I've worked up a second WIP, and posted it over at the Bennu Projects page. here is the link: http://projects.bennugd.org/?details=43

New to this WIP:
-playable on gp2x WIZ
-running, hiding
-pushing (only in one instance in the wip)
-new dialog system
-the levels are smaller
-improved AI for your co-survivors
-different areas of the city than previous WIP
-many other little things that you probably won't notice and that i can't remember



one thing that some of you may be a little disappointed about the WIP is that only the 3 police officers are playable. I wanted to include my newest character as playable (he's a SITH!), but I realized I'd have to change more things around than I wanted to, to make that work for the WIP.

any and all feedback is welcome. your guys feedback from my first wip helped make some nice improvements!

(Posted on April, 4th 2010, 18:27)
0 comments

http://moome.limewebs.com/

hello all. i'm back to work on zombie city. and i've also made a simple little web page for myself. it's very simple at this point, but i did put up some game play footage of zombie city. most notably, for those who played the wip, you can see the running and hiding that i incorporated after the wip. the video is a little choppy at parts, and the color is a bit off, but you'll get the idea.

(Posted on March, 20th 2010, 22:48)
2 comments

Initially, when I first was coming up with the idea for zombie city, one of my main thoughts was to try and make it have high re-play value. So my plan was to incorporate a lot of random variation to each play through, and to have many different stories that you would randomly be put into. As I've mentioned in the past I have 12 different potential villains who COULD be behind the zombie outbreak. So at the start of each game, the computer would randomly select one of the villains for you and you would have to narrow them down until you've figured out who it is.

The other option I'm debating is whether to, instead of having the computer randomly select a villain at the start of the game, let the user determine the villain during gameplay. Sort of in a "chose your own adventure" style where certain actions eliminate certain suspects. For instance, choosing a direction to go in from the initial map would wipe out half of the suspects. the user would not be aware of how their actions are affecting the selection of the villain, they would still have to talk to other characters to determine who the villain is.

Additionally, I'm having a dilemma over whether to keep things generic so that the villian/story is not tipped off to the player if they've already seen it before, or if there should be more story elements worked in during the game. If you've played the WIP and figured out who the villian is, you'll notice that all of the information the other characters give you is generic, and not related to what the scientist explains later. I'm OK with that, but at the same time I do like the idea of building up a story before it gets to the point where you know who the villain is.

for example, lets say that I had a suspect that was a wizard (i don't) and he is the villain on this particular play through. The wizard accidentally cast a zombie spell on Zombie City when he was trying to make chocolate chip cookies for a bake sale. So I could make it so that maybe another character mentions something about a bake sale, and maybe another character says something about the wizard buying a bag of chocolate chips. And then when you go into a certain area, you see zombies that are half chocolate chip cookies. Just vague hints that would set up the story for the villain. The down side, again, is that once you've encountered the chocolate chip cookie zombies on one play-through, you will know who the villain is right away on any other play-through that you encounter them.

Now, to mix the issues, if I choose to have the villain selection be random, I can incorporate any story elements from the very beginning of a play-through; where as, any story elements would have to wait until a villain has been determined by the users actions if I make the villain a user selection.

Basically, I'd like to get any feedback from you guys that I can, on what you think would be more fun. Random selection Vs. User selection; and on the amount of lead-up to a villain confrontation.

thanks

(Posted on October, 29th 2009, 23:33)
3 comments

Escape from Zombie City will be available for the Wiz when I finally complete it. Here are a few pics of it running on the Wiz.









i've had some small slow down when fire is involved, but it's pretty minimal and i'll be optimizing it as i continue. it runs a lot better with bennu than it was with fenix. with fenix, I had more serious issues of slow down with blood spatter.

(Posted on October, 4th 2009, 20:51)
3 comments

i am now in the process of converting my code to bennu. i've finally had a taste of bennu and will no longer be coding zombie city in fenix.


here she is running in bennu. not all the transition bugs have been worked out, but shes running.

(Posted on September, 11th 2009, 07:14)
1 comments