are this night, and where they will be the next night, and with 70% certainty, where they will be the night after that. This would be easy to implement if the world map were divided into districts separated by loading screens and maybe walls (the moon doesn't have to be an exact Detroit replica, which is why I would use the moon instead of the real, very limiting sort of Detroit).

The appearance of the spawn points would be procedurally generated and the districts many, so every play through would be very different. There would sometimes be at least two seemingly good choices in terms of travel plans (travel to district A now or wait the night here and travel there later; travel to district A or B now), but not every corner the player has managed to get himself into comes with an obvious next preferable travel goal. Also, sometimes a group of zombies would follow the player to the connecting passage between two districts so that the player couldn't return right away, even if the big zombie herd travelled to another district during the following day and there was something left to be explored there.

Making the whole thing work nicely is like solving a puzzle.

PS. I recently found this:

http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=4

It's a website with all sorts of random generation info.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Will gameplay be first person or third? Or both?

First person only. The only time you will see yourself in the game is on a security monitor or in a mirror.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

100% honesty, I thought I saw the most you could get out of some dodgy old graphics card like I have on my dev machine with Sauerbraten. My ATI Radeon 800 has problems normally properly displaying VGA textmode character screens much less cutting edge graphics. I had to turn most things off to get 12 FPS in Penumbra at 800x600 and even then it was sort of stuttering along if you looked at a complicated shader of some kind. I can't even run Bioshock or Fallout 3 on my machine, I had to play those on the computer in the other study.

About an hour ago I started to tinker with lighting in Unity Pro, including flares and dynamic shadow cookies. Never touched them until tonight. I had a couple dozen shaders in the view and everything bump mapped at 1028x768 and *honest* have never seen anything appear on my monitor screen for any commercial game ever look that good and it was running reliably at 20 fps. It started to slow once I had eight dynamic lights casting shadows at once in the same scene, but there is never any call in any game for that many dynamic lights, usually it's only 1-2 in a scene plus tons of lightmapping and Unity actually does baking of the shadows there into individual meshes.

Perfect. Perfect. Perfect dev engine for indie authors. A miracle engine.

P.S. I put a blue spotlight under water and the refracted light was displayed correctly against the inside of the pool with stippling of the shadows. I also noticed when my character walked halfway into the water with a weapon in the viewport, half the weapon was below the plane and half out and the half that was in the water was wavering from refraction. It was surreal, I figured I must be hallucinating an engine that good running on an ATI Radeon 800 card.

P.P.S. I thought that even C4 must have better shadows and lighting than Unity (I bought a license in 2005) but I was wrong. Unity3D craps all over C4.

 

[Luzur]

pics or it didnt happen.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

I've got all the assets I need to build my second map, this one as a real scene in the game and not just for testing. I give you my word when that is ready I will put some screenshots up here showing some of the gameplay.

 

[Trash]

Neat! Good luck with all that. You be sure and let us know how everything turns out.

 

[Stereotypical Villain]

Fact: Good games are made in bunkers and \ or Iron towers.

Good luck, Cleve.

 

[nomask7]

I don't believe you noticed this, Cleve:

Is this one of those threads where Cleve asks for ideas so he'll know what not to use (i.e. to get rid of cliches)? In that case, I realize that my contributions are an embarrassment to Cleve, since they are actually good ideas that he'd like to use but doesn't want to since they're public domain now. On the off chance that I'm wrong, I'm going to elaborate on one of the less obvious improvements I have suggested:

Radio transmissions could reveal the current biggest spawn points and where they will appear next (i.e. the movements of the biggest zombie mobs)

It's reasonable to assume that the military follows the zombie herds through their satellites, and projects future trends in their movements. (The military could actually be a slave takeover government in the prison moon modelled after Detroit.) The player would know where the biggest mobs are this night, and where they will be the next night, and with 70% certainty, where they will be the night after that. This would be easy to implement if the world map were divided into districts separated by loading screens and maybe walls (the moon doesn't have to be an exact Detroit replica, which is why I would use the moon instead of the real, very limiting sort of Detroit).

The appearance of the spawn points would be procedurally generated and the districts many, so every play through would be very different. There would sometimes be at least two seemingly good choices in terms of travel plans (travel to district A now or wait the night here and travel there later; travel to district A or B now), but not every corner the player has managed to get himself into comes with an obvious next preferable travel goal. Also, sometimes a group of zombies would follow the player to the connecting passage between two districts so that the player couldn't return right away, even if the big zombie herd travelled to another district during the following day and there was something left to be explored there.

Making the whole thing work nicely is like solving a puzzle.

PS. I recently found this:

http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=4

It's a website with all sorts of random generation info.

To elaborate further, the game world could be completely handmade, since the essential variety would come from the order in which the player travels through the districts. This order would be very different from game to game, and not all the districts would likely be part of every play through (since the player would either beat the game before visiting all of them, or would die before doing so). This still assumes that the player knows about the "movements" of the biggest zombie herds.

Unrelated to that, mood games, no matter how much procedural content they have, become uninteresting fairly fast. A (good) game remains interesting as long as it remains challenging. And that's why some sort of arcade element is pretty much a must if you want replay value in a zombie game. Space Invaders is still playable (and I sometimes play it), since it satisfies the human drives of the second group as defined by Theodore Kaczynski.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

I don't believe you noticed this, Cleve:

I did notice it. I noticed it was the total opposite of anything I wanted this game to be.

Unrelated to that, mood games, no matter how much procedural content they have, become uninteresting fairly fast.

Which is why I am playing Penumbra Overture for the umpteenth time or so.

And that's why some sort of arcade element is pretty much a must if you want replay value in a zombie game. Space Invaders is still playable (and I sometimes play it), since it satisfies the human drives of the second group as defined by Theodore Kaczynski.

Unless you are making fun of this thread altogether, I cannot believe after reading all these other posts you think I would want an arcade element in this game. It's the opposite in every way of all that consoletard stuff.

I believe you misunderstood. I'm not trying to design a game that "somebody else" would want to play. I'm trying to design a game I would want to play. That may differ strongly from the pablum that is created for the twitch'n'dribble turnkey kids who guide the design choices of the sociopaths running the executive levels of the game industry.

... and yet Fallout 3 seems to have made fools of them all ... and one suspects an appetite for even heavier and in-depth storytelling RPGs remains to be plumbed out there.

If you took Fallout 3 as an RPG and mixed it with Penumbra plus a post-apocalyptic world of the undead, you'd have a game I want to play. I cannot make a game you want to play especially because I suspect strongly if somebody followed all your suggestions you'd actually have no interest whatsoever in playing the game that resulted.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Which brings me to this ... does a survival horror game with no HUD otherwise need one of these? I think it does. I think Penumbra Overture could have used one of these.

 

[Wyrmlord]

That's a hard one.

On one hand, survival horror games should be about minimalism and surviving on very little, which obstruct the needs for an inventory interface.

At the same time, survival games would be about managing the things you need for survival.

You know what - keep the inventory interface. STALKER was an extremely atmospheric and tense game, even with an inventory.

 

[nomask7]

I don't believe you noticed this, Cleve:

I did notice it. I noticed it was the total opposite of anything I wanted this game to be.

I wasn't sure you were absolutely dead set on what the game should have and what it shouldn't have. In fact, I thought the initial idea, which you first mentioned weeks or months ago, was very arcade-like and frankly brilliant (trying to survive as many nights as possible against the zombie invasions). How you ever got from that to where ever you are now is beyond me. As for the rest. Throws his hands in the air and leaves.

 

[burrie]

Ach, cheers on choosing the Unity engine. I recently started on a game design course myself where I was specifically told to go with Game Maker, and nothing else. After pitching the concept of my game, as well as Unity, they were interested enough to overlook the Game Maker thing.

It's truly a wonderful engine. Bloody easy to work with, and supports Blender. Quite satisfied with that.

Where are you getting your models from tho', by the by? I haven't found any place where I can get them pretty cheaply.

 

[nomask7]

Unless you are making fun of this thread altogether, I cannot believe after reading all these other posts you think I would want an arcade element in this game. It's the opposite in every way of all that consoletard stuff.

What do you think I meant by an arcade element? A twitchy Doom-type gameplay as in:

pablum that is created for the twitch'n'dribble turnkey kids who guide the design choices of the sociopaths running the executive levels of the game industry.

???

You type fast, but when is the last time you stopped to think? (And haven't you noticed that everyone makes mood games these days? Must be the neverending graphics craze. Gameplay be damned, as in NWN. Of course, no one actually stops anyone from combining mood and gameplay, or adding an arcade element, such as a simple day counter which turns into points at the end. Of course, no one stops you from making a Resident Evil XVI rip-off either.)

 

[Trash]

Like a spurned lover he is.

 

[Bladderfish]

Did someone just accuse Cleve of not thinking?

Nah. Must have been my imagination.

(And how can you argue with someone who states that he wants to make a game purely for himself? First you'd have to convince him then he didn't know himself. Although, perhaps that makes this whole thread redundant. Move along. Move along.)

 

[nomask7]

Did someone just accuse Cleve of not thinking?

Yeah, that would be me, and there are plenty of other examples besides those I mentioned. But ... who are you anyway?

 

[Bladderfish]

Yeah, that would be me, and there are plenty of other examples besides those I mentioned. But ... who are you anyway?

Erm ... Look, a three-headed monkey!

 

[Unradscorpion]

Like a spurned lover he is.

Like that time he was glorifying war until Cleve scorned him.

 

[Jaime Lannister]

I saw a mod made with Newton once where you could connect electrical cables to a plug in the wall and then to anything made of metal, turn the power on and fry anything that touched that metal. I bought an electrical plug 3D model for this very reason, planning on doing that in this game. You do the same thing with water, you've got amazing gameplay that can occur just about anywhere. The player sees a plug on the wall and instead of just a decoration it's a whole strategy emerging - get zombies to follow me through shallow pool you have dropped cable in, turn on power when you're on the other side. That emergent game play.

Bioshock did it.

 

[opium fiend]

Are you people retarded to indulge him like this? He's obviously role playing an eccentric game designer. Next thing he'll offer you to preorder the game.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Instead of just a prototype, actually sat down and did an inventory manager mockup in Unity. Took me less than an hour to have some crude inventory management including drag'n'drop of items from one slot to another.

Complete in-game GUI in Mono C# is a little easier to use than my C++ GUI for Grimoire. A 2 week job in Grimoire is like 2 minutes in Unity. Labels, toolbars, listboxes, text editor, icons, scrolling panes, buttons, widgets of all kinds come ready-to-use. If I went for a minimalist look like Fallout 3 it should be pretty easy to do.