NOTLP (working title)

[HarryO)))]

I've been working passively on this thing for about a week and decided i'd see what the people at this board thought of it.

It's actually a sequel to a mod I made for my friend's first ever game project (a simple ascii-based RPG) which converted it from a generic fantasy world to urban zombie survival.

The rundown:
-Zombie/dumb monster survival
-Procedurally generated world
-Focus is survival and exploration rather than combat
-Item combination (could be viewed as crafting but more comparable to inventory puzzles in point-and-click adventures, no "recipes" involved)
-Role-playing elements, but this does not mean "stats/character progression."

More detail:
Zombies or dumb monsters have infested a city - I haven't done enemy AI or much spriting for characters yet so the final design of enemies could differ, but in the scheme of things we can consider them zombies as they'll likely be unintelligent, won't use weapons and the player will be vastly outnumbered by them.

The world is about a 900x900m area of a neighbourhood based on, i suppose, a charicature-ized northern US town. The actual inspiration for this setting was from some suburbs around Boston so if anyone reading this is from that area, what up.
I'm actually an australian and the architecture and style of the houses from this area are quite alien to me, so i've probably gone a little over-the-top with it. Not sure. The reason I picked this setting is because I noticed the footprints of buildings are quite square which makes them easilly manageable in a randomised world.

I want to create something which feels more exploration and survival based than combat based. To be more specific, I aim to create and continually add as many items as i possibly can, to the point that even playing through a whole map might not result in the player "discovering everything." Rare mobs could be cool as well. Naturally, combat will be present, but I want it to feel like conflict is an obstacle to the real point of the game, survival and exploration.
The survival aspects I intend to simulate pretty deeply. Food, shelter, sleep will naturally need to be attended to, as well as dealing with injury, fever, and secondary maladies. I could go into more specifics about the mechanics of these if anyone's interested.

As for the item combination stuff... Ehhh, I'm pretty cautious of it seeming like the kind of "crafting" system which is becoming popular in games. I'd like to be very clear about my intentions with the item combination mechanic. In pretty much every game i've tried with crafting systems, theres a bunch of items, a bunch of crafting recipes, and the general practise is that people look up recipes other players or the game designer has written down for them to use. I realise I can't stop anyone from doing this (and really, it doesn't matter) but my intention is to have enough items and combinations, and enough relatively simple/logical combinations of just two items, that the player can experiment with what they're carrying and easilly discover new ways to use things. So it will kind of be another "dimension" to the exploration focus, the player will be exploring the map physically, encountering new enemies and areas, while at the same time "exploring" or experimenting with the things they find there. This might sound kind of dumb but I really think experimentation and discovery give inquisitive humans a natural joy and this should appeal to that just fine. Otherwhise, we can always just run around wasting a few zombies til we get eaten.

I say role-playing elements, I mean you literally pick a role to play and stick with it. If you make yourself a character you decide doesn't fit your play style, you can't "level" other stats you want him to have in order steer him in the direction you'll like. You'll need to start fresh - But, that shouldn't be a bad thing. The world is randomly generated so you wont be replaying material with each new character you make.

What's done so far:
So far, the map generator lays out roads and divides the areas of non-road into lots for houses to go on. Currently a house can only take up one lot, but I intend to change that. It's placing one house per lot currently, I intend to let the generator leave spaces between houses for yards or driveways. The generator intelligently picks where each house should face so that their front door exits out onto the sidewalk. I need to draw more graphics to add further variation in the houses :D
The roads are a bit jinky and square-lookin when zoomed out, but the ingame view shows a small enough section that the roads look ok, IMO.
I've also got some very basic groundwork for inventory interface... Currently all that does is load up an array and interpret it as graphical items in an inventory. There's a screen of it below.
I've also got a simple day-night cycle going but I predict it'll need some edits in order to provision it for the use of artificial light sources.

My request:
At this stage I'm really worried my project appears too much like the game "project zomboid" on the surface. I myself think my project has different aims to zomboid but I can certainly see how it would seem to be similar at a glance. I've considered changing the enemies from zombies to some other dudes in an effort to avoid this... If anyone has feedback on the matter, please let me know what you think.

Furthermore, I would love any kind of general comments or questions about the concept. I would espescially like questions because they allow me to further clarify what's in my head to the public, and in some cases, I'm sure there will be stuff I haven't completely thought out yet and it'll be a good opportunity for me to handle those unresolved design questions.

I feel pretty bad about posting a link in my first post, but I'll explain myself.
I've set up a tumblr account for this thing, and as those who use tumblr know, it has an "ask" feature. Using this I hope I can more publicly answer the questions people have about the idea so anyone reading it might not have to ask it themselves.
http://notlp.tumblr.com/
For those of you who have tumblr, I'd appreciate if you "cross-posted" any questions you have both here and on the tumblr thing so that I can keep a decent amount of information and feedback across both this thread and the tumblr page. If you don't have tumblr, or do have tumblr and are too lazy to post twice, completely disregard this :D


PIX:

a WIP shot of a generated piece of the world

a mocked-up "ingame" screen

inventory mock-up

 

[bacon]

ive never heard of zomboid

This looks like a super neat project. I really like the fact that you have a random world generator as that should extend the replayability.

Be careful about adding too many items without a purpose. Every item should be just as significant as the last.

Is the inventory infinite? I think it would make the game a lot more interesting if you could carry only 9 items. That way, it becomes a constant struggle to differentiate what you need from what you want. Also, it could make the combination system a lot more interesting and a lot less generic.

I really love your ideas here. I especially love the fact that you are focusing on experimenting and giving the character a choice. However, just be careful. Ive seen games where the addition of experimentation in one part of the game causes another part of the game to be severely limiting. Make sure you spend ample time on every part of the game and keep consistent.~

Good luck. This looks super neat.

 

[HarryO)))]

This looks like a super neat project. I really like the fact that you have a random world generator as that should extend the replayability.

I'm really hoping so. I find it's really difficult to create a random world while simultaneously obscuring the routines used to generate it from the player, if you know what i mean. Like, plenty of games generate random "missions" or whatever, but it's a real immersion-breaker when the player can almost see the lines of code which must be being used to produce the briefs. I can only hope I'll avoid this by blending in a good dose of hand-crafted content, which will drive the labour requirement up but hopefully for a much higher payoff gameplay-wise. For example, the houses themselves are not generated, I'm merely drawing tons of variants of them and placing them with a randomised routine. This way, the only limit to how truly unique each world feels is how many different sprites i have the time to make. Ideally I will add more and more variation to the world generator as time goes on.

Be careful about adding too many items without a purpose. Every item should be just as significant as the last.

I agree to an extent... I do want to make some items less significant and more common than the more significant, less common ones. This, I hope, will drive the player to seek out the elusive stuff, as well as give me a way to scatter plenty of loot around the place without it becoming too easy for the player. I kind of like the idea of finding maybe 3 or 5 cans of food in an average house, which feels like a natural amount of stuff to be around the place, but considering that the game will likely span several weeks, a can of food wont be that significant of a find. Having said that, I definitely want most buildings to appear hastily looted, and most of what you find to be whatever the looters weren't careful enough to notice and take. One of the "perks" i have planned which the character can choose from at the start would be called something like "thrift junkie" which would give them a very very slight bonus for finding extra stuff amongst piles of junk.

Is the inventory infinite? I think it would make the game a lot more interesting if you could carry only 9 items. That way, it becomes a constant struggle to differentiate what you need from what you want. Also, it could make the combination system a lot more interesting and a lot less generic.

I was originally going to let the player carry 27 items. I've recently decided to limit it to 9 for the exact reasons you specified. You'll also notice that in one of the screens i posted is a shopping cart. These will function as a mobile inventory. When you're pushing the cart around you wont be able to use any items in your hands (weapons, torches etc) so I envision a lot of pushing of stashes and abandoning them temporarily when danger is afoot.
The carts will also have some interesting physical properties - They'll have momentum for one. You'll need to slowly accelerate to a full speed push. If the cart collides with an enemy it will shove them and possibly deal some damage to them as a function of the cart's speed on collision. This will also mean that people who push the cart around carelessly fast could risk having it come to a stop in the middle of a pack of undead when they need to let go.
There will also be sports bags which contain an inventory and can be carried over the shoulder. These have none of the physical characteristics of the shopping carts, but they only disable the use of one of your hands while you carry them.
What I'm hoping will result from this is that players holing up in a house for a long time, should they find their "base" compromised, face the challenge of transporting all their collected stuff to wherever they decide to go, one bag, trolley or backpack at a time, and with a possibility of their house simply being overrun in the transporting process, having to just forget about a few items.

I really love your ideas here. I especially love the fact that you are focusing on experimenting and giving the character a choice. However, just be careful. Ive seen games where the addition of experimentation in one part of the game causes another part of the game to be severely limiting. Make sure you spend ample time on every part of the game and keep consistent.~

Yup, it feels like I have a lot of work ahead of me. I'm sure a lot of eccentricities and so on will arise when i start implementing combat, and perhaps some unpredicted gameplay dynamics which i can exploit or stave as required. The way I see it, as long as I solidly implement the core ideas of the game, I can sort of "see how it goes" for the incidental aspects, and alter it from there - which is why i'm not going into too much detail with combat and so on just yet.

Good luck. This looks super neat.

thanks! I really appreciate the positive response