Zombpocalypse Released
Hey guys, I've recently submitted my game to the IGF (independent games festival) held at GDC every year. I'm pretty excited to be finished since it was pretty much just myself slaving over this for a very very long time 
! Finalists are announced in January so my fingers are crossed and I'm thinking happy thoughts...
I've decided to release the full game, free of charge. I was originally planning on charging a mini-fee like $2 for the full game but if a gamer wants to support me and future games, they are welcome to hit up the online store I have available. This way you get the game and a couple shirts, and it still throws a buck or two in my direction. I'm a little nervous about going this route but I think in the end anyone would appreciate the option since it's the biggest value to the gamers.
Currently the shop only has 2 designs; an ink-blot-test design, and a zombie Survivor design. Both of them have the zombpocalypse URL in small print at the bottom of the design. I am hoping that this is not too intrusive
, I tried to keep it small and out of the way. I'm considering on adding more designs but I don't want to clutter the store right now.
There's a few screenshots and a video on the front page so please feel free to check it out and maybe download the game for yourself.
http://www.zombpocalypse.com/
I haven't yet put minimum requirements on the main page, but you will need a video card with shader support; likely a Geforce 6 series or better. I'm not too worried on a site dedicated to cutting edge modelers but the general public probably needs to know.
Enjoy!
! Finalists are announced in January so my fingers are crossed and I'm thinking happy thoughts...I've decided to release the full game, free of charge. I was originally planning on charging a mini-fee like $2 for the full game but if a gamer wants to support me and future games, they are welcome to hit up the online store I have available. This way you get the game and a couple shirts, and it still throws a buck or two in my direction. I'm a little nervous about going this route but I think in the end anyone would appreciate the option since it's the biggest value to the gamers.
Currently the shop only has 2 designs; an ink-blot-test design, and a zombie Survivor design. Both of them have the zombpocalypse URL in small print at the bottom of the design. I am hoping that this is not too intrusive
, I tried to keep it small and out of the way. I'm considering on adding more designs but I don't want to clutter the store right now.There's a few screenshots and a video on the front page so please feel free to check it out and maybe download the game for yourself.
http://www.zombpocalypse.com/
I haven't yet put minimum requirements on the main page, but you will need a video card with shader support; likely a Geforce 6 series or better. I'm not too worried on a site dedicated to cutting edge modelers but the general public probably needs to know.
Enjoy!
Replies
I'll give this a go later, it sounds interesting.
Good luck!
I'm just showing you the insurmountable odds that are against you. Game of the Year, no doubt.
Having said that, i didn't play it, it might be different but judging it from the video it's looking really boring (not that the whole thing is bad, art is pleasing it could really work well) but it just has such a passive appeal, for you as the player and the zombie hordes, it's like neither of them is really there
that demo was breathtaking. The amazing consistency of the inconsistent art style is a unique art style in itself.
But that is awesome work locus, making a game like this all by yourself - I would say I knew how hard it was to attempt such a thing but in all honesty, aside from the asset creation, I have no idea
I agree with neox, from the video the environments look really empty. I have a bad feeling that its going to feel the same no matter what level you're playing
Good luck with the contest, I'll give your game a try for a few days.
@yozora: that was not my point, thanks to my bad english, yep the env could be filled with props, but that doesn't matter to me right now, i just meant, that it would be no difference if you shoot chairs or these zombies, they are as fearsome as cobblestones as everything looks so passive
@neox: no offense taken; I wouldn't have posted the link if I didn't think that SOMEONE might not like the game
The game is fairly passive, yes. It doesn't quite have that paranoid feeling you get from Left4Dead but a lot of that, in my opinion, came from the FPS camera perspective. If you can see the whole playing field, most of the fear of "i think there's something behind me" is now gone. Geometry Wars solved this problem by just having 200+ heat seeking sprites push you into a corner and make you feel claustrophobic. I considered doing that for this game but just couldn't get enough 3D guys on the screen and keep the performance manageable. I originally made the zombies MUCH tougher to kill but most of my testers complained that they were "too hard; i just want to mow them down". go figure...
@midna: yeah I suppose I could have added some tracer rounds but strangely not one person that tested the game made that comment. thanks for the input, I may have to find time to put that in now.
@yozora: yes the environments are very vanilla and I wouldn't dare show you the wireframe of the zombie models, LOL. I should note that I am not an artist by day if you didn't know that already. Also I kind of wanted to keep the area open; long-story-short, I originally wanted arenas to only be around 1 screen in size (ala: smashTV, robotron, geometry wars) and got a little overzealous. After stretching out the environments the "non-function beauty" areas of the map were also stretched out and I didn't have the time to make more props to fill in the space. You might notice that the gameplay is confined to a certain space inside of each arena. I originally planned to fill in the outer region with more pretty props but it just never happened.
Firstly, the menus...
I think the big green paint brushy font is really ugly. Doesnt match the graphics of the game either, which looked better than I first thought. It just felt amateurish with those menus
Woulda prefered if you made a drop down selection for screen resolution since I had to click it about 8 times to get to my resolution (didnt know right click went backwards until I found my resolution, but still that woulda been 3-4 right clicks
The borders around the levels on the level selection screen also look very tacky.
I'm surprised there was no controller support, I actually do try quite a few of these indie games and most of them have controller support. I think your game definitely would play better using a controller.
Next... the levels
I tried the sewer level first, I spent about 2 mins wondering around until I realised I was stuck in this box and there was no where else to go
All the levels were pretty much the same, some of them had doors and ledges that looked climbable plus those flaming barrels looked like I could shoot them to make em explode too but sadly none of the environment can be interacted with...
There was not much diversity in types of zombies. I noticed 1 type of zombie exploded upon death and dealt damage, the rest were just pouncers or walkers, and all of them had the same thing in common - too slow to actually do anything.
Which brings me onto difficulty...
I started on nightmare (which I assume is the hardest difficulty) and it was hard to get hit. As long as I continued to strafe while shooting, I couldnt get hit. So in short, too easy.
Not sure about the weapons, none of them seemed very special, the default gun felt like it was good enough for the job in all situations. Actually it was better than most of the "special" weapons considering its range, ammo and rate of fire.. there was no need for other weapons
I'd like to see either an increase in the variety of zombie attacks and number of spawns to make it as intense as geometry wars, or go the other extreme and make it diablo-style adventuring with hordes of zombies and scripted events that happen (like some big zombie breaking through a wall etc) and include a end boss for each level of course.
I'm not a fan of the game, but I have great respect for your achievement in completing this by yourself, good job!
It's funny, I explicitly avoided the cliche exploding barrels and EVERY single person I talked to has said the same thing, "can I blow those up? no? sigh" LOL... I may just give in and make them explode.
...yeah the menus are visually terrible; programmer art...
The difficulty settings issue is very true, they do inflict more damage but that only becomes an issue if you managed to corner yourself which is rare. I may look into speeding up their animations. I think I just had crappy testers
(FYI, adding tracer rounds. it looks much better now that you see where the bullets are going.)
Hey thanks a lot! I appreciate you looking at it. I hope you don't think I'm trying to justify myself by replying all the time
Personally, i love the variety in the weapons. I had alot of fun seeing the flamethrower, shotgun and the rocket launcher (?)! The art on its own it nice too.
Great job mate. You definitely deserve a break
I wish i knew about this before you finished it as i would have loved woking on it with you
great way to pass the time, you get a piece of triforce from me.
If the Trailer is anything, this game looks like shit. It looked like the sims but with commodor 64 graphics. Im not seeing it.
-Buddikaman
Now yazora has got me thinking... I may ramp up the difficulty back to where is was before but the player is definitely going to get hit a lot more so I'm hoping it doesn't get too frustrating. I may try to make "easy" mode about what it is now and really crank up the fierce for "nightmare" so the difficulties feel more unique. I've already started toying with this and it's starting to feel a little more hectic than lumbering zombies in the current demo.
* brief trails appear from "bullet" class weapons like machinegun, shotgun, and magnum.
* player is no longer slower if wading through water (commonly sewers)
* zombies are much faster so they tend to get in the players face a lot more often
* zombies have more health now so machinegun alone makes it tough to stay alive
* zombie health and damage given to player is reduced in easy mode
* zombie melee attack was re-animated, it's faster and more realistic
* magnum shoots much faster now, and you get more ammo per pickup
The common weapon strategies from most games apply here as well:
* cricket bat purposely has an unrealistic reach for easier usability and does good melee damage
* machinegun is the best all-around weapon but doesn't pack much of a punch
* magnum is very power and accurate, slower rate of fire, piercing damage (ala: railgun style)
* shotgun is a good crowd control and close up weapon
* grenades are good to spam off screen and keep the crowds down, or take out the slow zombies.
* rockets have splash damage so it's good to aim for the center of a crowd.
* telsa coil is basically chained lighting with a trigger and a barrel
okay, it's like 3am here. I'm going to bed
A few notes...
The gameplay is basic and very casual so the system requirements should reflect that.
With no real outstanding gameplay mechanics, you should focus should be on making the action spectacular and intense in the least system taxing way (c'mon, it's a game based on nothing more than slaughtering hordes of zombies so you need good performance!)
Take No Prisoners is a great example of a simple thing you could do: Keep the character at the bottom-centre of the screen! That way you can still capture the whole "having to watch your back" aspect of survival horror games and the player can see more of what is right in front of them.
The perspective could be more top-down so there are less instances where you get attacked unexpectedly because you couldn't see over a wall. The enemies need to be pretty fast: Especially if you don't have that many on-screen at once!
As for making the action more spectacular, you should find out what you think will make it more interesting. I usually just point to Duke Nukem 3D for ideal non-taxing special FX because of it's use of sprites: Glass shatters and throws shards around realistically, bottles and scenery that can be destroyed, being able to define how many and what gibs would come out of different enemies, etc.
Providing adequate cover for the player and having AI that is competent and quickly navigating around scenery props would be beneficial. Things like cars and the sort would probably fit better into your open-world design. Having posters on the walls and newspapers/litter/debris scattered around the environment would help make the environments better.
I'd use low-poly models for the characters too and focus on the quality of the animation. I always look fondly on Little Big Adventure for barely even using textures but still have very interesting characters with very good animation.
...Easier said than done so i'll stop rambling!
Agreed, this was really a side effect of many re-designs. I was originally working with a team to create a much larger game. It was a first person zero-g puzzle game (think doom3 meets dead space with elements of portal) before all of that was popular. unfortunately the art team lost interest one member at a time until I just had to scrap the whole game and start over with just myself... I knew that I didn't have the art talent or man-power to make an FPS anymore so I had to pull the camera back and find a new focus. The engine that I created for that first game was re-tooled for Zombpocalypse but they are completely different types of games with different rendering styles. If I had the choice to start from a blank page, I would have used less per-pixel accuracy and focused on quantity of zombies over rendering quality. Unfortunately, the engine took me years to write so I had to stick with it.
It's designed more like a Doom3 type of engine. The unified rendering system means all geometry (characters and environment) is rendered through the same pipeline so the lighting and shadowing is seamless and free of lighting/shadowing artifacts you find in games like Half-life or even Gears of War. To do this, all lighting is dynamic; even muzzle flashes create instances of real lights in the scene. Because the lighting is dynamic, the performance is determined by the number of visible light sources. It's all really technical and I won't bore you with the details of why, but yes dynamic lighting is ridiculously expensive but gives you the added benefit of accurate lighting and shadows. I know that accurate shadows are irrelevant for a zombie that lives exactly 0.3 seconds but it's what I had available to me
That's not a bad idea, but the zombies right now are around 1380 triangles if i recall correctly. That's probably higher than they need to be since they are only like 2" of screen space. Also I'm using about 50 joints which is probably overkill; I could probably remove the finger joints completely and no one would notice.
There were a couple of things I didn't get a chance to fix, though I wanted to badly:
1) Lacking controller support.
The code is there for joystick support but I never designed the GUI system to handle anything other than a mouse cursor so I was kind of stuck and out of time. I may still re-visit this idea since I think it would be pretty nice to play the game with an xbox360 controller.
2) Awful GUI artwork.
I'm just not very good at 2D; I never had any traditional training so this was a lost cause from the beginning
3) Simple Environments.
I've always been an old-school type of guy. I like the "Quake3-like" simplicity of the levels but I know that it's not what's hot anymore these days. I just never found to the time to go back to the environments.