Zity - Corpses

Corpses!! The backbone of any shoot-n-loot has now been implemented, er.. mostly implemented.

(The dead are dead!)

(Ignore the circles, they're for debugging)

When zombies die they leave behind a shell of what they once were. Zombie corpses will persist throughout the entire lifespan of each map to mark out areas that have been cleared or to signal that another player might be nearby. Hopefully it won't get too crowded with corpses.

The one aspect about the corpses that I am not sure about yet is that off loot. Originally I had intended zombies to be a powerhouse, a force to avoid - not confront. This makes sense for a survival game where you don't want the player holding too much power. With zombie fights being something occasional and not constant I figured that the zombies could carry loot that could be taken from their corpse, a standard game mechanic. Then I loaded up a test scene with 50, constantly re-spawning, zombies and a 1-hit-kill sub-machine gun and proceeded to have a whole lot of fun. Hmmmmmm.

So now I have a problem. It's very fun to murder hundreds of zombies in one go and carefully strafe around them as the huge horde gets ever closer. It's also impractical to have all those corpses contain loot. There's no good way to loot 50 zombies in a pile and that much loot in one go wouldn't be healthy for the game. Having zombies be easily killed makes it fun, yet takes the power away from them. There's a few options as I see it:

1. Zombies swarm the player in large numbers but do not drop loot and simply act as a conflict in the player's efforts to survive and re-supply.

2. Zombies remain sparse in small groups or by themselves. They contain variable loot that the player can pick up and act as a component of the survival process.

3. Zombies swarm the player in large numbers and DO contain loot. The loot is minor, stack-able things (money, ammo, stuff like that), and is picked up automatically as the player walks over the corpses.

These are the three options I'm working with currently. The merits of them vary.

Option 1 is fun, no denying that, but turns the atmosphere into an arcade bullet-hell instead of tense survival.

Option 2 is tense, zombies are strong and take bullets to kill. They also are satisfying in a way that they contain loot, making the expenditure of bullets and stealth worth it.

Option 3 is even more like an arcade. Money is picked up automatically and used on npc's to upgrade weapons/equipment. This option is last on my list but the auto loot mechanic might come into play somewhere else.

So that's that. Corpses and Looting is the flavor of the week. After this I'm hoping to get back to my map and the accursed scaling problem.