Hats and more inventory selections

Some hats and more work with the inventory selection.

New inventory system

In comparison to the earlier game Zombie Guard...

Zombie Guard (2017)
I want to avoid lots of menus and buttons like this

Hats provide bonuses too.

I am now working on the long meticulous process of adding sound effects and music.

Landmines, flash bangs, and ray guns

Landmines, flash bangs, and ray guns.

Plus a new compact inventory system, by just having circle buttons fly out from the character for selections. I can extend this easily for things other than just weapons.

Again, keeping it simple. The naive solution would some basic array of selections on a large menu.

Yes!

No!

That second one looks really bad. There is no implementation for this, just placement of art to get an idea of what it would look like. The disadvantage of the circular interface is it gets dense rather quickly; I will have to categorize selections to show.

"Getting Ahead"

Quick video of a newer zombie that throws her entire head as a projectile. The placeholder name of this area is Baltimore (to be renamed).

Hud

While creating this hud that depicts life and ammunition of the player, I had to settle on decisions pertaining to the underlying design of the game.

First non-functional placeholder concept (this is just a single sprite)

Using my go-to style, but this did not match the visual style of the joystick buttons

Using pieces of licensed interface art to create the look

Fully functional, and matches the rest of the interface

Ammunition

There will be unlimited total ammunition for each gun. However, each gradually refills at a constant rate over time without the need of a reload animation. When depleted, the player can still fire rockets or bullets, but at a very slow rate as ammo is restocked automatically.

I made this decision to encourage usage of secondary weapons when ammunition of the primary weapon is depleted. If weapons instead were reloaded to maximum capacity using an animation induced by a button (or automatic when ammo is fully depleted), then it would lead to some annoying situations:

• Being forced to run away while reloading.
• Never being able to reload successfully because of the overwhelming number of enemies.
• Never needing the use of secondary weapons.

These small decisions may seem trivial, but it makes an enormous impact on future design decisions and the overall feel of the game.

Life

I have adjusted the life of the player to be integers depicted by whole-hearts rather than some adjustable percentage meter. Unlike similar interfaces featured in games like Legend of Zelda, I wanted absolutely any hit to deduct a full heart, rather than half or full on a conditional basis. To adjust difficultly, I would simply increase the chances of the player getting hit, rather than adjusting damage to deduct half or full which could lead to confusion and sense of unfairness.

Therefore, I do not have to adjust damage amounts through tables and function curves which can turn into a huge nightmare.

Keeping both features simple for now...

Wall defense mode

This sequel would not be complete without a wall based defense mode. At least in Unity this is rather easy by just setting up a wall consisting of multiple game objects with stationary rigid bodies and circle colliders.

Wall with collider, rigid body, sprite, and depth components

The depth values of these pieces when live are automatic through a component that sets the z component of the local position.

This worked much better than expected. I just force the humans to always face right, only create enemies on the right side, and just let physics and basic AI do everything else.

I also added some other minor features, like reward boxes with randomized contents.

Moving right along....

If this first area of the game with these several characters for missions and weapons work out, then extending this experience through other areas and content will be rather straight forward.

I figure each area will have unique missions, but each will have common ones like exploration and wall-based defense with randomized rewards.

Characters

A bunch more characters ready to be exported into separate parts for animation. There are three arms for each character, swapped depending on the weapon or item being held.

Some of these are from my previous games, improved and redone at a higher resolution.

Scaling is a bit of an issue. It is still better to make the parts slightly bigger because it can be scaled down, despite reducing relative thickness of the lines.

Top: new characters. Bottom: Zombie Guard (2015)

I like to use really thick bold lines. Shadows tend to shift towards blue, and highlights tend to shift towards red and yellow. I never use pure black. Shapes tend to be curved and obtuse. When in doubt, I make something larger or thicker than necessary. Small details get omitted.

Back to programming... and the perils of design

These are enough for now. I can go back to programming with the content I have. At this rate I could at least distribute a demo within a month, to showcase the first 15 minutes of the game.