Alright thanks for listening to my ideas LOOY and trasseltass the idea is a little old but i think people would enjoy playing it because, a game like this has never been done in a professional version in 3d with multiplayer and all, thats why i think it should be made and why it will get a lot of attention.

Wow this sounds like the ULTIMATE game for me! I love the movies! Dawn of the dead, 28 days/weeks later, resident evil, etc...

I am also a big fan of the "hold the fort" type games :) So your idea is a combination of my favourite movies and favourite games.

I would love to do a project like this!

yeah, im glad you like it, this is exactly the type of game i would like so im gonna assume you would like/love dead rising you should check it out and also recently ive come across a game that is not made yet but it seems exactly like what you and I would like to play, its called Exanimus
http://www.exanimusthegame.com/ theres the link

keep the comments coming and i hope someone makes a game/project off of some of these ideas

Exanimus could become really cool! But what I gather from the website is that it is in a very early stage. So it will be a long time before it will be released, if ever.
It doesn't even have any screenshots yet, no pictures of models, nothing. Just some concept art.
If Exanimus ever does see the light of day I will definately play it!

I'd also like to attempt making this game myself, but I do not know how to program multiplayer games yet :(

Maybe I can make a singleplayer "sandbox" type zombie survivor as practice :)

Quote: Original post by LOOY
It'd be boring if you were dead forever so you would respawn as a zombie, however you will have a motivation to kill your former friends becausce killing two of them will allow you to be "reborn" as a human.

This actually won't work. If you have no other method for making players human, then this is nothing more than a pyramid scheme and, like all pyramid schemes, it will collapse under its own weight rather quickly. Thinking about this, I've become somewhat convinced that there has to be a permanent, AI-driven zombie force augmented by those human players who have been killed by the AI.

One idea I've had is that there is an antidote -- but it cannot be given directly to human players because they will simply not attack their human friends in order to be cured. Instead, the antidote must be administered to the AI zombies (who won't make it so easy) and in doing so, we allow the next zombi-fied human player to come back as a human after the next time he is killed. We can tweak this to some ratio of zombie-cures to human-resurrections that works.

Now, we address the issue of making the zombified-players behave adversarially towards the human players. Since we cannot reward them with resurrection, we must find some other reward for them. You could work in some sort of skills/experience system, but it would be difficult to balance a system to reward zombie-ism that doesn't short-change the advancement of human players. Instead, we can allow them to earn "buffs" for their next resurection as a human -- Better weapons, extra ammo, armor, speed/strength boosts, etc. When they've been killed and their turn to be resurrected comes, they are given a choice: come back as a human, with the buffs they have earned, or continue as a zombie (with some zombie-buffs) and go to the back of the queue. Each time their turn to be resurrected comes up, they are given a chance to switch over to the human side with the buffs they've earned -- However, each time they chose to continue as a zombie, the rate at which they earn human buffs was decreased by some ratio (and correspondingly, the rate at which they earn zombie buffs was increased). Of course, human players can also earn buffs for playing well.

My assumption through all of this is that, for every human player, there are a corresponding number of AI zombies, lets say there is one AI zombie for every human player. If no humans are zombies then the odds are 1-1, if half the human players have become zombies, then the odds become 1-3 in favor of the zombie horde, if 2/3 of the players are zombies, then the odds are 1-5, and so on.

because of how this system works, it encourages people to play zombie when the number of zombies are down, and to play human when the number of zombies is high, because their rate of advancement will naturally slow as more people join their side. I would estimate that the human-zombie ratio will typically hover around 1-2 or 1-3 in favor of the zombies, which sounds about right for the action to be consistent and dangerous but not overwhelmingly so (most of the time).

I forgot to mention AI zombies didn't I? I meant to include them, my idea was that all players are human to start with, but when they get killed they join the zombie team and supplement them, obviously player controlled ones would be much more agile, and they'd be able to solve problems where the Ai would have to resort to cruder tactics.

I don't like your antidote idea, but I do agree with rewarding zombies with upgrades next round, maybe less than you'd get for surviving but still worth trying for. I thought about my ressurection idea and decided it'd kind of ruin the atmosphere if you had humans "spawning" in during gameplay, it'd also suck for them as they'd be stuck with the starting pistol or whatever and just get zombified again.

Wow i just read through your post Ravyne and i have to say, its brilliant. I would prefer the antidote method over the "reborn" method just as LOOY said, and the ratio of zombies to humans does seem like a good idea maybe 25 zombies to one human because, it is going to be a big map and you wont be fighting all 25 zombies at one time. The only problem with this antidote idea is, where could you find a logical place to hide it?, and How would you administer it?. On top of this i was planning on hopefully having a skills/experience system, if you see in my first blog there will be classes and i was planning on requiring say (for example) your doctor needs to be level to administer the antidote. or something

Exanimus is in a very early state and i hope it goes far and doesnt crash because, otherwise all we have to look forward to is the linear plotline of left4dead, if it does come out we will have a MMO zombie survival, and if you look at the map which has recently come out you will see the area to roam is very big.

Blarkage,
When you talk about skill/experience, you are talking mmorpg. I thought you were initially proposing a regular online game.

If you make a regular online one, you could choose different game modes.
One mode would be to be in a building/neigbourhood with like 7 other players and have to fend off incoming AI zombies.
Another game mode could be playing the zombie horde to try and kill the humans.
And then a mode to mix both.

But if you want the skill/experience systems to work you are talking mmo! Which means only 1 (HUGE) map and a game that never ends. WoW-style.

Exanimus will be the latter, which I think is awesome :)

If you want to make the game yourself, or have a team on this forum do it however, you have a better chance with the first option. A regular online game is alot easier to program then a MMO.

So, to clarify, my earlier post was slanted towards more of an MMO or semi-persistent game world, not a round-based affair. In a persistent game, there isn't really a win condition -- its just survival for some period of time. In a round-based game, there needs to be some way to win -- kill all zombies, infect all humans.

There are also a fair number of concessions that have to be made regarding the number of AI zombies/player due to server-side AI processing and the bandwidth overhead of transferring their movements over the network. Keep in mind also, that in my persistent world, when an AI zombie dies they just respawn somewhere else -- there is a never-ending supply of AI zombies -- although, actually, having some large but finite supply of AI zombies gives the humans a win-condition, just have some ratio of active zombies per human as discussed above.

Response to Viperr:

You are true that making the game with a skill/experience system would be more WOW-style and probably never ending, but to keep players interested and wanting to get to the next level i think that is what you would have to do, however now ive got controversy between myself about what i want to do with the game, make it WOW-style or just do it kind of like an Age of Empires game. Either way it would probably be good but i just cant decided between regular game or WOW-style.

Response to Ravyne:

Your post really seems to continue on where your last post left off, i think what i will do with the game is have multiple large cities, and players will be put in a random one, and i think instead of a skill/experience system i will have a ranking system that judges how well a player does and then averages out all the players participating in the game rank, then it will determine a city depending on how many weapons or food is in the city will make it harder/easier so that way noobs will play in cities with some zomb's and lots of food and guns and pros will play in cities with LOTS of zomb's and some guns and food. I guess i will plan on trying to make it a regular type game. I just need to figure out how to make a multiplayer system. XD

-blarkage, keep postin :)