Zombie videogame
Okay, so I've been knocking this idea around for awhile now, and I just hit upon a solution to a question I had which was bugging me, so now I'm going to lay out what I've thought of so far, just for fun.
The major problem I've had with zombie videogames so far is that they are little to nothing like zombie movies. Not because I think they should stay true to movies, but because I think movies have a very different angle most of the time. Movies = get to a safe place, barricade it, stay there until something goes wrong/a supply runs out. In games, however, usually the opposite occurs. You go through extremely dangerous territory, usually far more dangerous than where you start the game, bypass a couple of places that could serve as safe havens, and find either the source of the crisis or at least an explanation, before escaping on a helicopter for somewhere safer before the government cleans everything up.
There are a couple of obvious problems with directly translating the movie ideas into the game. It's probably quite hard to make a convincing and enjoyable "People are going crazy because they've been cooped up in a small house surrounded by thousands of moaning zombies" game. The nature of the genre demands at least some action, and spending too long camped out in a relatively safe place wouldn't be a lot of fun. After all, who plays Dead Rising and just stays in the security room until the game ends?
It occurs to me while typing that, though, that a canny designer might be able to use the problem of boredom, which is one of the greatest problems faced by reasonably safe survivors, against the player directly. Who is going to resist taking some potshots at zombies? Hmmm, there might just be something in that, but it would have to be carefully tweaked and designed. The other option which springs to mind is to have various mini-games, maybe even some old videogames a la Shenmue, which would pass in game-time as you played them. Gathering these pastimes could form additional objectives. Again, though, that seems like it might be a bit of a cop-out from the main game, so it's something which would have to be considered carefully.
Alright, here's the basic premise of the game I'm thinking of though. Taking the parts of zombie movies which do translate into games, the best description I can think of is GTA: San Andreas with zombies. You don't get railroaded to your next objectives, you don't get weird and obscure puzzles which would mean the Police Commissioner can't take a leak without getting decapitated, you would instead get an open gameplay area in which your objective is to survive. The reason I say SA, even though I find it has a couple of weaknesses that III and VC don't, is because I think it'd be pretty vital to have a reasonably large spread of area in which to play. Urban, suburban, and rural should all enter into it, and give the player a wide range of options in where to go and what to try.
Here's the way I see the start of the game. First of all, you make your character. They should be customizable (Aside from it being a pretty fun addition to many recent games, there's another important reason for this I'll touch on later), both in appearance and some stats. The stats should be more Sims-esque than Oblivion-esque though. Or a combination of the two. Once you're done making your character, you get set down into the world. In homage, you'll start in a shopping mall. This would allow you to do a couple of things; first, you can stroll around and eye up nicer clothes you might want.
Second, you can go to the arcade and practise shooting, driving, and fighting. So you can consider the mall a 'tutorial' of sorts, but one which ends as soon as you leave, which you can do as soon as you like. Or when the zombies bust in many hours later.
One of the key aspects to this game is the 'emergent' gameplay. I don't care for that term greatly, but it's the best one I can think of. Due to various behind-the-scenes things going on, no two games are going to be the same. For example, the zombies themselves. There are a few possible reasons for zombies occurring, and the game will randomly choose one when you start a new game. You won't easily know which one will be the cause until you've been playing for awhile. Here are the possibilities I've got so far:
Bio-weapon, escaped from a lab.
Voodoo magic, started at a coastal village. (I know voodoo zombies are a different creature altogether, but there need to be a few different solid reasons here)
Zombies caused by a meteor which crashes out in the countryside.
A nuclear plant malfunctions and causes zombies due to the radiation.
What does this mean for gameplay? First; these places will be in different locations about the map. Let's say you end up with the meteor one - the small town will be the first place overwhelmed, and will be far less safe and easy to use than if the lab was the source, thus starting the infestation on the far side of the city. The other major gameplay effect this will have is in curing the infection. Incurable zombies are fine, but if you get infected, there should be a way to deal with it - if you know how. And how will depend on how it started. Of course, making a concession to gameplay, normal mode shouldn't mean one bite = you're infected. I have some ideas for variations in zombie canon rattling around, I could incorporate some of those here to help, I'm sure.
Alright, so as you know, I'm coming at this from a sandbox angle. Rather than having a tight, coherent plot, you'd have a freeform do what you want (Or rather, do want you're able without getting eaten) exercise. As noted, you won't start in a zombie-infested area. You'll start in a normal area, doing normal things, with zombies starting someplace and gradually spreading. This has good and bad points. The main bad point is story. Although the zombies will have a detectable reason, the gameplay itself won't have any particular story. Your attempts to stay alive will be the story. Is a greater motivation necessary? I believe so, for the following reason.
If it is not possible to escape from the game world - that is, if you play until you die, or play forever if necessary resources are infinite - then there will be the difficulty in giving plays the satisfaction of winning. I admit that this mode does work in Dead Rising, but it's an unlockable bonus which tests your survival skills and endurance, not the main game. Eliminating the possibility for players to win can work, but I think the game would be better if they could 'win'. In this case I think there should be two considerations for winning. The first is score. The game will have an old-fashioned score accumulation system, and competing for the highest score will be part of the fun. Score will be increased by the length of time you survive, zombies killed, and a number of blatant ripoffs of GTA and Dead Rising, such as stunts in cars. =P So! Here's the thing: If your score increases through survival, why would you want to actually leave the game, and thus put an end to increasing your score? Well, it's quite simple. Winning, in in-game terms, will boost your score. Indeed, it will apply a multiplier. Winning, in game, constitutes escaping the region for safety elsewhere. Of course it's not going to be as simple as just driving across state lines most of the time. Roads will be out, quarantine enforced, you know the drill. Getting out should take research and effort, not just strolling around.
So! The player will have to decide between staying in a safe haven, or trying to escape. There will be a case for both, but as the game progresses and there are fewer survivors, fewer easily accessed resources, and more zombies, it will become harder to survive (But more rewarding, I think). But even if you can get out safely, might not someone else have held on a day longer, and thereby beat your score?
Of course, points aren't everything. If this system is necessary to get people playing, the game itself is flawed. But I think such would be a good incentive to play more, and add some vital decision-making.
Speaking of decision making, that is what much of the game will in fact be. Do you head for a skyscraper and hide on the top floor, elevators off and stairways blocked? Do you head out to the countryside and try to find a cave, house, old nuclear bunker, or the like? Do you barricade your own home and hide out there? Do you try to get a sniper rifle, or will you make do with your pistol? And so on, and so forth.
One part I'm having trouble with is barricades. I'm thinking that various game-world items should form barricades naturally, for example you could make a ring of cars that slows zombies down, and that there should also be a special mode where if you have the tools you can reinforce windows and doors.
The other part which seems problematic is AI. How to make the AI relatively believable, fun to interact with, but without taking ten years of development time? Well, this and other matters tie in with what I said earlier about creating characters and assigning stats. The idea is, and this is something lifted wholesale from Spore, that in going online your character would be put into a database, and you would download characters made by others to your own game. This is the question I just answered a little while ago, and which prompted me to write this post.
This would eliminate a large amount of the diversity problems games such as this suffer from, and if Spore can do it then so can others. In many cases, the people would end up as zombies before you even meet them. But when you meet survivors, their actions should be guided by the stats they were assigned. Are they mentally strong? They're probably not going to be too terribly fazed, but more likely to keep things together, not go crazy or try to go it alone, and generally be a useful ally. Then again, they might try to take control, and end up going crazy through the belief that they alone are strong enough to lead people through the crisis.
Let's talk briefly about multiplayer. I don't even know how many zombie games haven't had mutliplayer but should have, but the most obvious offender here is Dead Rising. Note that I don't call it co-op. Why not? Because if someone else is around, that's twice as many guns, but also twice as many resources being consumed. You'll last a lot longer if these freeloaders aren't eating all your stuff... they're probably stealing ammo and planning to run, too! This applies to NPCs as well, of course, but could be particularly enjoyable in a multiplayer game. Again, the accumulation of points enters into this. If you're forced to make a move before you want to, that's going to be a problem. Of course if you do kill them, there's a price to be paid - not just that that's another barrel not firing, but because they will randomly spawn as a zombie somewhere in the game world, if they want to. They'll have typical zombie abilities and stuff, but obviously the game can't do anything about their Human brain IRL. They could concoct some very devious plans in revenge...
Alright! Quite a tall order, I admit. But if you look at it, most of this has been done before in some way or another, some of it is being done currently, and of the things not done the only true difficulty is NPCs who are, at the least, not complete idiots (Or rather, not complete idiots against the designers intentions) and whose actions can have a real effect on gameplay without their being overly frustrated, or even just plain repetitive (Hi Oblivion).
Do you fine folks have any thoughts?
The major problem I've had with zombie videogames so far is that they are little to nothing like zombie movies. Not because I think they should stay true to movies, but because I think movies have a very different angle most of the time. Movies = get to a safe place, barricade it, stay there until something goes wrong/a supply runs out. In games, however, usually the opposite occurs. You go through extremely dangerous territory, usually far more dangerous than where you start the game, bypass a couple of places that could serve as safe havens, and find either the source of the crisis or at least an explanation, before escaping on a helicopter for somewhere safer before the government cleans everything up.
There are a couple of obvious problems with directly translating the movie ideas into the game. It's probably quite hard to make a convincing and enjoyable "People are going crazy because they've been cooped up in a small house surrounded by thousands of moaning zombies" game. The nature of the genre demands at least some action, and spending too long camped out in a relatively safe place wouldn't be a lot of fun. After all, who plays Dead Rising and just stays in the security room until the game ends?
It occurs to me while typing that, though, that a canny designer might be able to use the problem of boredom, which is one of the greatest problems faced by reasonably safe survivors, against the player directly. Who is going to resist taking some potshots at zombies? Hmmm, there might just be something in that, but it would have to be carefully tweaked and designed. The other option which springs to mind is to have various mini-games, maybe even some old videogames a la Shenmue, which would pass in game-time as you played them. Gathering these pastimes could form additional objectives. Again, though, that seems like it might be a bit of a cop-out from the main game, so it's something which would have to be considered carefully.
Alright, here's the basic premise of the game I'm thinking of though. Taking the parts of zombie movies which do translate into games, the best description I can think of is GTA: San Andreas with zombies. You don't get railroaded to your next objectives, you don't get weird and obscure puzzles which would mean the Police Commissioner can't take a leak without getting decapitated, you would instead get an open gameplay area in which your objective is to survive. The reason I say SA, even though I find it has a couple of weaknesses that III and VC don't, is because I think it'd be pretty vital to have a reasonably large spread of area in which to play. Urban, suburban, and rural should all enter into it, and give the player a wide range of options in where to go and what to try.
Here's the way I see the start of the game. First of all, you make your character. They should be customizable (Aside from it being a pretty fun addition to many recent games, there's another important reason for this I'll touch on later), both in appearance and some stats. The stats should be more Sims-esque than Oblivion-esque though. Or a combination of the two. Once you're done making your character, you get set down into the world. In homage, you'll start in a shopping mall. This would allow you to do a couple of things; first, you can stroll around and eye up nicer clothes you might want.
Second, you can go to the arcade and practise shooting, driving, and fighting. So you can consider the mall a 'tutorial' of sorts, but one which ends as soon as you leave, which you can do as soon as you like. Or when the zombies bust in many hours later.
One of the key aspects to this game is the 'emergent' gameplay. I don't care for that term greatly, but it's the best one I can think of. Due to various behind-the-scenes things going on, no two games are going to be the same. For example, the zombies themselves. There are a few possible reasons for zombies occurring, and the game will randomly choose one when you start a new game. You won't easily know which one will be the cause until you've been playing for awhile. Here are the possibilities I've got so far:
Bio-weapon, escaped from a lab.
Voodoo magic, started at a coastal village. (I know voodoo zombies are a different creature altogether, but there need to be a few different solid reasons here)
Zombies caused by a meteor which crashes out in the countryside.
A nuclear plant malfunctions and causes zombies due to the radiation.
What does this mean for gameplay? First; these places will be in different locations about the map. Let's say you end up with the meteor one - the small town will be the first place overwhelmed, and will be far less safe and easy to use than if the lab was the source, thus starting the infestation on the far side of the city. The other major gameplay effect this will have is in curing the infection. Incurable zombies are fine, but if you get infected, there should be a way to deal with it - if you know how. And how will depend on how it started. Of course, making a concession to gameplay, normal mode shouldn't mean one bite = you're infected. I have some ideas for variations in zombie canon rattling around, I could incorporate some of those here to help, I'm sure.
Alright, so as you know, I'm coming at this from a sandbox angle. Rather than having a tight, coherent plot, you'd have a freeform do what you want (Or rather, do want you're able without getting eaten) exercise. As noted, you won't start in a zombie-infested area. You'll start in a normal area, doing normal things, with zombies starting someplace and gradually spreading. This has good and bad points. The main bad point is story. Although the zombies will have a detectable reason, the gameplay itself won't have any particular story. Your attempts to stay alive will be the story. Is a greater motivation necessary? I believe so, for the following reason.
If it is not possible to escape from the game world - that is, if you play until you die, or play forever if necessary resources are infinite - then there will be the difficulty in giving plays the satisfaction of winning. I admit that this mode does work in Dead Rising, but it's an unlockable bonus which tests your survival skills and endurance, not the main game. Eliminating the possibility for players to win can work, but I think the game would be better if they could 'win'. In this case I think there should be two considerations for winning. The first is score. The game will have an old-fashioned score accumulation system, and competing for the highest score will be part of the fun. Score will be increased by the length of time you survive, zombies killed, and a number of blatant ripoffs of GTA and Dead Rising, such as stunts in cars. =P So! Here's the thing: If your score increases through survival, why would you want to actually leave the game, and thus put an end to increasing your score? Well, it's quite simple. Winning, in in-game terms, will boost your score. Indeed, it will apply a multiplier. Winning, in game, constitutes escaping the region for safety elsewhere. Of course it's not going to be as simple as just driving across state lines most of the time. Roads will be out, quarantine enforced, you know the drill. Getting out should take research and effort, not just strolling around.
So! The player will have to decide between staying in a safe haven, or trying to escape. There will be a case for both, but as the game progresses and there are fewer survivors, fewer easily accessed resources, and more zombies, it will become harder to survive (But more rewarding, I think). But even if you can get out safely, might not someone else have held on a day longer, and thereby beat your score?
Of course, points aren't everything. If this system is necessary to get people playing, the game itself is flawed. But I think such would be a good incentive to play more, and add some vital decision-making.
Speaking of decision making, that is what much of the game will in fact be. Do you head for a skyscraper and hide on the top floor, elevators off and stairways blocked? Do you head out to the countryside and try to find a cave, house, old nuclear bunker, or the like? Do you barricade your own home and hide out there? Do you try to get a sniper rifle, or will you make do with your pistol? And so on, and so forth.
One part I'm having trouble with is barricades. I'm thinking that various game-world items should form barricades naturally, for example you could make a ring of cars that slows zombies down, and that there should also be a special mode where if you have the tools you can reinforce windows and doors.
The other part which seems problematic is AI. How to make the AI relatively believable, fun to interact with, but without taking ten years of development time? Well, this and other matters tie in with what I said earlier about creating characters and assigning stats. The idea is, and this is something lifted wholesale from Spore, that in going online your character would be put into a database, and you would download characters made by others to your own game. This is the question I just answered a little while ago, and which prompted me to write this post.
This would eliminate a large amount of the diversity problems games such as this suffer from, and if Spore can do it then so can others. In many cases, the people would end up as zombies before you even meet them. But when you meet survivors, their actions should be guided by the stats they were assigned. Are they mentally strong? They're probably not going to be too terribly fazed, but more likely to keep things together, not go crazy or try to go it alone, and generally be a useful ally. Then again, they might try to take control, and end up going crazy through the belief that they alone are strong enough to lead people through the crisis.
Let's talk briefly about multiplayer. I don't even know how many zombie games haven't had mutliplayer but should have, but the most obvious offender here is Dead Rising. Note that I don't call it co-op. Why not? Because if someone else is around, that's twice as many guns, but also twice as many resources being consumed. You'll last a lot longer if these freeloaders aren't eating all your stuff... they're probably stealing ammo and planning to run, too! This applies to NPCs as well, of course, but could be particularly enjoyable in a multiplayer game. Again, the accumulation of points enters into this. If you're forced to make a move before you want to, that's going to be a problem. Of course if you do kill them, there's a price to be paid - not just that that's another barrel not firing, but because they will randomly spawn as a zombie somewhere in the game world, if they want to. They'll have typical zombie abilities and stuff, but obviously the game can't do anything about their Human brain IRL. They could concoct some very devious plans in revenge...
Alright! Quite a tall order, I admit. But if you look at it, most of this has been done before in some way or another, some of it is being done currently, and of the things not done the only true difficulty is NPCs who are, at the least, not complete idiots (Or rather, not complete idiots against the designers intentions) and whose actions can have a real effect on gameplay without their being overly frustrated, or even just plain repetitive (Hi Oblivion).
Do you fine folks have any thoughts?