Zity - Character Creation

Pretty big update. After my foray into zombies and their animation I decided to work on the player and player animation. I implemented almost all the same pieces of a character (head, body, feet, hair) except arms as those will work differently then the zombie's. After getting all the art together and working I decided it's about time I worked on character creation and customization, so off I went.

Zity - Trees

Another day, another update. Today it's trees.

I'm in NY! Yesterday morning my whole family and I flew out to NY to attend my great grandma's funeral this morning. She died at 103 years old which is crazy amazing. Yesterday I was exhausted but this afternoon I was feeling better and decided to tackle the problem of foliage in Zity.

Over a year ago I played a small little flash game that involved being a wizard and defending against creatures; I wish I could remember the name. The part of this game that interested me was how the (beautiful looking) trees faded in and out as you walked under them. I instantly knew I would use that effect someday in my own game.

In Zity, trees will come in a variety of different types and variations in both look and color. There will be forested areas of the map where zombies will be few and animals many. These areas will be for setting up a camp or taking a break from the populated city zone. Animals can be hunted and berries picked for food and little lakes and ponds will give water. The only thing about these zones is that the temperature is lower and you have to fight off the cold.

I digress. Trees are now almost fully implemented and you can watch a short video below:

(Treeeeeeeeeesss!)

For those who would rather read: Trees come with a canopy and a trunk. The canopy will fade when creatures are underneath and become mostly transparent. Trunks act as walls and block movement and bullets. When a tree is chopped down it will drop wood and a few other sparse items. I'm considering implementing a season cycle and colorize the trees according to the time of year, but I'm not sure a game will last that long or if that would be appropriate for the first version of the game.

Let me know what you think! These trees were drawn by me and my sister.

Zity - Idle Zombies

This morning's work was all on the zombies. Specifically, I wanted to work on how the zombies act when they aren't attacking anything. The obvious actions would be to shuffle and look around from time to time. So that's what I did.

This video shows how the zombies move about and look around. I intend to have more interaction with the zombie in idle mode such as fights and the obvious groan sound effects. For now though, this is a good start.

Next up is going to be some work on zombie stimuli. Sounds and smells to be exact. I'm hoping to spend my trip to NY (this weekend) and get to the point where zombies will react to the player making noise and try to find the player around walls and obstacles.

I've gotta say, this AI programming is really satisfying. Everything I've done up til now has been great but, aside from vehicles, nothing else has had such an immediate impact on the game and actually added gameplay. I'm very excited for future updates and I'm churning out new content at a steady pace these days.

Zity - Sound and Stuff

Another day another update. This time it's audio and sound.

I knew audio would be a big part of my game but I desperately wanted to put it off for as long as I could. This was mostly due to the fact that didn't have any audio FOR the game. I did, however, think about the type and style of the audio system would take. This morning and last night I decided to give it a shot due to a number of reasons one of which was the discovery of http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/ , a site with hundreds of songs with different mood attributes making them easy to find.

The song system is going to be pretty straight forward. There will be several song lists for different areas of the game, from the menu to the city. Each list will have half a dozen ambient songs played sequentially with cross-fading to make it sound seamless. I've picked out a few songs from incompetech and, in a few hours, had my audio manager up and (mostly) running. So far only the menu screen will play music as there is no map with zones to switch between as of yet. In the end there will be several zones such as: City, Woods, Country, Ocean, Desert, etc. I'm still in need of an Audio Producer but I'm not concerned with that as of yet.

Sound effects are also going to be an important part of Zity. Actions such as opening doors, stepping on floors, shooting guns, reloading, eating, crafting, and coughing will all need both a sound effect for the user to hear and will create a sound object that will alert nearby zombies of the sound. The zombies will then choose whether to react or not based on their awareness and some other pseudo-random factors.

(Image resized - Not representative of in-game)

Apart from sound I also did quite a bit with the zombies graphics and movement/attacking. The zombies had their shoulder width cut and their overall shape improved. I also added preliminary arms that stretch from the shoulders to the target. I thought about trying to implement my dynamic hand idea but I realized it was out of the scope of what I wanted to accomplish right now. That's more of a final polish item. Anyways, now the zombies look like so.

They also will start attacking the player when close enough. After half a second of animation (that hasn't been implemented yet) if they are still close enough to the player they will deal damage and then repeat. While there may be an issue with players abusing the sprint function to periodically gain range on the zombies to avoid attacks, I believe I can iron out the flow enough so the zombies feel dangerous. The only issue I have right now is that the zombies tend to overlap in weird ways. The ones nearest the player should get preference over those farther away and I'm looking at implementing this soon.

So all is well. Working on more of the zombie states currently. After that who knows.  Maybe I'll work on buildings again. I'm hoping to get around to working on trees soon. Also another gameplay component popped into my head; Zity will most definitely have farming and farm animals along with pets and zombified animals/pets.