@dra6o0n: Go
Continuously rescuing civilians for points would change the map into something completely different, taking it more towards the Lemmings style from survival style. The traits system could be a nice touch instead of just having characters with different numbers in their skills as I had planned it so far.
There are two ways to take the map to, both of which have gotten quite a lot of ideas and approval: The "death means death" mode where you lose your character when you die, and the mode where you preserve some of your characters attributes when you die and then get to respawn in some way. The latter could benefit from a character save/load system, and the death-means-death mode not so much.
A save/load system would also mean that the character development system was interesting enough over a long period of time to benefit from the save/load system to begin with. If you'd be just getting more and more traits over time, then eventually all characters would end up being the same. So it'd probably mean each trait would need its own level up system, like a character with Military Training would become better and better at using guns, and so on.
However, then some of the players would start with a more and more powerful character each time, and the game would have to be balanced for that, requiring me to create new content for the more powerful characters... The whole thing would become very chaotic considering that not all players would start the game with a character of the same level, and the game would also be more predictable if the character levels would mean enabling a different set of gameplay content.
For a "casual" game like this (compared to big MMORPGs which you might spend months or even years with), it seems to me that it's better to add replayability by creating various different kinds of random encounters and randomizing the city for each game, so you never know which of the possible variations you'll be getting into when starting the game. Considering all this, I don't really see the usefulness of the save/load system even for characters, because I don't have the will to spend so much time balancing the gameplay for progressively improving characters.
The traits system can still fit into this, but only by using them as static attributes which instantly tell you what the character is good at and which skills he can improve faster than others. Still one more possibility to use a save/load system for is that the more times you have beaten the map, the more choice you have for what kind of starting character you get, otherwise being completely random. First you'd be able to choose one of your perks, then the rest, then the point distribution into each of your skills, and eventually even the starting equipment you have.
Maybe I have a bit different idea of what an RPG means to some of you, but in this case I'm mostly referring to the style of gameplay with it, not everything related to a game where you assume the role of a character and emphatize with him/her like maybe in some pen & paper RPGs. There's no point spending months into developing original lore for a map which people will play for a few hours.
Seesh, just calm down everyone. :P I'm not getting insulted by any of this, so no need to feed the trolling...
The map will be at least loosely SC2 lore based because of one simple reason: I don't have the skills to make new models. However, so far I'm only building the engine and the content can be changed later on. Also, how is a generic zombie setting any more creative than a setting based on SC2 lore? And of course I'm going to call them zombies even though they are Infested Terrans. A zombie is a zombie, no matter what it looks like or what it's called.
Same goes for the contiguousness of the game world: right now the plan is to just have each game last up to a few hours without a save/load system, because I haven't yet planned any comprehensive skill system which would remain interesting over a long period of time. But once the base engine is done, I'll start properly thinking of how I want to expand it. It's also only possible to save a very limited amount of data, so saving the entire city in the bank is out of the question. Characters would be possible to be saved, but I'll have to see if it's going to be useful enough for the effort.
Also, I'm doing this for fun, and won't be spending endless hours on it... so it probably won't become anything overly popular any time soon. As you might notice I've been just talking here for the past week without any real progress, so don't get overly excited just yet.
The ideas about the random encounters for blocking debris, lockpicking etc. are nice, and just about what I was going for anyway.
Very nice. But does it currently Support Sub-Levels such as basements?
With basements added You could add some kinda of "sewer system" support which might make it very interesting as well =)
Also a Dialog Box in the top right that shows you the "name" or "id" of the building the player is in and the current floor/level they are on of the building.
Yeah, it supports basements as well. I was thinking of making a sewer system, but that might take for a while since I still have a lot of more important things to do. The building name and level display is a good idea, I was wondering how I should do that... and a simple dialog will be nice and clear.
@dra6o0n: Go
Protoss purges and a queen spreading creep tumor sound like good random encounter possibilities, but I'll have to see how many of them I have the time and motivation to implement.
@oODoomieOo: Go
That's one of the possibilities for a respawn system, but I have a feeling it would become too random since the map isn't linear. Sometimes the player might spawn into a place where it's nearly impossible to rescue him and sometimes in a building that's right next to the other players. That's why I was planning for having the players rescue NPC civilians so that the new player could just "possess" one of those.
However, I think I'll go for a death-means-death system but with some possibilities to bring dead players back to life, possibly with an adrenaline injector which the players first need to find. I'll try not to make fleeing from enemies too difficult so you always have a fair chance of survival if you didn't do something stupid yourself, like running right next to a monster. This could be balanced by making your sanity drop reasonably fast when you're hiding.
There's some serious bugs with the preview / edit / post system because they use the "#link" stuff instead of proper links. Browsers don't recognize those links as "the page should be reloaded" but instead just scroll down to that section on the page. This means that when you click "edit", edit the post and then click "update", you need to reload the page manually for the update to actually show for you. So you can never know if it has actually updated yet before hitting reload... and if it isn't, all your text is gone unless you copied it before hitting update.
I also encountered another weird bug which caused me to lose like 200 words worth of text. While editing a post, I wrote the stuff in the edit box, pressed "preview" and accidentally double-clicked it instead, so the preview didn't show the edit box anymore and it looked just as if I had posted the text. The text was in the post, but when I pressed "edit" again, the text was gone again and I had no way of retrieving it since the preview doesn't open in a new page but instead just replaces the text in the current page (so pressing "back" on the browser doesn't help).
I'm not sure why the site even uses this weird makeshift *cough* forum software instead of one that already works (and uses web standards), but these kinds of bugs should really be taken care of... (just a little annoyed for having to type everything again, but I guess I'll just use notepad from now on... no offense otherwise).
I talked a bit about the crafting system with Xenox and I'm not so sure about it anymore, since it'd make more sense for the survivors to craft weapons like crossbows, molotov coctails, swords, axes etc. and not complex things like shotguns, pistols and rifles. I'd also have wanted to give the players a choice of what they want to craft since what'd be the point of a crafting system if they couldn't decide? It'd be the same as just making obtaining weapons more difficult, and the same effect could be achieved just by setting the chance to find them lower. So the random identification idea wouldn't really work with that, but because none of the weapons I just mentioned can really be crafted by using the same parts (like how do you make a crossbow from the same parts as a sword or a molotov coctail), a crafting system might not be that good for the gameplay after all.
Instead, I was thinking of a "repair system" like in Fallout 3, where you can find different kinds of weapons (then there can be shotguns, pistols and rifles as well), where you can repair one weapon by using another one of the same type as spare parts, like combining two shotguns together destroys one of them but increases the durability of the other one. This way the players would need to decide if they want to share the weapons they've found with everyone, or use some of them to make the others more reliable.
One idea was to let the players use almost any wooden and metallic weapons and equipment to fortify barricades (some better than the others), but you'd need a blowtorch or similar to do so. Maybe have an ability to destroy a weapon into scrap metal or scrap wood, and also have the weapons that are destroyed for repairing produce a little bunch of those.
—
I've been a bit busy with other things for the past few days but the zombie AI is coming along quite nicely. So far it only works for zombies and players who are in the same building or outside, but the code structure allows me to add the other cases without having to change the structure itself. Here's what I have implemented so far:
Whenever a zombie sees a player and isn't chasing him yet, the zombie generates 10 threat per second (TPS) towards that player.
At 35 threat towards a player, the zombie starts a countdown timer of 3—9 seconds at random (resetting on every AI cycle when the zombie can see the player) during which it knows where the player is and generates 1 TPS towards that player up to a limit of 100 threat.
When the countdown ends, the zombie doesn't know where the player is anymore and issued a move order to the last known position of the player.
While the countdown isn't running, the zombie loses 2 TPS towards that player.
Each zombie has separate threat counters and countdowns for each player (stored in the zombie unit's custom values), and if another player has more than 110% threat than the current target, the zombie changes its target.
This means that if you walk past a zombie so that it only sees you let's say for 2.5 seconds, it only generates 25 threat on you and doesn't yet start to chase you. While you're hiding, the zombie loses 2 TPS from you, so after 5 seconds it still has 15 threat on you. If you then let the zombie see you for another 2 seconds, its threat increases by 20 from 15, adding up to 35, and the zombie starts chasing you.
It also means that the longer the zombie chases you, the more threat it gets on you and the longer it takes for the zombie to "forget" you, and even if it forgets where you are, it still remembers how much threat it has on you. So if you manage to lose a zombie but it still has more than 35 threat on you when it sees you the next time, it instantly starts to chase you again.
Later on, I'll add more complex threat generation which will be partially based on the distance between the player and the zombie, the view angle of the zombie towards the player, and the speed at which the player walks by the zombie. Sounds will also generate "environmental" threat for the zombies, which can cause them to move to the point where the sound came from (if the threat generated by the noise is high enough compared to the zombie's current target).
I set up a poll about what happens when you die. If it seems like there's not much demand for a respawn system then I guess there's no point in making one.
In Starcraft lore, they technically can use small arms, but little information is on those. Other than that, rifles, flamethrower, and such are quite plentiful (in military areas that is).
In a urban environment, where soldiers died fighting, maybe there are guns, but most of em are destroyed in the battle.
So maybe, survivors can also craft guns together like this, after finding unbroken parts to assemble them.
Example:
Instead of making items with "barrel, trigger, etc." you can just craft them out of "Gun Part" items that stacks. Say making a gun requires a # of said gun parts, and maybe experience or skills.
Then you'll have to craft ammo... Somehow...
Crafting weapons and other kind of equipment could be cool and was one of the very first ideas I had, but I didn't explore it much further. How about you can't make just anything from the gun parts you find, but you must first "identify" a bunch of gun parts.
For example: You have found three gun parts and you use the identify ability on them. The game randomizes which weapon you can make out of those parts, and replaces the parts with a "Dissembled Flamethrower" or "Dissembled Rifle" etc. and then you can use your crafting skill to try and reassemble it. This way, it wouldn't seem like you can make a rifle and a flamethrower from the same parts, since the identified parts would only be usable for the weapon that was identified from them.
The same system could be used for other kinds of equipment, but they'd use another item like "equipment parts" instead.
As for ammo... might be better if you just need to find it rather than craft it.
I'll just give them weapons without proper animations for now and when I know which weapons I want to keep, I'll look for someone to do the animations.
Well, this is a difficult decision, and I'd like to hear some feedback, since I don't want to take dying into either of its extremes. Although "death means death" would fit into a survival game, it doesn't fit into a multiplayer game when the players want to play it together. I know for a lot of players it doesn't really matter who they are playing with, so that if a game ends for them, they can just go play another game even if the players from the previous game were still playing that game. But if players want to play with their friends, like I often do, and they get dropped out of the game, they'll have to wait until the friends finish with the current game until they can start a new one together again.
Best solution could be to let the host decide the game mode. I could do a death-means-death hardcore mode and another mode where you can respawn. But there are still some unanswered questions about both of these, and even more so with the mode where you can respawn. I'll focus on that for now.
Respawn Mode
In this mode, when a player dies, the game doesn't end for him. However, he doesn't get to respawn immeadiately, and there will be penalties for that player and also for the overall gameplay. Respawning also just means the dead player gets a completely new character, losing everything the former one had (unless other players manage to loot some of his possessions). If there are no living civilian NPCs around, the player needs to wait until a new one is rescued by the other players. Meanwhile, the player gets to spectate the other players. There's also a timer after which the player gets to control a new character. This could be explained so that the NPC civilians are too afraid to act, but then one manages to gather his courage when the player gains control over him. The length of the timer could inrease on each death per player, and maybe even have a limited number of respawns per player to prevent abuse.
As I described earlier, the number of rescued civilians affects how fast the players lose and gain sanity, which indicates their mental health. Losing sanity makes the game more difficult by giving your character different kinds of drawbacks depending on how low it goes. The more living civilians there are, the faster they regain their sanity in safe places, and the slower they lose their sanity when encountering horrors. So when a player's character dies, this global sanity modifier decreases (because there's one less civilian alive), and there could be an instant sanity loss for all active players and NPCs.
In addition, the number of dead civilians (player characters and NPCs) will have an effect on sanity losses and gains. If the civilians know that a lot of people have died already, their morale drops and they start losing their sanity faster, and regaining it slower. This way you can't just keep enough civilians around to have a decent sanity modified and then replace the dead with new ones when too many start to die, but you also have to keep them alive as long as possible.
The goal is to not make dying feel like just another decision for the player to make. It should feel like you're supposed to keep your character alive as long as possible. Only then it's properly possible to get the feeling of tension when you're being chased by a monster and trying to desperately find a place to hide. The player shouldn't be let to think, "Well, I can just stop running since I can respawn anyway." With enough penalties for dying, I think this can be achieved even if the player can return to the game later. But will the penalties I described above suffice, and are they reasonable enough?
Meanwhile, I've been planning the zombie AI and I have a pretty good idea about how they will react to players and follow them around from building to building until the players manage to lose them.
You can scale down camera movement in the Cameras data objects, the "Forward Scale" and "Strafe Scale" values. There's lots of other camera related settings as well there.
I have some trouble with my building spawning system: When I create a building, the game freezes for a short duration (maybe 0.1 - 0.25 seconds) for all players, which feels very annoying. I can optimize this a lot, but it will take some time. I need to make some of the walls consist of longer parts than 1x1 so I only need to create one unit per multiple squares of wall. Another thing I can do is spawn the walls into the game already on map start, and hide them when they aren't needed, and then move them to their position and show them when a player enters a building. If anyone has any better ideas for optimization, I'd like to hear them.
Edit: It was a bit simpler than I thought, so no worries here.
Storylines don't work well in multiplayer games. The only time it gets to its full potential is when all of the players are playing the map for the first time, and since the map will support up to 14 players, it'd rarely be the case. I like the idea of having one background story that isn't actually a "plot" for the game, but like telling a reason why the players are in the situation and what they need to do to get out of it.
Zerg eggs could be used for the broodling-like quickly spawning, quickly dying enemies, but I was also thinking of using the infested cocoons to very rarely spawn full-grown zombies from them. I mean very rarely as in if you walk to a room with 10 cocoons, there'd only be like 1%-5% chance that even one of them will hatch.
I don't want a "tactical" combat system where the players can outskill the enemies just by being good at controlling their character, which means I won't make the zombies turn slowly. There will be very few zombies around, so if they turn too slow, players could just kill them by running around them (since there won't be other zombies to help the one being attacked).
As for weapons, there's only one attack animation for the civilian model so unless I can get someone to make new animations and attached weapon models etc. they'll only be able to throw stuff... But that should be good enough for a start. I can add more weapons later on if it seems like they're needed. Either way, I wouldn't worry too much about the combat system since it'll be one of the least used aspects of the game.
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You can only get the mouse coordinates on the "Mouse Clicked" event until 1.2 patch (not sure how well we can get them even after that, though).
0
@dra6o0n: Go Continuously rescuing civilians for points would change the map into something completely different, taking it more towards the Lemmings style from survival style. The traits system could be a nice touch instead of just having characters with different numbers in their skills as I had planned it so far.
There are two ways to take the map to, both of which have gotten quite a lot of ideas and approval: The "death means death" mode where you lose your character when you die, and the mode where you preserve some of your characters attributes when you die and then get to respawn in some way. The latter could benefit from a character save/load system, and the death-means-death mode not so much.
A save/load system would also mean that the character development system was interesting enough over a long period of time to benefit from the save/load system to begin with. If you'd be just getting more and more traits over time, then eventually all characters would end up being the same. So it'd probably mean each trait would need its own level up system, like a character with Military Training would become better and better at using guns, and so on.
However, then some of the players would start with a more and more powerful character each time, and the game would have to be balanced for that, requiring me to create new content for the more powerful characters... The whole thing would become very chaotic considering that not all players would start the game with a character of the same level, and the game would also be more predictable if the character levels would mean enabling a different set of gameplay content.
For a "casual" game like this (compared to big MMORPGs which you might spend months or even years with), it seems to me that it's better to add replayability by creating various different kinds of random encounters and randomizing the city for each game, so you never know which of the possible variations you'll be getting into when starting the game. Considering all this, I don't really see the usefulness of the save/load system even for characters, because I don't have the will to spend so much time balancing the gameplay for progressively improving characters.
The traits system can still fit into this, but only by using them as static attributes which instantly tell you what the character is good at and which skills he can improve faster than others. Still one more possibility to use a save/load system for is that the more times you have beaten the map, the more choice you have for what kind of starting character you get, otherwise being completely random. First you'd be able to choose one of your perks, then the rest, then the point distribution into each of your skills, and eventually even the starting equipment you have.
0
Maybe I have a bit different idea of what an RPG means to some of you, but in this case I'm mostly referring to the style of gameplay with it, not everything related to a game where you assume the role of a character and emphatize with him/her like maybe in some pen & paper RPGs. There's no point spending months into developing original lore for a map which people will play for a few hours.
0
Seesh, just calm down everyone. :P I'm not getting insulted by any of this, so no need to feed the trolling...
The map will be at least loosely SC2 lore based because of one simple reason: I don't have the skills to make new models. However, so far I'm only building the engine and the content can be changed later on. Also, how is a generic zombie setting any more creative than a setting based on SC2 lore? And of course I'm going to call them zombies even though they are Infested Terrans. A zombie is a zombie, no matter what it looks like or what it's called.
Same goes for the contiguousness of the game world: right now the plan is to just have each game last up to a few hours without a save/load system, because I haven't yet planned any comprehensive skill system which would remain interesting over a long period of time. But once the base engine is done, I'll start properly thinking of how I want to expand it. It's also only possible to save a very limited amount of data, so saving the entire city in the bank is out of the question. Characters would be possible to be saved, but I'll have to see if it's going to be useful enough for the effort.
Also, I'm doing this for fun, and won't be spending endless hours on it... so it probably won't become anything overly popular any time soon. As you might notice I've been just talking here for the past week without any real progress, so don't get overly excited just yet.
The ideas about the random encounters for blocking debris, lockpicking etc. are nice, and just about what I was going for anyway.
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Yeah, it supports basements as well. I was thinking of making a sewer system, but that might take for a while since I still have a lot of more important things to do. The building name and level display is a good idea, I was wondering how I should do that... and a simple dialog will be nice and clear.
As soon as I have any. :P
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@Kimphoe: Go Nope, but I heard a bit about it though. I haven't taken any ideas from it, sanity has been used as a stat long before that. ;)
Though if you're just saying it might give some ideas, then I maybe should give it a try.
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@dra6o0n: Go Protoss purges and a queen spreading creep tumor sound like good random encounter possibilities, but I'll have to see how many of them I have the time and motivation to implement.
@oODoomieOo: Go That's one of the possibilities for a respawn system, but I have a feeling it would become too random since the map isn't linear. Sometimes the player might spawn into a place where it's nearly impossible to rescue him and sometimes in a building that's right next to the other players. That's why I was planning for having the players rescue NPC civilians so that the new player could just "possess" one of those.
However, I think I'll go for a death-means-death system but with some possibilities to bring dead players back to life, possibly with an adrenaline injector which the players first need to find. I'll try not to make fleeing from enemies too difficult so you always have a fair chance of survival if you didn't do something stupid yourself, like running right next to a monster. This could be balanced by making your sanity drop reasonably fast when you're hiding.
0
There's some serious bugs with the preview / edit / post system because they use the "#link" stuff instead of proper links. Browsers don't recognize those links as "the page should be reloaded" but instead just scroll down to that section on the page. This means that when you click "edit", edit the post and then click "update", you need to reload the page manually for the update to actually show for you. So you can never know if it has actually updated yet before hitting reload... and if it isn't, all your text is gone unless you copied it before hitting update.
I also encountered another weird bug which caused me to lose like 200 words worth of text. While editing a post, I wrote the stuff in the edit box, pressed "preview" and accidentally double-clicked it instead, so the preview didn't show the edit box anymore and it looked just as if I had posted the text. The text was in the post, but when I pressed "edit" again, the text was gone again and I had no way of retrieving it since the preview doesn't open in a new page but instead just replaces the text in the current page (so pressing "back" on the browser doesn't help).
I'm not sure why the site even uses this weird makeshift *cough* forum software instead of one that already works (and uses web standards), but these kinds of bugs should really be taken care of... (just a little annoyed for having to type everything again, but I guess I'll just use notepad from now on... no offense otherwise).
0
I talked a bit about the crafting system with Xenox and I'm not so sure about it anymore, since it'd make more sense for the survivors to craft weapons like crossbows, molotov coctails, swords, axes etc. and not complex things like shotguns, pistols and rifles. I'd also have wanted to give the players a choice of what they want to craft since what'd be the point of a crafting system if they couldn't decide? It'd be the same as just making obtaining weapons more difficult, and the same effect could be achieved just by setting the chance to find them lower. So the random identification idea wouldn't really work with that, but because none of the weapons I just mentioned can really be crafted by using the same parts (like how do you make a crossbow from the same parts as a sword or a molotov coctail), a crafting system might not be that good for the gameplay after all.
Instead, I was thinking of a "repair system" like in Fallout 3, where you can find different kinds of weapons (then there can be shotguns, pistols and rifles as well), where you can repair one weapon by using another one of the same type as spare parts, like combining two shotguns together destroys one of them but increases the durability of the other one. This way the players would need to decide if they want to share the weapons they've found with everyone, or use some of them to make the others more reliable.
One idea was to let the players use almost any wooden and metallic weapons and equipment to fortify barricades (some better than the others), but you'd need a blowtorch or similar to do so. Maybe have an ability to destroy a weapon into scrap metal or scrap wood, and also have the weapons that are destroyed for repairing produce a little bunch of those.
—
I've been a bit busy with other things for the past few days but the zombie AI is coming along quite nicely. So far it only works for zombies and players who are in the same building or outside, but the code structure allows me to add the other cases without having to change the structure itself. Here's what I have implemented so far:
This means that if you walk past a zombie so that it only sees you let's say for 2.5 seconds, it only generates 25 threat on you and doesn't yet start to chase you. While you're hiding, the zombie loses 2 TPS from you, so after 5 seconds it still has 15 threat on you. If you then let the zombie see you for another 2 seconds, its threat increases by 20 from 15, adding up to 35, and the zombie starts chasing you.
It also means that the longer the zombie chases you, the more threat it gets on you and the longer it takes for the zombie to "forget" you, and even if it forgets where you are, it still remembers how much threat it has on you. So if you manage to lose a zombie but it still has more than 35 threat on you when it sees you the next time, it instantly starts to chase you again.
Later on, I'll add more complex threat generation which will be partially based on the distance between the player and the zombie, the view angle of the zombie towards the player, and the speed at which the player walks by the zombie. Sounds will also generate "environmental" threat for the zombies, which can cause them to move to the point where the sound came from (if the threat generated by the noise is high enough compared to the zombie's current target).
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I set up a poll about what happens when you die. If it seems like there's not much demand for a respawn system then I guess there's no point in making one.
Crafting weapons and other kind of equipment could be cool and was one of the very first ideas I had, but I didn't explore it much further. How about you can't make just anything from the gun parts you find, but you must first "identify" a bunch of gun parts.
For example: You have found three gun parts and you use the identify ability on them. The game randomizes which weapon you can make out of those parts, and replaces the parts with a "Dissembled Flamethrower" or "Dissembled Rifle" etc. and then you can use your crafting skill to try and reassemble it. This way, it wouldn't seem like you can make a rifle and a flamethrower from the same parts, since the identified parts would only be usable for the weapon that was identified from them.
The same system could be used for other kinds of equipment, but they'd use another item like "equipment parts" instead.
As for ammo... might be better if you just need to find it rather than craft it.
0
I'll just give them weapons without proper animations for now and when I know which weapons I want to keep, I'll look for someone to do the animations.
0
Dying
Well, this is a difficult decision, and I'd like to hear some feedback, since I don't want to take dying into either of its extremes. Although "death means death" would fit into a survival game, it doesn't fit into a multiplayer game when the players want to play it together. I know for a lot of players it doesn't really matter who they are playing with, so that if a game ends for them, they can just go play another game even if the players from the previous game were still playing that game. But if players want to play with their friends, like I often do, and they get dropped out of the game, they'll have to wait until the friends finish with the current game until they can start a new one together again.
Best solution could be to let the host decide the game mode. I could do a death-means-death hardcore mode and another mode where you can respawn. But there are still some unanswered questions about both of these, and even more so with the mode where you can respawn. I'll focus on that for now.
Respawn Mode
In this mode, when a player dies, the game doesn't end for him. However, he doesn't get to respawn immeadiately, and there will be penalties for that player and also for the overall gameplay. Respawning also just means the dead player gets a completely new character, losing everything the former one had (unless other players manage to loot some of his possessions). If there are no living civilian NPCs around, the player needs to wait until a new one is rescued by the other players. Meanwhile, the player gets to spectate the other players. There's also a timer after which the player gets to control a new character. This could be explained so that the NPC civilians are too afraid to act, but then one manages to gather his courage when the player gains control over him. The length of the timer could inrease on each death per player, and maybe even have a limited number of respawns per player to prevent abuse.
As I described earlier, the number of rescued civilians affects how fast the players lose and gain sanity, which indicates their mental health. Losing sanity makes the game more difficult by giving your character different kinds of drawbacks depending on how low it goes. The more living civilians there are, the faster they regain their sanity in safe places, and the slower they lose their sanity when encountering horrors. So when a player's character dies, this global sanity modifier decreases (because there's one less civilian alive), and there could be an instant sanity loss for all active players and NPCs.
In addition, the number of dead civilians (player characters and NPCs) will have an effect on sanity losses and gains. If the civilians know that a lot of people have died already, their morale drops and they start losing their sanity faster, and regaining it slower. This way you can't just keep enough civilians around to have a decent sanity modified and then replace the dead with new ones when too many start to die, but you also have to keep them alive as long as possible.
The goal is to not make dying feel like just another decision for the player to make. It should feel like you're supposed to keep your character alive as long as possible. Only then it's properly possible to get the feeling of tension when you're being chased by a monster and trying to desperately find a place to hide. The player shouldn't be let to think, "Well, I can just stop running since I can respawn anyway." With enough penalties for dying, I think this can be achieved even if the player can return to the game later. But will the penalties I described above suffice, and are they reasonable enough?
Meanwhile, I've been planning the zombie AI and I have a pretty good idea about how they will react to players and follow them around from building to building until the players manage to lose them.
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You can scale down camera movement in the Cameras data objects, the "Forward Scale" and "Strafe Scale" values. There's lots of other camera related settings as well there.
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I have some trouble with my building spawning system: When I create a building, the game freezes for a short duration (maybe 0.1 - 0.25 seconds) for all players, which feels very annoying. I can optimize this a lot, but it will take some time. I need to make some of the walls consist of longer parts than 1x1 so I only need to create one unit per multiple squares of wall. Another thing I can do is spawn the walls into the game already on map start, and hide them when they aren't needed, and then move them to their position and show them when a player enters a building. If anyone has any better ideas for optimization, I'd like to hear them.
Edit: It was a bit simpler than I thought, so no worries here.
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Storylines don't work well in multiplayer games. The only time it gets to its full potential is when all of the players are playing the map for the first time, and since the map will support up to 14 players, it'd rarely be the case. I like the idea of having one background story that isn't actually a "plot" for the game, but like telling a reason why the players are in the situation and what they need to do to get out of it.
Zerg eggs could be used for the broodling-like quickly spawning, quickly dying enemies, but I was also thinking of using the infested cocoons to very rarely spawn full-grown zombies from them. I mean very rarely as in if you walk to a room with 10 cocoons, there'd only be like 1%-5% chance that even one of them will hatch.
I don't want a "tactical" combat system where the players can outskill the enemies just by being good at controlling their character, which means I won't make the zombies turn slowly. There will be very few zombies around, so if they turn too slow, players could just kill them by running around them (since there won't be other zombies to help the one being attacked).
As for weapons, there's only one attack animation for the civilian model so unless I can get someone to make new animations and attached weapon models etc. they'll only be able to throw stuff... But that should be good enough for a start. I can add more weapons later on if it seems like they're needed. Either way, I wouldn't worry too much about the combat system since it'll be one of the least used aspects of the game.
Some progress today: