Game Concept Idea - The Art of Zombie Killing (Name not final)

News & General Discussion
1

This is a description for a game concept I have been thinking of. Wanted to get the input from others on what I have so far. There are a few key game mechanics that I think will give the game some flavor. Taking some advice from xenoargh, the idea of the game has changed a bit.

The game itself is designed to capitalize on my strengths as a graphical designer and model maker. (I am best at buildings, which is why it takes place in a city). The game will not rely on heavily scripted events.

The basics of the story:
Rewriting the story to make it better.

— Exploration —

  • The player will remain in his house, useing the supplies around him to survive a constant stream of zombies. The yard can also be explored
  • Rooms of the house can be unlocked.

— Campaign —

  • The campaign will exist to teach the player the basics, and once the house is fully secured, the campaign is over. The player will move room by room, securing all windows and doors.

— Single player —
This is a game of survival. You are given some items, and the house will be completely unlocked. See how long you last.

— Multiplayer —
Not sure how hard this is to implement, so this remains as a maybe for now

— Crafting System —
The number of weapons in this game will be high, and be obtained via an in debt crafting system. The player will gather all sorts of items (there is no such thing as a “junk” item in this game, an will create a variety of fun or useful weapons. I plan to implement a very flexible system, allow the user to create many combinations and variations. Parts can be forged from vehicles, buildings, trash, anything will be fair game.

— Combat —
Hand to hand, shooting, arrows, cannons, whatever the player wishes to do to kill zombies.

— AI —
The nice thing a bout a zombie game, the AI. I do not see this as a big obstacle. The AI is simple, zombies will chase any living human in sight! There may be some zombies that can use special abilities, but that is still being developed. If for some reason I add more AI to the game, the only issue would be navigating through the house.

More info will be added, as well as concept art once I iron out the game details. This will defiantly be a large scale project that will take me a good amount of time to finish. I would love to hear thoughts on what I have written, as well as any helpful tips! Before you mention it, I do know there are numerous zombie killing games, but between the detail in the city, crafting system, and story, I hope to give it some originality.

2

I will be honest and brutal, because honest and brutal is the truth! (So please don’t hate me! :smile:)
You seem to focus a lot on explaining the “why” than the story itself. Its like George Lucas who tried to explain “the force” (midi-chlorians!) in Starwars EP1 and the mechanics of intergalactic politics which seems pretty trivial and not interesting to most movie viewers. Its nice to have a background story, but you should focus on the “experience” as that’s what’s important.

Now, the storyline also seem pretty nondescript as well as the gameplay. Sounds like a mix of Left 4 Dead/STALKER/Resident Evil and the upcoming Dead Island (and a million other zombie games out there). I think you are probably holding some interesting ideas back, but so far all I can say is its pretty generic.

If you just want know if this is do-able…technically I would say yes, nothing is hard but the question is - do you have a team of 100?! :smile: Or do you planning on making this game for the rest of your life? The scope looks ridiculously large for a one man team (if you are one man team)…even if you are 30 man team it would probably still take 14 years (eg. Duke Nukem Forever!). Realistically I think something like this would take a 100 man team to finish in a realistic time table of 3-4 years.

3

Thanks for the input. As far as story and everything else, it is nowhere near final. I also know experience is key as well. I will never release something that has choppy game play, horrible controls and a poorly made environment. I plan to find somebody who is good at creative story writing to iron out a good story line. To be fair though, it is nearly impossible to create an entirely original story these days (ones that involve zombies that is)

The second paragraph seems right… You need to add Minecraft though, that is my main inspiration for the crafting system.

Currently this is a 1 man team, but for now I plan to work only on the map. While this does seem like a huge process, I plan to use Google sketch up to make the buildings. With this, I can make a to-scale building (inside and out) in about an hour (this would be a two story, 30 room building). As far as graphics go, I am pretty good at making semi-photo realistic pictures in Photoshop, and have a few very good free to use sources for building material images (http://www.cgtextures.com/ is amazing).

I plan the map alone to take at least a year to have the basic graphics and models. From that point, I plan to start building a small team for the rest. I think this seems like a realistic time frame. Grated I still have to make sure collisions work and script doors, objects etc.

4

Honestly, the story is secondary, possibly even tertiary.

5

Well, I’ll try not to be brutal, but I’ll be honest with you, and say that what you want to build is basically GTAIV with zombies. This is not a practical idea for a small team, if you want it to be polished. Moreover, you’ve left a lot hanging that would cause serious problems.

I can imagine the scope expanding… “wait, we need other people to interact with!”, “wait, wouldn’t it be cool if you could get people to join you?”, etc., etc., etc. This is a classic example of how not to design a game with a low / no budget.

My first reaction, as a game designer, is that you don’t need the crafting at all. That’s irrelevant to the core survival gameplay; the character’s in a city in the United States; finding weapons, food and other items he / she needs is not the problem; the problem is surviving the zombies. You don’t need it, and it doesn’t make sense.

If you want crafting to be a real focus, then the setting should not be urban; watch Night of the Living Dead, where, even with a fairly well-stocked farmhouse, the cast confronts huge numbers of zombies and is hard-pressed to work with their limited resources. Voila, now you’re down to just one house that you can build, in exquisite detail, a very limited problem in terms of developing pathfinding for the AI characters, a clear set of design problems, in terms of what resources can be crafted with and why. IOW, you’ve reduced your giant idea that cannot be done well with anything less than a AAA production team to something that one artist and one coder might be able to pull off, if they were both very, very good.

In short… you need to think through the content issues very, very carefully. The game design needs to be kept within what’s reasonable to execute, in terms of content- and when you look at it that way, you’ll find that it’s time to make a much smaller, more tightly-focused game (and it’s likely to be a much better game as a result).

Furthermore, you say you’re an artist, and that’s your end of the labor. However, if you’re using Sketchup… I hate to have to put it this way, but that’s not a production tool for realtime assets, and you need to learn one.

Building “a building” in “one hour” is nothing like building a AAA art asset, where everything needs to be photoreal and you cannot just slap a tiling texture on some geometry. It’s totally unrealistic to think that’s your timeline. More like “1 week per building, if I’m just doing the exteriors”.

6

Game idea : The best of everything with everything to do and its going to be amazing because youll never get bored

But the only way you’re going to get it done is to jump at it, and see where it goes.

7

@xenoargh

Hmm… That single house thing does sound interesting, and much more reasonable for a one man team. I could probably stick with the same story line, except the guy is to scared to even leave the house, and blocks off all doors. I think I will run with that, as I really want to use some sort of crafting system.

Oh, and I am using sketch up for the models, It works fine for making high detail models of buildings. Texturing is done in another program.

Thanks

8

Update:

So far, so good! I am in contact with a arcitecture company trying to secure a set of plans that would actually be the main house of the game. It was designed for the 2003 Seattle Street of Dreams and was the Best of Show winner.

Next step is to finish the model, texture it, then start making it usable in a game!

On another note, I need some input from everybody here. Since this game is similar to Call of Duty zombies, what did or did you not like about this game? Try and answer some of these questions:

  • Were levels to hard?
  • Did zombies get annoying?
  • At what point did the game stop being fun?
  • How was movement around the level?
  • Do you wish you could block off sections of the map?
  • Was ammo to hard to get?
  • Did you like the special weapons?

And any other likes or dislikes you would like to address.
Thanks!

9

It seems a fair bit like http://projectzomboid.com

10

Oh wow, it is somewhat like this game! I guess the main difference between the two is story and game play mechanic. Mine will bei n FPS style, and the graphics will be a tad higher. Unfortunately this will go nowhere until I find a good coder, but that waits until every single (or nearly all of the) game asset(s) are finished XD.

Here is actually a quick picture of the model in progress. Once I get the basic structure in sketchup done, I will be exporting it to blender for touch ups and final details. This picture is of the first floor. I have already started the second floor. Considering adding another simple structure such as a barn or some other form of storage outside.

(Right click on little icon and copy url if it does not appear)

11

It has been a while since I last posted. I have just gotten back in town, and am trying to finish up the base model soon.

The model is almost done, and I would really appreciate it if somebody would be willing to take a look at it and give feedback. I tried to clean it up as much as possible. I imported what I have (the roof is nearly done) into unity, and the base model clocked in somewhere around 10k polys I think (which is not that much from what I understand). Of course - I have not added windows or any of the other high poly additions yet).

I am having some issues though with collision mapping on the railings. Is there a way to edit the collision points in the mesh?

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what you may want to do is make an extra mesh for collision. The mesh itself doesn’t need to render, it will just be there as a collision mesh :slight_smile: this can really help optimize objects with a lot of small surfaces, like rails, grates, and other similar meshes.

13

@Larvantholos

How would I go about making this mesh exactly? I do see how this would be good for stairs, instead of the steps make a ramp. How would I ensure that it does not render though?

14

There’s a mix of ways you can do collision. If a mesh renders it has a “Mesh Renderer” component in the inspector. Simply uncheck it and the mesh will not render, but still have it’s collision.
First way would be his solution - create a custom mesh for collision in a modeling program. Slanted surface for chairs, lack of wall lips/details, increased wall height. This would probably be the fastest and most accurate.

Second way would be to fake it with collision boxes. Takes longer to set up, not as accurate and modifications would be a pain.

15

Adding on to what Windex said, for doing rails, grates, etc, you just create a solid shape. For instance, if its along stairs, and you want to prevent the player from going through it, you can create a solid rectangle or plane to accomplish it. If you absolutely need the holes in the mesh have no collision, unity can generate the colliders for you, but if you want more control, you can use several smaller meshes to accomplish the result as well.

16

Ah ok I see. thanks for your help. I will probably go and make the suggested collision mesh, though I will probably wait until all texturing and final details are done just in case something changes.

Oh one other question.

I read that a single unity unit is considered 1 meter right? If I build my house inside of sketchup using exact measurements - then import into unity and change the scale to 1 unit, will the house be the appropriate size?

17

It should be. You can also build a mesh for scale, to help assure your objects end up the right height. I usually do a box that is 1 x 1 x 2 - 2 high for the approx height of a person (tho I think its more like 1.7 round numbers make it easier to balance out the dimensions)

18

This house does not look half bad in Unity. There are still a few faces going the wrong direction (which I will fix), but other than that it seems to work. I do not have any issues with collision mapping anymore. This model is, at this time, 10k verts and 8k tris. If this house is going to be one of two buildings in the entire scene, how many verts and tris can it have without causing lag?

Also, when it comes to texturing - is there a better program to texture in than blender (I do not have 5k to spend on a program)? I plan to do layered textured (base texture with alphas on top of it) - not sure if blender can do this though. Then again… I wonder if I can do it in photoshop… I know cs5 has some sort of 3d support - but I have not played with it yet.


Almost time to texture this thing!

19

Now, simply change the name to “The Ancient art of Zombie Killing”, and you have a winner.

20

That’s going to be based on video card. Max model size can be 64k vertices (a tad higher) but there there is no hardcoded vertice limit for multiple objects.
So an 8k building isn’t going to be costly.

I’m a bit confused by that one. Why do you need to 3dpaint that building?
If you’re new to UVing and textureing than what you need to do is do some research into it, look at some tutorials. UVing is just as important as making the mesh.
If you are new to it, say so and I’ll give you the basic idea of what you’ll need to do for easiest UVing and texturing.

(I am not a good modeler by any standard, any better ones out there feel free to correct anything)