Saturday, February 21, 2009

Plague 3.14

Lots of backend changes have been made (which also impact gameplay). I think I've found all the bugs, but if you find anything, or anything that doesnt seem to work "quite right" or as expected, let me know. Cheers, and enjoy!
  • changed survivor sim ai so that they change to the best gun they have (ammo permitting)
  • nerfed sniper rifle a little
  • nerfed the zombies a little – it was too hard
  • added more of Sean Lange's artwork, and his implementation of a shotgun.
  • Implemented inventory for sims
  • rebalanced grenades and guns a little
  • changed the ways guns and ammo interact
  • made laser make its own (non-universal) ammo

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just tried this version. It's pretty fun, but since there's only one level, and no upgrades, it doesn't really have any appeal after the first 4-5 games. It's exceedingly repetitive.

I think you could make this a lot more fun if you added some means of continuing the same game after the first one. After you kill all of the zombie hives, you should be able to continue to another level with the same weapons, just at a higher difficulty. Perhaps new kinds of zombies could appear, and the zombies could move faster and do more damage. To increase the difficulty even more, you could also reduce the number of survivors, and reduce the supply of ammunition and health.

To add a bit of strategy, you could get new upgrades and weapons. Things like faster firing, faster movement, more health, more ammo, body armor and so forth. This way, the game would still be fun even after you play it several times.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Hey there, just trying out Plague for the first time...big fan of Rogue-likes & Crimsonland (is that an influence?) so I'm enjoying what you're building here.

I'm playing the Windows exe'd version of 3.14 and I've noticed a possible glitch: when I reload one weapon, all of the ammo counts for each weapon go down.

Also, it would be nice if I couldn't grab a weapon I already had...they can get scarce enough on the ground as is :)

Michael Stone said...

I liked your game well enough to write you some preliminary numpy patches, which you can find in the git repo at http://mstone.info/code/plague/.git. They seem to give a decent speedup, for a few hours' work.

(Also, just let me know if you'd like me to take that repo down -- your README gives no indication of whether or how you want to receive patches.)

Benedict Carter said...

Hi Anon,

Thanks for your feedback and criticism. I'm currently working on some of those suggestions to provide some replay between levels (as a quick fix). The plan is to eventually have different levels entirely in a larger world, with a persistent character (and squad) that levels up.

Benedict Carter said...

Hi Alex,

At the moment, all guns (apart from the pistol and laser) draw from the same "ammo pool". I've built the back end in such a way that it wont be hard to change to non-universal ammo, but I'd prefer to add that as a user-option (once I get user options).

Auto-picking up all weapons is also something that I intend to be a user option, but in the meantime I'll change that as it does deprive everyone else of guns for no marginal gain for you.

Thanks for the test-feedback!

Benedict Carter said...

Hi Michael,

Wow! Cool! Getting this done was a big item on my todo list.

I've been using bzr to version my patches, so I have no exp with git (although it seems extremely similar). Can I get the modified .py files off you, or have you had to edit a lot of them necessitating a computed diff? I'm looking into git right now to see if I can pull from your repo as well.

I'd love to receive patches and have Plague become a community-developed game, and I'll modify the readme to reflect this. What are your thoughts on how best to receive/store patches?

You don't have to take the repo down, but I would like to make sure that it doesnt diverge too much and become a separate project. Feel free to contact me on benedictnz on gmail if you would like to discuss.

Benedict Carter said...

Hi Micheal,

I've incorporated your cell.py changes (and all the little code cleanups/moves as well). Thanks for that. It'll go into this weekends release.

Would you liked to be credited as "Michael Stone"?

Ben.