Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Plague rewrite - your design thoughts wanted

I'm in London and unemployed right now, which leaves me with loads of unallocated time that I can use to upskill (and spend going for runs in the sun). I've started learning C# and XNA and am planning on releasing a new variant of Plague - it'll have similar gameplay but with different design trade-offs.

I'm concentrating on programming, with the game as an after thought (but also a concrete testbed in which to write lots of code). As such I'm happy to outsource lots of design decisions.

Here is what I am thinking at this point:
  1. Top down shooter
  2. Procedural map generation
  3. Procedural weapon generation
  4. Line of sight for game agents
  5. Hive mind for zombies (so they dont all have individual memories which was quite expensive)
  6. Tower defence elements
  7. RTS style controls for friendly agents
  8. Much less AI for friendly agents?
  9. Keep game fast (probably lose cellular automata fire and explosions)
  10. Open world gameplay (I really hated the confined maps of Plague) - not sure how I'm going to do this - any hints?
  11. Unlimited ammo?
  12. Recharging health?
There are about a billion design decisions to be made within this design outline, and I'd be keen to hear your thoughts. If anyone wants to help out, please let me know. There will be plenty of testing/balancing required.


4 comments:

Shmandaloo said...

Hey! You should come over and try out a game called Earth Empires! It's a community based game with a lot of us being around more than 10+ years. The game has been refurbished and is awaiting facebook application. There will be lots of programers there that would bounce ideas back and forth on plague for you. Also lots of other people who are willing to test.

www.earthempires.com

come chat! Alliance Talk is the forum we usually chat most in.

Anonymous said...

hello mr carter,

really like your game plague, i think the thing lacking in lots of top down shooters is customizable game play, i think the user should be able to control more features in the game, like map size, number of friends and foes, damage amount of attacks and speed of weapon and ammo of weapon, self damage from explosions, i think this adds to replay value, (like spore) i think this lets the user be more creative,

another big change could be game play mode where you have to all the zombies or you have to just reach the end location, and bosses, could add levels where it is just one smart zombie with a gun or some fire breathing zombie that hunts for you?

thanks for the good times,
brian

jellybob2pointo said...

it would be appreciated if i could access the last 3 options on the difficulty menu

Benedict Carter said...

hi jellybob2pointo,

realistically im not going to get time to work on plague in the near future (im tempted to, but dont have the energy after work).

why dont you have a go at editing the code yourself, you might be surprised how easy it is :)