Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[nenjin]

In 10 years, Rule 34 is going to apply to map generation, because it's that sexy.

Great work. Always looking forward to more.

[Strife26]

Is that first page on the site country specific? Because I totally thought that it was actually blocked by the UAE, which there's a fair chance my internets go through right now.


Edit: Yeah, the site is awfully leany, I have to say. Especially, especially, especially the wikileaks page.

[NRDL]

I saw the video, and it looks pretty cool.  Can't wait for the game to come out  .

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Is that first page on the site country specific? Because I totally thought that it was actually blocked by the UAE, which there's a fair chance my internets go through right now.


Edit: Yeah, the site is awfully leany, I have to say. Especially, especially, especially the wikileaks page.

Haha, no, it isn't. But the splash screen IS a real page that used to show up in the UAE. Nowadays, it's a more shiny blue page (I checked by bouncing my signal through a UAE proxy and hitting the block), but the basic message is the same. I like that they're very upfront, instead of just dropping the packets; they tell you it's blocked, and even give you place to go complain about it. Censorship with dignity.

And yeah, the guy who did the Wikileaks page did a great job.

On topic, I'm working on the UI for the survivors list at this very moment, or was until Flash crashed a moment ago and led me to take a break. I'm really happy with how it's turning out. Flash is a great program.

[Yannanth]

.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

One of the reasons mainstream game development tends to avoid being too open is because features can get cut for time or even for design considerations. Right now, I'm considering limiting you to one safehouse and one squad. My reasoning is as follows:

One Squad
1. You can only take action with one squad at a time anyway.
2. Having one squad will allow tracking the time of day during site actions without creating strange paradoxes and other timeline crossing weirdness.
3. A single squad with time tracking could still hit multiple sites in one day, potentially staying out past nightfall. Fort Zombie shows the interesting risk-reward gameplay that can create.
4. Having one squad will simplify the management interface greatly. You can literally click a check box on the character list to include them in the squad, click it again to toggle them out.
5. Focusing on a smaller number of people increases the level of personal attachment to each character and amplifies the consequences of squad actions.

One Safehouse
1. The primary purpose of having multiple safehouses in LCS is to shake the police off your trail and mitigate risk to low-heat Liberals. There may be Zombie attacks, but the heat mechanic won't work in such a way that the same safehouse management tactics would help anyway.
2. Having one safehouse will simplify the interface, especially personnel and inventory tracking, and it will focus your safehouse investments on depth (lots of improvements/upgrades in one place) rather than breadth (get the same few improvements/upgrades in lots of places).
3. Attacks on your safehouse will be much easier to balance if all your eggs are in one basket, instead of having arbitrarily strong/weak safehouses scattered about.

In general, while multiple squads and safehouses are cool features conceptually, I feel they are secondary to the core strategy even in LCS, which centers around the application of your people and the growth of your organization. Not implementing them would allow me to avoid spending the development time and interface complexity to support them. And I really think having a simple check box to mark your survivors for squad duty would be amazing.

Your comments encouraged.

Jonathan, please check the video's comments. I based my comment on the Burgess model and most major British cities (not so much terraced housing in America I take it). I forgot to mention the irregular road patterns in my comment by the way.

Heheh, not to worry, I get all YouTube comments on any of my videos in my email. Big channels disable this feature because they get thousands per day, but I get only a couple at most, so I can afford to splurge. Somewhat unrelated, every edit on any page of the LCS wiki also ends up in my inbox.

I'd like to further differentiate the buildings in different parts of the city at some point, and I think that kind of approach -- having each area of the city have a different flavor, drawn from patterns seen in real-world cities -- is a good one. It's something I'll have to come back to at some point.

[nenjin]

One Safehouse
1. The primary purpose of having multiple safehouses in LCS is to shake the police off your trail and mitigate risk to low-heat Liberals. There may be Zombie attacks, but the heat mechanic won't work in such a way that the same safehouse management tactics would help anyway.
2. Having one safehouse will simplify the interface, especially personnel and inventory tracking, and it will focus your safehouse investments on depth (lots of improvements/upgrades in one place) rather than breadth (get the same few improvements/upgrades in lots of places).
3. Attacks on your safehouse will be much easier to balance if all your eggs are in one basket, instead of having arbitrarily strong/weak safehouses scattered about.

I'm going to quibble with this assessment, because I think maybe you're extending LCS' game play beyond its genre.

To me multiple bases in zombie apocalypse games serve these additional purposes:

-Escape. Thought it's counter to the doomsday scenario of ZA games, it's a legit tactical consideration. While putting all your eggs in one basket might make things more defensible, it's still putting all your eggs in one basket. Always having an exit plan is just good ZA preparation, it's part of accepted wisdom of the genre. There's no point to having an escape plan if you've got no where to escape to.

-Reconnaissance. The BIGGEST problem with many ZA games is that, due to the design, exploration becomes exponentially more difficult the farther you get from home base. To the point where the risk almost completely outweighs the reward. Fort Zombie provided an excellent example of this. It was suicide to pursue a mission more than 1/2 way across the city map. You'd almost never make it back before nightfall, or in one piece. With multiple forward bases, exploration and risk scale better together. You don't necessarily create a 2nd mega-base, but you create a forward outpost that lets you extend your exploration radius without just throwing yourself to the zombies.

-Caches. This is the BIG one to me. No zombie games really account for this specifically, it's always a by-product of the item system and the fact the world is populated mostly by zombies. If you're setting up forward bases, the next logical thing is to stock those bases with a few supplies. Some extra ammo, food and medical supplies. Maybe you come back and visit a cache and find there's some bikers camping on it, because they stumbled on to a lot of supplies and thought they'd hit the lottery. Take Rogue Survivor for example. Caches there are important because everyone wants the goods you're stockpiling. It's also important in terms of logistics and security. I want a zombie game that acknowledges caches as important enough to commit some extra thought to them.

You don't NEED multiple bases to achieve some of these effects, but they all contain the spirit of game play that says "i'm not pigeon holed to where I started, I have some control over my environment and I can make many tactical decisions outside my base that don't involve loot, running, shooting or hiding."

It's harder to balance for sure, but I think the pay off in tactics, replayability and a connection to your in-game strategy makes up for it. Like, with Fort Zombie, I never felt like I was making meaningful decisions. Sure you pick the mission, build some barricades at base, tell people what to do with their time...but that was it. The simulation was very narrow. Compared to say, Rogue Survivor Alpha, where you don't get any formal base or survivor control mechanics but you get the freedom to choose where you set up. I think the freedom of choice wins out over just the standard Zombie Apocalypse base mechanic, even when it's dressed up with things like upgrades (which people will always try to get, the difference there is only in how much they have to sacrifice to get it or in what order they acquire them.)

I'm not saying I won't be happy without multiple bases. But really look into the possibility of achieving the same sorts of effects without straight duplicating the main base. For example, if we could "declare" buildings as an outpost or cache, and it might show up on the map or provide us some options like getting some working power, or something....that would be enough to satisfy me. It totally side steps the issue of multiple squads too, which I agree makes this simulation much more difficult to design, because it's not creating the expectation of a whole second base that could support 30 or 40 people. It implies that forward bases are small and functional but they never overshadow your main base for security, the breadth of options or as a living space.

Put another way: a 20x20 concrete maintenance shack out back of a school doesn't make a great base. But as a place to rest, hide, heal or store things it's ideal, and I hope the game achieve that in a way that's more fun and detailed than just "Pick a building and throw stuff in there, it will be there when you come back."

[Innominate]

I think a one-squad pseudo-multiple base system would be nice. Squads could take equipment to a secondary base or fortify it, or use it as a staging point for actions, but while doing so would be considered the "active" squad. Something like:

Perform squad action
[Choose destination
Choose action
Action completed] *repeated until returned to base, or a full day has elapsed, or whatever makes the most sense with your data structures

E.g.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Perform squad action
Go to Police Station
Explore site

Go to safehouse between Police Station and Grocery Store
Fortify safehouse, stay the night
[potential for attacks on both main base and safehouse]

Go to Grocery Store
Explore site

Go to safehouse
Store some non-perishable foods in safehouse

Rush back to main base before nightfall

Even though this takes two days to complete, you would not be able to form a new squad or do any non-base actions in the mean-time. Prolonged activity outside the base would still be dangerous; you would have to retreat to a less-fortified safehouse (perhaps only saved by the smaller numbers in your squad avoiding notice - though I'd love it if that could all come crashing down if you skirted too close to nightfall and got followed), and couldn't fetch any equipment or food for the main base while you were away. But it would reward players who managed to keep some of their eggs in a separate basket, and might become necessary as you exhaust the resources closer to the main base. So it provides what I think is a good compromise between strategy and the ease and quality of implementation.

[nenjin]

E.g.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Perform squad action
Go to Police Station
Explore site

Go to safehouse between Police Station and Grocery Store
Fortify safehouse, stay the night
[potential for attacks on both main base and safehouse]

Go to Grocery Store
Explore site

Go to safehouse
Store some non-perishable foods in safehouse

Rush back to main base before nightfall

(click to show/hide)

Exactly what I'm thinking. Perhaps after you "declare" a building as an outpost, it asks you to give it a designation. Forward Base Alpha, Camp Freedom, Adams School Safehouse, whatever. Depending on the movement mechanics of the squad, yeah, it gives you a place to travel directly to since it's a "known" location to your squad and allows them to think a little more deliberately about what they can do to the building (build containers, barricade and/or reinforce, power and lighting, creature comforts like a bed, ect...) By establishing forward bases you slowly extend your range of exploration....but all of these areas are still subject to zombie attacks or NPCs, so you don't really create a safety ring around your main base, more you create nodes of relative safety. But these things would take time and lot of a material investment you may not have or may not want to sacrifice over your base.

You wouldn't want them to get too over developed otherwise it becomes a game of hoarding, zombie-apocalypse style. And because it becomes semi-redundant to make 10 fortified outposts for 5 survivors.

Maybe the # of outposts you could create could be controlled by some factor. A player skill or perhaps how much of the map they've actually explored.

[chaoticag]

Yeesh, for a second, I thought the site was actually blocked. I grew up seeing that damn page, and the fact that they made the logo a bit grayer now isn't all that much an improvement.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I think you make a good argument, nenjin, and I certainly wouldn't want to reproduce Fort Zombie's system of artificially diminishing the size of the city as a side effect of incorporating travel time and a fixed base. I can't help but think of XCOM, where starting a new base was a major investment that took a lot of time and money, but had substantial strategic benefits. New bases could be staging points to protect other parts of the planet, or just manufacturing/research centers, since those activities required space and personnel that could be better devoted to combat-related tasks in the staging bases.

At the same time, I think the Fort Zombie syndrome can be mitigated with things like a central location for your safehouse and allowing travel directly between locations (rather than always running home between), as well as simply making fast travel take less time than they do. The heavy consideration favoring these workarounds is that I have a fairly limited amount of development time before I simply run out of money to pay rent and buy food, so I need to make sure the core gameplay is in place. I would like to eventually be free of this concern, but that's not the case for this game. You make a good case that the game would be better with multiple safehouses, but I think I still have to list it as a "nice to have" rather than a "must have". I will keep the possibility in mind though.

In other news, here's what I've been working on:



What you're looking at is preliminary UI for survivor list, character sheets, squad formation, and activity selection, all on one screen.

Let's take a tour:

1. Survivor list in the top left. Most of the effort went here. Basic info about the character, a drop-down (with mini scroll bar) for setting activites on the fly, a scroll bar for navigating the list, check boxes for putting people into and out of the squad. I'll make the check boxes for adding more people gray out when the squad is full (of course, they're already gray... I'll figure something out). I'm pretty happy with how it turned out overall, though a lot of hand-wringing went into what information to display and how to organize it. These entries used to be one line, but I really had trouble fitting both the drop-down and the check box in the available space. Maybe if the right sidebar is removed it could be collapsed back to one line. I'm not sure off hand if that would be stretching the information too horizontally or not; if so, and I still want to do that, I'll have to alternate colors between entries to aid visual tracking.

2. Character sheet in the bottom left. This should look almost exactly like an LCS character sheet right now, because I haven't figured out exactly how I want to lay it out. Needs weapon at least on there as well, and a button to toggle views (switch to all skills, any other views that need to be added later). I'm not sure if weapon should be chosen here or on the map screen where you dispatch the squad; it might be better to list your five squad members and their weapons along the bottom or side there, and that would help you to visualize the squad all in one place. I'll need to do some more work on this.

I don't like having the character sheet in a frame below the list. That was how I originally sketched this screen, but the sheet is bulky and there are some clunky issues with how it determines what character is there. If I set it by mouse over, you can quickly preview different characters, but you can't easily move the mouse to the character sheet to interact with it (it would mouse over other characters on the way and switch which survivor is displayed). If I set it by click, it turns each list entry into a button. But the list entries already have two buttons on them, which would mean nested buttons, which is pretty painful. What I'm currently envisioning is that the list stretches from top to bottom, and there's a button to expand each entry in the list. Expanding that entry would append the character sheet for that character below their list entry and push the rest of the entries below that. You could expand or collapse as many characters as you want.

3. Navigation sidebar on the right. This was part of my initial sketches for this screen, but I don't like it. Huge real estate used to display little of importance. It can almost certainly be shrunk, possibly even removed and turned into a bottom or top bar across the screen, instead of down one side. We'll see. Also, the squads screen won't exist, and I probably need a research screen. More design is needed here.

None of the content is hooked up with anything yet, so, for example, the list of activities in the drop down, and the skills on the character sheet, are just there for illustration purposes to help me visualize it. Also, the visual look I'm going for with this is kind of a text based game with a GUI. It still feels terribly gray though. Maybe a beige paper-ish look would be better? For that matter, should the font be something handwritten instead of Courier New? Sketchy font is a more common convention in zombie games, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's what I should do. This is another area where I haven't pinned down what I want for the game yet.

[nenjin]

Question: What can you use in terms of art for the character page? Just solid colors? Can you import like, a background image to lay over it?

It's terribly gray, yes. Some more detailed borders (even a double line) on the buttons or fields would make it pop and give it some depth immediately. Colored font, where appropriate, will reduce the amount of gray the player is paying attention to.

I wouldn't go with a paper-color emulation unless you can add some sort of graphical backdrop to it. In my mind, a featureless beige page with text would look even more funky than slate gray. On the other hand....if the font backs up the beige color, you might be able to achieve the illusion that the player is looking at paper. I personally wouldn't mind the spiral note book or note pad look: yellow and/or off white with translucent teal lines across the page. You can probably do that without any sort of background image. If you CAN use a background image, some sort of overlay that has paper-like wrinkles would be a nice touch.

On the other hand....that screen is already quite full. There's not a lot of room between fields or anything, so adding much visual depth to it might make it look crowded. What about a clipboard, rather than a piece of paper? Clipboard paper documents are always checklists and things with boxes, that would work pretty well. But again, really pulling that off relies on some art assets.

On font: Sick of sketchy, for real reals. Yes, it's supposed to look either drawn or slightly fear-prone....but often it looks childish to me and it's fairly over done. As for what you could use.....I dunno, I'd start by genre rather than going by the names. Genre might help you narrow down conceptually what you want your font to be. Like, industrial. Futuristic. Thin profile. Gothic. Stuff like that. Typical "horror" fonts tend to all look cartoony, especially if they're using squiggles to remind you of blood. Font is just one of those things you have to spend 2 hours looking through them before you find one that speaks to you.

On Character sheet in the bottom left: What about a button that takes you to a full character screen pretty much like what LCS does? Or are you trying to avoid using more screens than necessary? To me the bottom left micro view combined with a clickable full page view would be just fine. Perhaps shift the character micro view to the top left. For myself, that's where my eyes go for "header" information, which is what the character view panel is. It's the header for whatever field you're looking at.

On the rest: Time is ever the great enemy. Whatever gets you closest to your financial goals before you starve is what's best, for sure. That said, on a later front, I think favoring a smaller outpost system in the end would be easier and jive better with the ZA game than what X-Com did. Half of that game becomes economic management exactly because of the depth of base building and investment. I think it'd be interesting to try something akin to it, but of an entirely different scope.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I can do background images, gradients, alpha, vector art, masking, animations, filters, anti-aliasing, blend modes, rudimentary 3D, you name it... Flash isn't perfect, but it's definitely hot stuff, and Adobe has it well documented and presented too. Its only real Achilles' heel is performance, and that's not an issue with this kind of game. The limiting factors for how good the UI looks are my ability and time.

I'm trying it out with a lighter gray and bold Cambria font. Cambria is a collaborative project between Microsoft and God, it's pretty much the most amazing font ever invented. It's not the least bit genre relevant, but I'm happy to have a clean, readable font that doesn't do anything fancy. Cambria also has the advantage that even bold, it's narrow enough that there are rarely space issues, but still extremely readable. Once I have a bit more done (I'm also going to mess with getting rid of the sidebar and try to incorporate the character sheet into the list, as described in my last post), I'll post a version two for comparison.

[nenjin]

Well, I know contributing work is a sticky wicket for anyone wanting to do a commercial venture, particularly because you don't want to end up relying on other people's art for completion, compensation, yadda yadda....but I don't doubt a few here would be willing to chip in some art if you put out a call for it.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Unfortunately, Cambria looks kinda ratty when processed by Flash's anti-aliasing instead of Microsoft's, and I'd have to embed it and hand processing over to Flash or it wouldn't show up on Mac/Linux boxes. So I'm currently leaning toward just using Arial. What a shame.