Zombie Game Prototype

I'm working with Robert Green at Battery Powered Games on another game, this time its a action game. About 4 months ago, Rob and I got together for a meeting to discuss our next efforts and discussed ways to learn from our mistakes on Deadly Chambers. We each came with five game ideas and pitched them to each other, back and forth. At the end we picked one idea and went with it. The idea we picked was mine and goes something like this:

Combine Flight Control with Tower Defense, best described with with humans and zombies. You control the humans and try to get them to a safe house, they may or may not have weapons. The zombies try to eat your humans. I'm not going to go into the details beyond that because, along with a designer we've hired, we working on many of the details to make sure the game is fun, engaging and rewarding.

Since the pitch, I've been thinking about the game play and I've come to many conclusions. This is a problem, since we have yet to see the game in prototype form. Rob (and me to some extent) has been busy on some other projects, one of which is Battery Tech, and another is an android game that will be hitting the market within the month (fingers crossed). (My friend Bill and I did the art for this soon to be released game FYI so look for future blog posts about it). Rob hasn't had the time to make a prototype as he's also executing some other business ventures and contracts.

As I said we hired a designer but he has become confused about the game which is primarily my fault. With so much time thinking about the game play its hard to keep an open mind, to be flexible. It's hard to explain things well and succinctly, at the same time to not seem contradictory to previous statements. We've gotten buried in communication issues and semantics. It has been interesting to see the designer's interpretations and opinions, and his designs given our flawed descriptions and requirements. Its also been problematic because we each have our ideas we're pretty adamant about, but no way to see them in action, get a feel for what works and further the discussion. I was contemplating making some level drawings and animating them to show how I expect game play to work, but then I decided I should just program a prototype.

This is what I love about programming. I started at about 9pm and fired up some XNA sample and just had at it. 6 hours later the clock reads 3am and I reluctantly call it quits. But at the end is a partial prototype allowing for human path drawing, basic zombie AI seeking/attack, a safe house, turning (human becomes zombie), weapon pickup, and human AI targeting.

 

 Ryan's Zombie Prototype Version 1

In the above picture, the grey blue lines are paths for the humans. The purple diamonds are zombies. You can also see some of the humans are armed with little guns. The lines from humans to zombies show that the humans are targeting and within range of a zombie. I'll be adding some code to do shooting next as well as see what Rob and the designer say.

Needless to say, I'm excited to program again and wonder why I never really get into it when its so much fun. I'm excited to build up some momentum on this project as well. I'm art lead with two artists on my team, so I'm anxious to get them working.