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Zombie Attack!

jacobus

Entry posted by jacobus

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I released an early (too early from some of the reviews) version of this game around six months ago. Since then a lot of things have changed – more of the game runs in the VB allowing for much smoother animations and responsiveness. If a mob is hit with a non-lethal attack (happens more in later levels) they will get knocked back in order to provide some visual feedback to the player. The player’s weapon is shown, and in many cases a muzzle flash accompanies each firing of the weapon, the grenade explosion looks better and very importantly the end of level calculations are much improved allowing for a logical progression between levels. From a playability point of view the most important change is likely that the player’s character now automatically aligns itself to the underlying character grid – this means that the weapons now have a much higher chance of hitting the mob you think you’re aiming at.



ZA is a bit of a departure from my usual techniques of having pre-defined maps and offloading as much of the graphics and other data as possible to the disk. Despite having everything onboard in a single executable, I still have a fair bit of memory left over. Procedurally generated playfields are much easier to deal with!
blogentry-11281-0-02385300-1491323343_thumb.png

Not sure what else I need to add to the game - I’m considering allowing the flame thrower to start fires in the buildings and have them slowly consumed. Although this would be a cool effect, and fun to code, I’m not sure how much it would add to the game. Perhaps I should save this for some future firefighting game … hmmmmmm
ZA is almost ready for release – many many thanks to Stefan Both for his testing and motivational support!

Stay tuned!
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jacobus

With just over 2K left I though ZA could use a little more variety, so I added what I call the Speedy Zombie. As the level is being drawn, I randomly (with a bias towards the deeper playfield), pick one infected zombie to be the speedy. This Zombie gets much more attention from the program and therefore moves much faster. He/she actually gets 1 movement for each movement of every other living NPC. Therefore with 50 NPCs active, the speedy moves 50 times more often than any of the others. The standard proximity, damage and health rules still apply to the speedy. When killed, the game will pick another infected to promote to speedy.

 

Should provide a nice surprise every now and then.

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+Adam+

Jacobus, I've tried to PM you, but I got the warning: "The member jacobus cannot receive any new messages". Maybe your message box is full?

We're organising Kaz Kompo every year at AtariOnline.pl, a competition of all Atari 8-bit games published in a specific year. I'd like to ask you - do you treat ZA as something finished enough to take part in such competition or it's better to wait for the final version?

As you wrote above, the published version was "early (too early from some of the reviews)".

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