If we get other survivers, im giving em guns and stuffing them in trenches.

Lets see the zombies get over that?

The only Important randomisation that'll happen will be of the terrain you can build upon, and what time the zombies come, for that exact reason. If someone gets decent terrain they could feasibly distribute the seed, but inputting a seed would only be do-able in free-play mode, where you cannot submit your highscore (same one as the floating islands), because the same seed will be used for where zombies come from. Free play will be more of a fun, dicking-about-with-the-game mode while survival will be for lack of a better word hard to do well in.
If someone has a fun starting build they can distribute it, as well, for fair. If someone wants to take on the world with just their fists they'll get quite a sizey mutliplier, but I assume they'll also not be able to get many points as they won't be able to kill zombies in melee, won't be able to effectively mine to get stone, won't be able to effectively log to get wood, won't be able to hunt to get food, only forage, so it'll essentially be them running away from the zombies until they die or starve if there's no vegetative foodstuff. No industry points, no military points, and a tiny survival score multiplied by maybe 200? If it's a viable tactic I can just reduce the multiplier
Also: There'll be global highscores and daily ones, and perhaps also weekly. I'm fairly sure the highscores API that's integrated into playtomic is fairly easy to hack anyway, so I don't have a problem with manually deleting any dodgy scores.

Also: fire mechanic? As in "schtuff's burning and now i am daed" or "pew pew take that zombehs!"?

Re: Other survivors - The only way I'm planning on doing this is through local multiplayer, for a slight score deficit but, you know, the ability to kill zombies from two directions.

Well, what I mean is do you plan to put this as a standalone .exe instead of a web based thing?

Not any time soon, sadly. I don't have time to maintain at least 3 binaries for cross-platform support, and I'm not going to make anything windows-centric for a while, partially cause I'd be discriminating against myself (wine runs most programs slower than native doze).

edit: 87,570 tiles. Will have a look at zombies and terrain tweaks tonight before physics study.

Zombies are in. AI is terrible.
It's 23:21 and I have two exams tomorrow. Argue with my logic and die.


They're really really hard to kill once they're upon you. I suggest weakening them with falls through games of chase, and caving things in on them.

Balancing is off, as you might expect. I don't even care at the moment.
Feel free to suggest balancing measures and AI behaviours. Currently there's literally 12 lines of behaviour code.

Makes the game a lot more hectic, in any case. Dig a hole, run from zombies, get killed by zombies, repeat, I suppose.

Someone get good screenshots.

Zombie AI:
If they hit a wall, check if they can climb/jump it. If they can't, don't go that way again. If they can, climb/jump it. If they fall at least 3 blocks, they go either way (to explore tunnels they just fell into).
Zombies that see you moan, making all the others try path towards you. If there is no path, or if it's a really long way, try dig your own path.

Make them weaker, maybe a grab-damage combo attack. They stop you, then damage you. Makes one a nuisance, and a swarm lethal.

Maybe let them break the weak dirt block? Make it take, say, 20 times longer than it takes you to break them. That way, swarming again will speed up the dying.

Also for balance, the player needs air. Just a single tile path to the surface would do, but without it, you have limited time to make one. Makes debris filling your corridors deadly, and stops you just camping in safety.

Ugh, the mining is horrible. Make it automatic, fixed rate, as long as you hold the button, you dig.
Anyways, the zombies are just instant death and theres not much to play, really.

Mwahahahahaaaa..

Damnit coops!
I really need to make the zombie's fall damage kick in at a later rate.Indeed, I'll be working on that soon, though the player is currently using empty hands. I might make the attack key repeat, but I might also just ragtag together a faux-ventory and give you access to the pick earlier than I was planning to.
I'm also going to tweak spawn rates and the like before doing anything, as currently the stream that happens is ridiculous. The amount of zombies coming is going to be proportional to the amount of noise happening on the map, and dependant on a virtual "number of nearby zombies" to prevent a loud sound causing 40 zombies to spawn.

Barnox: I like the idea of a grab attack.
I think I need AI modes, sadly. Currently they just seek the player, which doesn't really work when they can't see you or just end up piling up down the bottom.
Luckily, modes are very easy to code.

I probably won't have the zombies able to dig, considering that in the "real" game you won't be able to cause tunnels with your mouse so all of them will need to have a pathway out of them. The exception to this will be ladders, I suppose, but I'll probably make zombies kill one-another in cramped spaces. I've got to get a corpse system happening soon anyway, and you're going to be able to climb bodies, so they'll fill the hole with bodies and then keep going I suppose.

Got to go now, good to get some feedback.

About the grab attack thing. It would be rather neat if the zombies took, i dunno, half a second to turn around, so in that period you could grab them from behind and then drop them from ledges and stuff.

I'm not sure how I'm going to handle grabbing entities but I'll definitely put some knockback into blunt damage (which is what you and the zombies both do, though you also currently do cut, pierce and dig).
Just got out of my first physics exam of the day and it went swimmingly, I've got another in 3 hours though so I'm not going home in between, I'll just walk to town for some noms.

I need to make actor's controllers not react while they're doing the whole pain anim thing. I'm going to up the zombie's pain tolerance a lot. Also, I'll switch fall damage from a dedicated number to a damage instance, so you can actually crash through tiles that're succeptible to blunt damage as well (supports, weak roofing), not to mention crash on top of people. Zombies won't be very succeptible to blunt damage, but will be to cut and moderately to pierce as well, making choppy weapons the way to go, followed by your pick, daggars, and bullets.

Tonight will be about getting the zombies to a stage where they're fun to play against, where a large cave-in causes them to turn up, and where they have a virtual population to pick from. If I have time, I might also make some variation sprites to liven up a large group of them, and tweak animations at large (seeing them in-game has highlighted the weaknesses <_<).
Oh, also, just for findude, I might put the action key on a slow repeat as well.

Oh yeah: 111,451 Tiles Destroyed, 7,809 Zombies Killed, 429 deaths. I really need to slow down the spawn rate so they don't kill one another in those huge packs so much <_<

Update.
♥♥♥♥ gets crazy, but not too crazy. You can kill the zombies kind of now, but they get a massive advantage while in-melee: no pain.

Enjoy. Zombies still don't crouch through tunnels, sadly. I'll do an AI update tomorrow.

Riiiiight...


Holy crap mspaint jpegs suck.
Oh, and zombies too!

But yeah, the spawn seems to be a wee bit silly.

I've not seen that many spawn in my game O_o Could be cause I'm at a lower framerate though. I'll look into it now, I thought it might need tweaking <_<

edit: 21 hours logged play time worldwide, missing out on yesterday. 14,141 zombies killed. 134,661 tiles destroyed. Yay! Numbers!

Well, it looks like they are responding to terrain destruction.
Massive mouse-excavation -> haha zombies

They never stop swarming once started though.

You might wanna cap the spawnrate.