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.