Last year I started working on this project hoping to complete it in a week for Halloween, but I think this was too ambitious of a deadline for someone who had never developed a game before. I gave up on it for about 8 months, but have just recently started working on it again and have put about a month straight of work into it, and it’s not far from its 1.0 release. The current version is 0.8, with only a couple of features to implement for its 0.9 release.
Generic Zombie Shooter is exactly what it sounds like… you kill lots of zombies! I got the inspiration for it from the “I MAED A GAEM WITH ZOMBIES IN IT!!!1” game on Xbox Live. It’s a top-down shooter and has several weapons. The weapons are as follows:
- Popgun (Handgun)
- Rooty Tooty Point & Shooty (Assault Rifle)
- Boomstick (Shotgun)
- The Flammenwerfer (Flamethrower)
- Hand Eggs (Grenades)
- Flip-Flops (Landmines)
- Shiny Sticks (Flares)
There are also several zombie types. Here are the zombies currently in the game:
- Regular Zombies (Well, OBVIOUSLY…)
- Fast Zombie Dogs (Faster than normal zombies and very vicious.)
- Acid Zombies (Hulking green abominations that spit balls of concentrated acid at you!)
- Poison Fog Zombies (When killed, they explode into a cloud of green, poisonous fog that poisons the player! Watch out!)
- Zombie Matrons (The mother of all zombies. If not killed fast enough, she will burst and create a swarm of 5-10 tiny zombies!)
- Tiny Zombies (Smaller and faster, but weaker versions of regular zombies that swarm you in droves!)
The zombie names are subject to change, because despite its generic nature, I’d like to give everything in the game a comical name and meaning.
The game should be completed in a couple weeks if I don’t slack off, so I’d like to hear some opinions on it. Also, I’ve gotten a lot of good ideas from other communities for features that I should add, and have implemented several of them. So now I will show a list of features currently being worked on, and features to be implemented in the future.
TODO:
- Add more weapons.
- Change gameplay so you do not start with all weapons automatically. Add store system so you can
buy the weapons with your cash. - Add powerups (speed, firing rate, unlimited ammo?, extra life, etc)
- Add “boss” waves every 20 waves or so where the entire wave is just one big boss monster with a special power.
- Add background music or ambient sounds so the game isn’t as quiet. Maybe add zombie noises.
- Add EXP and level up system to enhance certain attributes.
- Add alt-fire for certain weapons.
- Add effects to ammo for tertiary effects.
Post v1.0 Release Features:
- Lighting system so the player has a “flashlight” so he can only see in front of him, and rest of the screen will be shadowed. (Gonna need help with this one!)
- Implement a day/night cycle once shadowing is implemented.
- Randomly generated terrain.
- Pathing AI for zombies to make terrain possible. (Something tells me moving directly toward the player won’t really work.)
- Add level-based gameplay, possibly as a different gamemode than the wave based gameplay. A friend of mine suggested this feature, and suggested that it should be like a map, where each day, you can explore a new area, where you need to fight off the zombies, and search for survivors. You can choose to travel at night, but there would be lower visibility and more zombies.
- Change enemy AI so they attack when either, a) the player is in their line of sight, b) they “hear” the player, or c) are attacked by the player. Zombies that detect you will alert zombies near them, forming hordes.
- Custom Graphics (I’m not very good with graphics, so every zombie, with the exception of the Matrons, had their sprites taken off Google. Also, the first three weapons in the loadout and the player were also taken from Google. You may have noticed the Flammewerfer’s icon bears a resemblance to a certain Team Fortress 2 character’s weapon of choice. :P)
- (Optional) Migrate game engine to LWJGL.
So, tell me what features you think this game should have before its v1.0 release, and I’ll consider throwing them in!
Here’s a link to the JAR: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zrdzwzjgb7ni7c9/GenericZombieShooter.jar
Here are a couple screenshots!
http://www.darinbeaudreau.com/images/generic-zombie-shooter_43.png
http://www.darinbeaudreau.com/images/generic-zombie-shooter_44.png