So, I've been working on a game ...

[Jacks:Revenge]

btw, your game sounds identical to State of Decay.
inspiration maybe?

minus the pretty graphics and 3rd-person camera, they're essentially the same concept.

 

[DarkED]

Admirable work DarkED. Big respect to you.

Forgive me for not yet trying it though; what with all of your feverish tweaks, I suspect it will be a much more polished game in a week or two!

Hah, thanks. And it's all good, but you can expect development to slow down a little as features become more and more complicated to implement (which they certainly will.) There are simply a lot of things I want to add that I don't know if I'll be able to tackle on my own. Hell, I'm still trying to fix player animations in aim mode (you'd be surprised how difficult it is to make an animation play based on the direction something is facing.) Once I reach the point where art assets become more important than coding features, dev time will certainly slow to a crawl unless I have help.

btw, your game sounds identical to State of Decay.
inspiration maybe?

minus the pretty graphics and 3rd-person camera, they're essentially the same concept.

While I haven't played State of Decay yet (no PC release for a while) I guess the two games are somewhat similar. Still, State of Decay is all about zombies. My game isn't going to be.

My main source of inspiration was Project Zomboid. I played their initial tech demo a couple of years back and I instantly loved the game, and it's isometric perspective put a unique twist on the concept of an apocalypse survival simulator. Since then, I bought the game and I follow it's development closely. Ever since I played the PZ tech demo I have wanted to make this game - both because I wanted to do something different with the concept, and because I think I can do it better. Project Zomboid is shaping up to be a fantastic game, but it has it's flaws, and they are currently many.

Right now you could probably call my game a 3D clone of PZ and not be far off, but it (hopefully) won't be that way for much longer. If I can get these current bugs (player animations ARGH!) fixed and get a few more major features (inventory/loot system, equipment system, survival system) in and working, I can move on to implementing my own concepts for mutants and NPCs. And, of course, there is still an entire world to build. And then public alpha and (god forbid) multiplayer!

 

[DarkED]

A new build is up.

http://nitesstudios.com/the-town

v0.0.5:

• Fixed player movement and animations in aim mode (thanks Nereid.)
• Player can now move faster in aim mode if you hold down Sprint (left shift.)
• Added reload animation for the handgun.
• Added main theme.
• Various UI tweaks (new crosshair, improved health bar texture.)

 

[Jackal]

So what's your plan to make the dosh?

 

[DarkED]

So what's your plan to make the dosh?

There currently isn't one. If public alpha does well I might ask five or ten bucks for the public beta. If that goes well, the v1.0 release will cost something reasonable ($15-20.)

 

[Psychomorph]

Why zombie game?

 

[DarkED]

Why zombie game?

Read the first post.

 

[Psychomorph]

I see. A hidden agenda.

I has kreative inputs: You are shopkeeper and the house is an Apple store and the zombies... you get the idea.

 

[cryptophreak]

for those of use who don't have an W, A, S, D keyboard this is impossible to play.

I'd advise remapping to the arrow key so as to not alienate everyone but "hardcore" gamers with a qwerty keyboard.

What sort of keyboard do you have?

 

[DarkED]

New build!

http://nitesstudios.com/the-town/

v0.0.6:

• Gun raycasting now works properly. The gun now fires whichever direction you're aiming (so you can hit enemies even if the cursor is behind them) and no longer fires through walls or objects.
• Transparency for objects in front of the player is back, but still kinda broken.
• Various small fixes and tweaks.

 

[Zur]

What sort of keyboard do you have?

There are about a hundred variations of localized keyboard layouts out there besides the classic qwerty. I'm using an azerty myself but the symbols are different from the French azerty. That's why it's a good idea to be able to map keys.

 

[DarkED]

New build.

http://nitesstudios.com/the-town/

v0.0.7:

• Added version to main menu.
• Minor main menu tweaks.
• Implemented streaming system. Web player (and final standalone) should load faster now.
• Re-wrote main theme.
• Adjusted volume levels of all sound effects. Sound volume will be adjustable in a later build.
• Added basic ambience sounds, more to come.
• Added basic sound effects for zombies, more to come.
• Zombie movement speed is now based on a random number within a set range. In general they will move much quicker now.
• If shot from a distance greater than their detection radius, zombies will now detect and follow/attack the player anyways.
• Zombies now deal more damage over time.
• Adjusted spawn rate; now respawns occur every 2.5 minutes (was previously 5 minutes.)
• Fixed a bug where the game got caught in a null reference loop after player death, caused massive slowdowns.
• General code optimization, should be less CPU-heavy now.

For the next update, I will randomize the detection radius based on a set range as well. This will essentially mean that some monsters will have better perception than others, and this will really come into play once I implement hearing and FOV in the AI.

There are about a hundred variations of localized keyboard layouts out there besides the classic qwerty. I'm using an azerty myself but the symbols are different from the French azerty. That's why it's a good idea to be able to map keys.

The standalone builds will allow you to map keys pre-launch (Unity already includes an Unreal Engine 1.x-style config GUI framework.) I haven't added in-game remapping yet, so you currently can't do it in the webplayer builds.

 

[theabyss]

Checked it out yesterday. It's coming along really well.
Three things:

* I was trying to escape in the high grass and the wavy motion of the grass almost got me sea sick after a while. I'm not kidding. Maybe some more random movement?

* Then I was constantly "bunny hopping" to get away from them. Maybe some stamina system could be implemented that let's you hop away for a couple seconds and then you run out of steam.

* I found it a bit weird that the street lights would turn invisible if you stand behind them but not the trees. Consistency?

Other than that, really nice.

 

[DarkED]

I am putting together a dev team (already got one programmer) so I put up a dev forum.

Checked it out yesterday. It's coming along really well.
Three things:

* I was trying to escape in the high grass and the wavy motion of the grass almost got me sea sick after a while. I'm not kidding. Maybe some more random movement?

I'll definitely look into it, sorry about that. The game will likely have much less grass by public alpha as well.

* Then I was constantly "bunny hopping" to get away from them. Maybe some stamina system could be implemented that let's you hop away for a couple seconds and then you run out of steam.

The game will definitely have a re-generating stamina bar, and eventually jumping will be fixed and will have a cooldown timer so you can only jump once every couple of seconds or something.

* I found it a bit weird that the street lights would turn invisible if you stand behind them but not the trees. Consistency?

Yeah, it's a bug with the code that makes objects transparent - it currently works only for objects that have one material applied. I'm still working on it

Other than that, really nice.

Thanks!

 

[Benfica]

I'm really digging this :tup:

 

[Gir]

btw, your game sounds identical to State of Decay.
inspiration maybe?

minus the pretty graphics and 3rd-person camera, they're essentially the same concept.

*cough*Dayz*cough*

 

[DarkED]

So, we got a bunch of stuff done in the past couple of days. I was able to get a git repo running for the project, Jon helped me convert the entire codebase to C#, and we're fixing quite a few behind-the-scenes bugs for the push to v0.1.0. That will be the first official bug-free 'stable' release of the game, and standalone builds of that version will be available. Once that is done and out, we're gonna work on adding more features and recruiting more people to the dev team.

I've also been working on more art assets (doors, windows, furniture, etc) in the meantime, so you'll likely see some of that stuff (and script to run them) pop up in the next release.

Tomorrow we're gonna try to re-write the script that makes objects transparent and see if we can get some of the new assets into the game and working. Doors, windows, containers, etc will probably work with both a Use key and a right-click context menu if we can make that happen. After that stuff is done, we'll probably try to get a save/load system in so you'll be able to save and load savegames.

I'm really digging this :tup:

Thanks

*cough*Dayz*cough*

Yeah, that too.

 

[theabyss]

I'm really digging this :tup:

Great! Now go and get an avatar. Bugs me every time I see a post of yours!

 

[HugoMarques]

Great! Now go and get an avatar. Bugs me every time I see a post of yours!

There. If you want, I'll turn this into a gif and make all the white space around transparent...

 

[-Jes-]

Digging the zombie pileup at 5:30.