Reactions (all bearing in mind the pre-alpha state of the game):
1- Love the blood effect. Needs MOAR blood effect, for zombie impacts too. Maybe their blood looks darker and funkier and they don't leave blood trails.
2- Love the item view. Something about zoomed up pixel art that just clicks with me.
3- The zombies and PC are placeholders I assume? With smooth movement between tiles, it implies you'll be doing actual animations at some point?
4- The zombie tile was hard for me to distinguish what I was looking at. I knew it was "not player" but I couldn't exactly see the zombie in it.
5- Backpedaling seems too effective. Would it be possible to reduce movement speed when you're shooting in a direction opposite of your movement?
6- Smooth tile animations allows for some interesting zombie movement. For example, zombies could occasionally lunge or lurch an additional tile (basically randomly altering their movement speed per tick or based on player proximity.) Nothing is less dangerous than a target with finite and knowable movement capabilities. Zombies being able to lunge an additional tile would encourage people to keep their distance. And with smooth tile movement it would actually
look like a lunge too, instead of a zombie moving two tiles rather than one like it would be in TBS. The game has this real-time action thing going on right now, which looks pretty good. But it seems fairly easy to trivialize the zombies, even if they could break through windows and doors. Randomly making them faster would add some more twitch goodness to this.
7- Seemed a little too easy to sneak past zombies. One would think they would have a higher detection radius than something bumping into them. Especially with the flashlight on.
8- Guns should have different styles of shots. For example, I expected the shotgun to have a spread fire animation. Right now you're abstracting the value of a close range shotgun blast because it's firing a single shot. If you changed it to fire a spread pattern, you could better emulate a close range shotgun blast by making it about how many pellets hit versus the range difference.
9- Zombies should home in on blood trails like flies to poop.
10- Melee seems underwhelming. I know this is an pre-alpha state, but looking forward to bumping stuff as a melee attack, I feel like it's going to need more to make it feel meaty. So, consider things like: knock back, knocking down or maybe even an attack animation (even something as minor as showing a strike animation on a zombie or a bite animation on the player when they take a hit.) Maybe it's just a purely visual thing right now....but there should be more cues. Like, the player tile should flicker when they've taken damage. You've got the sound effect and the life bar but it still feels a little hollow. Like it's still operating on a TBS philosophy. (In that cues are much less important because the player has time to look around and gather information. In real-time, the game has to do more of that work for the player.)
11- I don't know how keen you are on sound engineering, but I'll say I think ZSQ will benefit greatly from as much ambient sound as you can throw in there. Footsteps, doors opening, rain, wind, distant thunder, panting and groans of pain, I think these will all deliver on atmosphere in a way that even tons of lighting and fancy furniture tiles won't pull off. Since you've moved this to real time, the value of sound effects versus them in a TBS game just went up a lot.
A game needs an endgoal, but that endgoal require some objectives for you to find. Someone mentioned the Madagascar endgame, where you try to escape, but why are you looting random buildings (other than to survive)?
12- Agreed. If you're going the pure exploration/combat route for your first release, consider a goal-based objective. I.e., survive 20 days, reach a certain point in a certain building plot alive, find an item, find "the way out." Because without a serious dose of "you can't win this", games like this tend to only be good for a play through or two before you're seriously only playing it for its tactical purity. The thing about LCS ect...which I'm sure you're aware of, is the player attachment to their characters and to their grand strategic design. That's what takes LCS from "played it" to "love it." Without lots of customizable characters or a grand strategic approach to explore....the game will need something.
For example, compare Project Zomboid. It's got it all. Sound, graphics, combat, atmosphere, more mechanics than you can shake a dead cat at....and yet it still lacks that key goal for people to do other than "survive", which in their highly detailed but very limited world.....gets you about 2 to 3 play throughs before you're done and there's almost no drive to play. Even for games that claim to just be tests of survival, there's always got to be something more going on there than just the pure skill challenge.
I see ZSQ falling into the same trap, where focusing TOO MUCH on the minute to minute gameplay only leaves the player with minute to minute interest. I'm not trying to convince you to change your design plan, which seems like a solid route to go. I would leave yourself some space for other things to frame what the player is doing though. Because I'll be honest, most games that bill themselves as exploration games rarely have the content to actually justify it. And zombie apocalypse games tend to offer THE LEAST exploration value because they're always focused on finding the exact same things: food, ammo, safety. You know what's out there, the only mystery is what form it takes.
Compare that to a fantasy game where you're not only finding gear, you're finding
special gear, you're finding unique environments, story elements and tons of additional game play things like trinkets, player abilities, and on......To me, that's exploration, where there are dozens of things I'm hoping to find, some of them with absolutely zero game play impact. For a zombie apocalypse game to really live up to an "exploration" claim, it has to have more than 100 buildings full of ammo, weapons, armor, zombies and food. Because by 30% of the game, you don't NEED those things. You may WANT those things, but they're not excellent compelling reasons to play.
As another example, Rogue Survivor had a few sites of interest. The CERBERUS or whatever organization with the cool buildings. There were sewers too, which were so horrifying I never had the courage to explore them. Beyond the world-based things of interest, there was this nice skill mechanics for humans and zombies that gave you reasons to try and survive longer, to play the game again and see what you hadn't seen. It was a good start and I think between that, and Fort Zombie, with its varying plot design, you can see what I'm getting at. Going through 12 generic buildings, even if they're reasonably furnished, to stock up on things to keep me playing longer, doesn't really make it an exploration game in my book. Once you're satisfied that you've got the structure down and it's fun, really focus on the world. Because it's your canvas, more than the mechanics, the zombies or the meta-game, and it's what people will rely on to entertain them. Even if all the other points of interest aren't as deep as they could be, an interesting world will keep me coming back just for the sense of being there, if it's been done well.
And as a last example, Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2. Some of the excellent moments in that game have nothing to do with shooting things or staying alive. I remember once when I actually stopped to look around at all the graffiti and wall textures...how much
character leapt out at me. Messages to loved ones scrawled on walls, blood splatters, corpses in obviously staged positions telling little stories about what happened to them in their corner of hell. Not all of that is extensible to a top-down, 2d game but the spirit of it is. I'll kill as many ZEDs as I have to, to see a world detailed like that. (And one would hope it's done in a slightly more interesting way than what most zombies games do, which is writing "THE END IS NIGH" on every wall.)
Well that turned into a huge ramble but I hope you find some of that feedback useful.
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Topic: The Zombocalypse Is Coming (Read 41839 times)