Looking promising so far.
What I really liked that you have so far: the auto-combat thing. Genius. Multiple party members + single targeting methods + swarms = tedious combat. The combat you've done very much streamlines it, but allows us the gameiness of saying "I, Hubert Jenkins, chose to smash that zombie's head in with a fire axe." If you can squirrel configurable AI options in there for the auto-combat AI, that would be sweet.
The action points bar is also something I've wanted to see in Rogue-likes for a while. Games like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup would benefit from something like this, to explain combat speeds and performance much better. I'd like to see lists in-game that describe how much each actual action costs. Give us delicious data to plan the perfect team, down to their turn-by-turn capabilities.
While the player tile is a cute effect that hearkens back to LCS...it feels too small to me. The whole squad fitting on one tile. It makes me think that maybe zombies should stack since the player effectively stacks, and you can have a tile for a horde of zombies. That way you can cram more zombie in for less overhead. It's not "realistic" but the squad already breaking reality in that sense. It's up to you if you want to continue down the path it's presenting.
So, what I would like to see.
There was a web-based zombie game someone linked over in OG. You had your base, yadda yadda, but the city map was a series of plots. Some were residential, some were commercial, some were government. You started by securing the sites around your base and progressively you started exploring more of the world.
I found that plot-design really endearing. Combine that with what Fort Zombie does, which is random encounters while you travel that plop you into generated plots you need to escape from, I think you've got a good mixture of free roaming and simulation. It allows you to set up other things like: multiple bases. Various environments with different threat levels and rewards. Different scenarios for meeting and recruiting survivors. Plots of different sizes that may or may not take advantage of the 1,000,000 site tile cap. And you could make a fun little procedurally generated game map that whoever is doing your tile artwork could have a fun time doing.
Things it would require though:
-Another, top-level procedural plot generator.
-Lots of variety in the site map generator.
-Some sort of method to track the zombie pop moving through the city via plots. I'd poke around the work done on Rogue Survivor, as it manages to model this efficiently without bringing things to a halt. You don't want static sites because, obviously, the Zombie Apocalypse isn't a jRPG where you just systematically clear out the world. So even sites you "clear", you want roamers and the chance a horde moves through there.
If you can get a decent horde simulation going, that becomes a game in and of itself (like if you get scouting reports that X numbers of zombies were seen at Y,Z plot), managing the movement of the horde or responding to it. Again, Rogue Survivor does something like this, but it tends to focus a lot on the individual sightings, so information about large movements of ZEDs becomes hard to discern.
Anyways, that's just generic random thinking that popped into my head while watching this. These zombie rogue-likes to me benefit from as much procedural map gen as you can conjure and good zombie population simulation. The whole "zombies go to sleep and stand there when you aren't around" works, it's just the limit of what most zombie games of this nature can reach, and it would be cool to see someone go beyond that, by modeling the horde more effectively. Rogue Survivor has in a sense gotten there in a fun and interesting way, even if the game becomes unsurvivable past X because of it. Fort Zombie does it through smoke and mirrors, just a countdown timer to DOOM and a swarm. Something that captures both, the movement of the horde and the climatic but not necessarily inevitable conclusion, would be amazing.
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Topic: The Zombocalypse Is Coming (Read 41894 times)