Stay Dead (WIP)

I'm probably being a bit premature with this however questions were asked and all that...

My helicopter game is currently shelved, it was all getting too complex for one person, on top of that my 'real life tm' has been somewhat complex over the past year or so which drove any development to nothing.

The past couple of months I've actually picked up coding again and started work on a nice simple game.

Go round and shoot the crap out of zombies, although the AI is pretty cool as the city is 'alive' in that even stuff off screen is looking around and reacting to stuff. Humans get killed by zombies and turn into zombies themselves, zombies attack humans when they see them, humans run away from zombies when the see them etc etc... There's currently about 30 AI states in the AI system which all works quite nicely.

Anyway... Onto the obligatory screenshots:

Sized to 50% from the screen res I run in:


Cropped 640x480 out of the full size screen:



All the zombies/humans are quads created from topdown rendered 3d models, each one currently has 32 frames of animation each, and currently there are 4 flavours of person.

The game supports 4 co-op players on screen at one time, no network support (but there might be in the future).

No it doesn't use any of the Alien Breed remake code, it's all new.
Yes I know the textures don't line up properly and are a bit crappy!
Yes I know the players guns look rubbish, they're currently a couple of untextured cubes!
And yes I know the gun flares aren't quite lined up.

It seems interesting...4 players at one time! Now I understand why you named the game 'Stay Dead'...it will be a war each-other :D

I love the crossed arms shooting effect! Wish I could complete a game!

Looks cool. demo?

Not even close to demoing yet, as I said I'm a bit concerned about being premature here, my todo list is still longer than an cavemans arm.

NPC Placement
Character Shadows
AI Follow And Stay
NPC shooting zombies
Sound FX Library
Objects (streetlamps etc)
Object Placement
Object Collision
Grenades / Explosions
Particle Emitters (vents/fire)
Emitter Placement
Smart Shot? - (maybe add a helper feature so you can only shoot if there's a zombie infront of you, stops you shooting innocents so easily!)
Player death
Front End

On top of this there's a cake load of additional media to produce, more types of zombie/human, more buildings, more floor tiles etc etc

OK, look forward to it in about a year then ;-)

Like so many things initial development is fast because you've got nothing and suddenly you've got something, it's the details and pruning that takes the time.

Should be able to knock a lot of the coding on the head pretty quickly, it's the media and level design that's the killer.

Once I'm in a state where the level editor is complete and I've got one working level I'll probably ask for help from this wonderful community for level designing and/or media.

Progress has been made today!

Character Shadows and Grenades/Explosions can now be crossed off the list!

Screenshots resized to 800px wide:

Reminds me of Grand Theft Auto. A bit.

Yeah GTA is an easy comparison to make I guess with the top down 3D view. And also because the textures are poor at the moment it looks somewhat dated.

Hey that's really neat Rob!

I made a top down shooter like this a few years ago including zombies, almost identical in design to yours, but mine was strictly 2D only and more like the top down view on SNES Contra 3 than Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2, so no sexy 3D buildings.

Sadly, mine was only 2 player split screen coop, not 4 player like yours. But mine had 8 players in total and the rest were controlled by advanced AI bots (they could complete the game with you just standing perfectly still at the start.

I guess you like your zombies survival and shooting too. :)
I really look forward to seeing how your game turns out when it is finished.

Shame about your helicopter game though, I remember you posting shots about that and it looked really nice!

@rob (cant locate this questionmarkthing)
are you planning on implementing vehicles? maybe that strays to much from the zombie vs humans concept, but it would be cool!

That move with the crossed weapons rocks, it reminds me of neo in the lobby of that building or the cleric in equilibrium!

ha just occured to me, i can copy and paste:¿

Love the concept and the OldSkool GTA style is cool. I love zombies, they are so much fun to kill.

Enay - have you still got a copy of your game around anywhere, I'd be interested in trying it out..

Enay: Yeah the AI in this is pretty good this, if a NPC has a gun they'll start shooting at the zombies, they run away from them, huddle in groups and all sorts of stuff! On top of that you can order them around so you can get them to follow you or wait where they are.

A fair chunk of code for this has come from the helicopter game, that just got too complex for one bod to handle, need to team up with at least one more person to get something of that size complete (especially when you have a full time job to hold down anyway!).

FirstBorn: Vechicles - Yes and no, obviously it would be cool to have a truck and mow down a load of zombies, but the whole vechicle thing opens up a whole new can of worms and complexity.

There will certainly be burnt out cars and 'dead' cars but not sure about driving them around.

That said the idea of the game is to rescue the humans so it would be cool to get a bus and get a load of people to pile onto it and drive them to safety.

However, initially all vehicles will be undriveable, I'll see how I feel about adding that dynamic in though.

looks brilliant, reminds me of mageslayer/take no prisoners, WHEN CAN WE PLAY? :D

I've not had any time to work on this for the past week so it's not progressed since the last screenshots, although I have made a lamp post model!

I've got a couple of plans afoot too which include improving the resolution of the building collision, currently buildings are on a 5x5 grid and you set which square is solid and which isn't, however, this means the smallest building detail is 2m square which I think is too big, so I'm increasing the collision resolution to 10x10 which means the smallest collision unit of a building will be 1m square which gives you a bit more scope for adding bits of detail to buildings.

I could upload a demo now, but to be honest it's not that interesting at the moment! So I'm going to make a couple of enhancements first, ideall I want to get a whole first level done so you can actually complete it.