Hi!
Project Night Z
Project
Night Z is an AI team management game.
It's
zombie apocalypse. A few survivors have banded together to fight the
zombies. At day they build defenses and at night they fight hordes of
zombies. The zombie horde keeps increasing every day they stay put
and at some point they must abandon their base and start anew. All
the while trying to reach a mythical safe haven far in the horizon.
Gameplay
You
have a level of control akin to Dungeon Keeper. You give tasks for
the survivors to do, like building a barricade, setting up a machine
gun point, fixing the truck etc. and the AI team members will carry
them out.
Survivors
must gather supplies and building materials from the surrounding
area. If you run out of supplies you must send a team to collect some
farther away.
The
AI team members have skills which determine their efficiency with
given tasks. The more they use a skill, the better they become with
it. They have an inventory and you decide who carries which weapon or
item.
At
day only a trickle of zombies wander around but at night there will
be hordes of them. The more noise you make during your stay, the more
zombies are attracted to your position. At some point you must
abandon the camp site or be overrun. You can carry only so much and
must decide what to take to your new camp site, as the game
progresses you may find a vehicle and be able to carry more.
There
are two screens in the game: camp site screen and map screen. When
you move the camp you go into a map screen, where you move your
caravan and you must decide a new camp site. Traveling on the map
will consume supplies and eventually you must camp and restock. Where
you decide to camp on the map will define your camp site area, like
if you camp near a gas station your camp site will have a gas station
next to it.
You
start on one side of the map and your goal will be to travel to a
specific place or places to win the game.
Other design thoughts
(not fleshed out yet)
-Modable
(including AI)
-Randomized
events requiring users input
-Somewhat
random overall map. So you won't have the same experience on every
play-through
-Random(ish)
starting group of survivors. You may gain or lose some along the way
-Character
personality diagram. Defines how well survivors get along. Decisions
concerning one character may trickle down to others as well
-Character
back story. Tells who they were before the apocalypse. Defines
starting skills.
-Likely
to be made with Unity. Mainly because I'm more interested of making a
game rather than an engine.
My next steps
-Write
down more in-depth design document of the game.
-Make
an AI demo. I'm thinking of using behavior trees and something to
facilitate the moving of masses of characters at once (crowd fields
or flow fields or whatever it's called).
-Jaerom
