End Day 1
RB[0] on 2014/10/05 05:25
of Wish Me Luck!
— edited on 2014/10/05 05:26
We originally had about 3 different ideas we were kicking around, but we really wanted to do something unique with the theme.
Our first idea was a cabin defense thing vs hordes of zombies, where you can hire new people, that upgrade, and position them around the house. You could also purchase weapons/ammo for your guys, and items to use to barricade (like tables, couches, refrigerators, etc.) - and fought different sorts of enemies, requiring different strategies for each wave.
As we got going we started to feel that this had been done too much and wasn't really a fun way to think about the theme.
Our second idea was basically to have a player in their house/kitchen (whatever) and monsters are attacking, and you had to use whatever was in the kitchen as weapons, to either chuck, or set traps or barricades. The idea behind it was the saying "throw everything including the kitchen sink" - so we envisioned a character furiously trying to rip down the sink to throw as a weapon.
Sadly this seemed to require a large amount of art (which I am still not very fast/good at) - and would really work well in 3d, not so much 2d, so we scrapped it.
We we settled on was using the room as a concept for your starting point. The idea going back to zombies, you wake up, and it is announced that the zombie apocalypse has started, you have two minutes, and various items in your room (based on which class you start as) - you can only take a few items, so choose wisely, and quickly. Once you select your items you emerge into the world, and must fight off the waves of zombies and locate the other survivors (the other playable classes) - as each provides a skill crucial to survival. Resources are very limited outside of your room, so the tools you select, and proper use of the skills provided by each character are necessary to survive.
The goal is to reach the evac point, where you throw a flare and trigger a zombie hoard you must survive until the helipcopter arrives, and then fight through to reach the helicopter. Points are awarded based on how quickly you finish, how many characters are left in your party at the end, and also how many of each characters sub-quests you complete. For instance, the medic gets points for each type of zombie she collects a specimen from. The soldier from each type of zombie killed, etc.
After we settled on the idea I spent the next 4-ish hours getting the basics down, such as relearning Pygame as I haven't used it since last Pyweek I participated in ^_^ - we absolutely knew we were going to go 2d, and non-networked, as those have been royal pains in the past. So we created a basic half-tile map engine (kind of like isometric, with 64x32 tiles, but they are rectangles not diamonds) - we got the GIF loader working, and created basic tile, character and zombie images (the stick figures lol - zombies are animated gifs as well). We also set up the camera following the player, and the zombie spawner to purge zombies that fell too far behind and to respawn zombies in the direction the player is heading.
I ran into a lot of initial bugs setting things up, due to the rustiness with Pygame, but overall we have a decent base. I hope that this time I haven't been too ambitious, but we'll see.
Hope everyone else is doing well!