Zombies Final Stage

It has been a while since I last updated everyone with what is going on with Zombies. Basically we have decided to go more in the direction of a Tower Defense style game-play with Real Time Strategy (RTS) elements.

The player has to defend hordes of zombies from getting to the base in the center of the city. The player has the choice to either freely move soldiers around the environment or use a soldier to build towers in certain places on the map. The game is over once the zombies destroy the base.

A few changes have been made to get the game to its current state. The first major change is the artificial intelligence (AI) of the units and zombies. We were having probably with the AI working properly in our environment. The zombies and units could not navigate through the city to get to the target locations. The method we were using was also extremely expensive framerate wise causing the game to slow down drastically. We solved this problem by implementing a node based movement system for the zombies. For the soldiers we decided to go the route of point and click, with the soldiers moving in a straight line from point A to point B. Although changing the way the soldiers moved around the environment made it slightly harder for the player we felt it was the best option. After implementing this new AI we saw an amazing improvement in the framerate, this gave us the option of having a lot more zombies on the screen.

Game Environment:

(The green circles are where nodes are located)

With the improvement in framerate due to the new AI system we were also able to create a much larger environment(can be seen above).

For our environment we wanted to create a large enough area for the player to defend against but at the same time keeping it small enough so not to make the game-play too easy for the player. With this in mind we thought of the best way to do this using as little resources as possible. We decided that we would use a few basic, generic models and texture palettes to get various looks from the same models.

Texture Palette 1:


Texture Palette 2:

With these texture palettes we managed to create many variations of buildings from the same models(shown below).

Building Variations:

Where Zombies is now I hear you ask?Well, I would say Zombies is still in a prototyping phase. We have the ground work there and working, it just has to be worked on and improved a bit more to make it a better game.

Zombies has turned out to be a massive challenge and headache. We encountered many problems and dealt with them accordingly. It has definitely been one hell of a learning experience.

Visual Feedback

Today I did up a few elements for visual feedback and the HUD. This should be implemented for the next milestone of Zombies. With the visual feedback implemented it will make the game a lot more user friendly and enjoyable. Here are a few of the feedback images I did up.

HUD Layout with space for the radar:

Button Templates (There will be images of each objects instead of letters):


Soldier Selected Icon (will be at the base of the selected soldiers):

Move Here (When the user selects a location for the soldiers to move towards this icon will be placed):

Death (When the zombies or Soldiers die this will be placed):

At the moment I am happy with all the icons and HUD, except for the death icon. I think the death feedback should actually be a 3d object in the game to give it depth and then it could sink into the ground over time. We will just use this death image as a placeholder for now.

So that is what I have done for visual feedback for now. Please feel free to add any feedback or comments. Thanks for reading.

Zombies Milestone

So over the past week or so we have been working more on our Zombie game. We have made improvements with the code and the visuals. Everything seems to slowly be coming together.

We now have a full working and adjustable radar. The soldiers can now get through the walls but the zombies have to break it before they can go past. The AI has been improved as well. We now have multiple spawning points and a day/night system is in development. And I think that's it for the code at the moment.
As for visuals, we have started texturing buildings and assets. We are using texture palettes to do all the texturing, that way we can make a few variants of the same buildings and it wont look repeated (that's the plan). We also have animation for the zombies walk, only one at the moment but we are planning on having a number of different walks just for some difference so the zombies don't all just look the same.

Here is a screenshot:

Zombies Update

This is an update for the Zombies game I have been working on with a group of friends. We have actually added a few features since I last updated the blog so thought I'd get to it.
Changes:
1) zombies can break through walls
2) walls take time to build
3) AI is starting to come together a lot better
4) zombies move towards the target area (will be the HQ) unless soldiers get close to them and then they attack the soldiers
5) A radar has been implemented
So those are changes we managed to get done two weeks ago.

Here is a quick screen shot of all these changes:

More Zombies Work

This week I have been doing some basic environment work. I've managed to get a full low-poly building modeled as well as a destructed version. I'm still busy working on another building which isn't finished just yet. I also managed to get a town map so now we can actually plan the layout of everything and have a better idea of what buildings and assets are needed. For now we are concentrating on the buildings and trying to get a decent quantity for a city. We will probably move on to building assets in a few weeks, once we are happy with the way the city looks.

Here are a few screen shots of my work.

Town Layout:

Building 01(Destroyed)

Building 01(Normal)

That's it for now. Feel free to comment if you have any advice or ideas.

Thanks.

Textures

So, I've finished all the textures for the models I showed the other day. Now bare in mind that these are for a prototype, so I haven't gone into too much detail and kept it very simple.

Here are the textures.

Figure 1. Wall texture

Figure 2. Random building 01 texture

Figure 3. Random building 02 texture

Figure 4. Destroyed building texture

Figure 5. Barracks texture

Figure 6. Terrain texture

And that's all the textures for now. Feel free to leave any comments you have.

Thanks.

Prototype Models

Okay. So this week I have been doing some basic models of wall, terrain and a few buildings.
Here are a couple quick renders I did just to show you what I have been doing.

Figure 1. Wall

Figure 2. Random Building 01

Figure 3. Random Building 02

Figure 4. Destroyed Building

Figure 5. Barracks

So that's the models. I'm working on the textures at the moment and will have them up in a couple days time.

Reference

I've been spending the last couple days do some searching for decent reference pictures to get some inspiration. It didn't take long to find what I was looking for. I've got a couple pictures from various existing games such as Age of Empires (AoE), Company of Heroes (COH) and Halo Wars plus a couple others . I'm leaning more towards the Company of Heroes style. The reasons for this is because its modern and it looks really great to start with. I like the style as well, it gives a very urban war like atmosphere from the get go which I think would suit out Zombie RTS.

So enough ranting now, time to show some pictures.







So that's my inspiration for now. Don't want to get too involved in the visuals as this is only a prototype.

Zombies

So today everyone got to pitch the game concepts to the rest of the class. Unfortunately my idea wasn't chosen, but such is life and we move on.

The prototype I am going to be working on for the next 2 or so weeks is a real-time strategy game (RTS) about zombies. To sum it up, the city/town you live in has been overrun by crazy zombies and you control a group of survivors who have to fight for their lives and survival. Unlike most RTS games, the main focus of this game will be to expand your territory and hopefully find other groups of survivors to join you, instead of having to collect resources and build your civilization up from scratch.

We have 2 weeks to hopefully get a decent prototype up and running. I'll be doing up a little environment to test in the prototype, nothing fancy, pretty much a flat poly plane with a texture(maybe a slight hill here and there as we would like to have it set on a golf course to start). I'll also be doing up a little wall/barrier, maybe some buildings and if we have enough time I could do up a character or two.

So yeah, our aim is to just get the "select player and click to move here" function to start with and take it from there. I think that is the most important feature to get right for the prototype, so we aren't really that worried about visuals at this point.

Well, that's it for now. Feel free to leave any suggestions you have.
Thanks for reading.