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Zombie4 (Read 2821 times)

JohnG Ex Member	Zombie4 Jun 5^th, 2005, 6:55pm Finally got around to finishing zombie4, and here it is: http://www.hardcorepawn.com/zombie4/ Taken me ages, and is by far the biggest processing sketch I've ever done, weighing in at over 2,500 lines of code. I don't think I'll ever try to do somethign as complicated as a game again, there's just too many conditions to deal with.

seltar Senior Member Offline Posts: 475	Re: Zombie4 Reply #1 - Jun 5^th, 2005, 8:21pm Hehehe.. well, i think you did a great job making a game.. This is actually pretty fun.. Even though it's hard making games, I think it's worth it in the long run.. -seltar
	I'm bored, therefore I program http://seltar.org > seltar's special place http://snippet.seltar.org > seltar's snippet palace http://libraries.seltar.org > seltar's libraries

mflux

Re: Zombie4
Reply #2 - Jun 6^th, 2005, 1:19pm

I finished playing the game today. Here's what I thought:

The good:
The graphics are pretty sweet for a java applet that has 3D. The art and stuff could be improved (for example.. dots reprensenting people could be somewhat better, because the buildings are 3D + textured... art quality inconsistency).

The controls are okay. I liked using WASD and didn't have a lot of trouble.. although sometimes the keys would get stuck and it would only move one direction.

Gameplay wise.. it felt great because any one zombie could create a whole infestation of other zombies.. so you had to kill them as quickly as possible. This made for a really intense beginning part of the game.. which leads me to the next part..

The bad:
The middle-end game is really boring because once all the humans had turned into zombies... it became just a clean-up. You feel like the maid and you're ordered to clean the toilet.

Zombie infestation is a bit too quick... or perhaps it doesn't nearly give the player a chance to save the humans.

Which is another thing. There's no point to saving the humans when they're all turning into zombies so quickly anyways. There's only one stage where that can be evaded... and that's the mansion stage because of the way it's built (the room with one entrance).

The controls could also use improving. Perhaps an actual dotted line to the crosshair would be helpful for aiming.

Overall fantastic :] I'd love to see more!

Portfolio

JohnG

Re: Zombie4
Reply #3 - Jun 6^th, 2005, 7:50pm

Thanks for the feedback.

I know the middle-game can be tedious, but it's hard to find a way to make the zombies spread so that acting quick is useful, without meanign they always infect everyone... I tried to find a middle point, where I'd have a 'good' clear up about 50% of the time testing it, and hope other people will get as good Wink

Actually, it is possible on every level to save a significant number of humans, but you've got to be quick (and a bit lucky). It's just a case of herding the zombies away fomr certian areas.

As for the controls, I've had it happen one or two times that it seems to "lose" a keyRelased() event, and you have to press and let go of the key agian, but this only seems to happen if some other program in the background churns the CPU a bit whilst you're playing, and so there's not really much I can do about it.

Markavian

Re: Zombie4
Reply #4 - Jun 7^th, 2005, 11:18pm

I really liked the game and the first few levels, but it does get particularly tedious and I got bored when there were no humans left and I was sat in a city of zombies. I enjoyed the rush of killing the slow zombies before they infected anyone. Perhaps zombies should move slower then humans (or would they never get caught?) or maybe the zombification process should be slower - have some sort of stationary incubation state for new victims?

JohnG

Re: Zombie4
Reply #5 - Jun 8^th, 2005, 11:23am

The zombies have to be faster to catch anyone unfortunately, as this has ramifications later on in a level.

The problem is that to have any kind of "outbreak" leads to them taking over the entire city quickly, if ou can't stop it in time. Make them slower, it's too easy to kill them before they infect anyone.

Making them stationary for longer whilst they infect, can actually make things worse when there's a group of zombies, as they seem to end up splitting up more, and so infecting a wider area quciker, than if they stay as a single group.

It's a bit of a chaotic relationship, changing one variable makes the entire experience different, and not necessarily in the way you expect, so I had to settle for a situation that seemed to work okay.

Markavian Full Member Offline Posts: 174	Re: Zombie4 Reply #6 - Jun 9^th, 2005, 9:39am What if while a zombie was still 'transforming' other zombies still saw them as 'human' targets and so headed towards them?

minh

Re: Zombie4
Reply #7 - Jun 27^th, 2005, 1:38am

fun game...
maybe use motion, how the humans move and how the zombies move to further communicate which is which. i had a hard time at first figuring out which is which... green means good i think, not zombies.

and if you think about it, zombies are lumbering mindless things. your dots should behave as such. maybe that will slow down the infection rate.. and maybe give the humans some intelligence. if there were zombies around, i'd hang out with the guy with the gun.

Markavian Full Member Offline Posts: 174	Re: Zombie4 Reply #8 - Jun 27^th, 2005, 4:13am Slow lumbering things? Have you seen Dawn of the Dead* or 28 Days Later??* I like the thought about the humans crowding around the player, since they do have the gun.

minh YaBB Newbies Offline Posts: 6	Re: Zombie4 Reply #9 - Jun 28^th, 2005, 8:36pm 28 days was fun. make sure to have the human crowd behind the guy with the gun and not in front.

JohnG Ex Member	Re: Zombie4 Reply #10 - Jun 30^th, 2005, 3:45pm Unfortunately, I'm not really able to make any more changes to Zombie4 now, as it's being so heavily used, changing the rules would completely unbalance the experience, and I know there ar emany people out there competing against their friends for scores.

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