Alt is for strafing!
Hmm. Was considering picking up a bunch of the Tom Clancy games on Steam, but after watching those videos from Guildboss I think I might skip 'em and buy Project Zomboid instead. Even if it’s pretty unfinished at the moment, and breaks my vague rule of only buying games on Steam, seems to have a lot of promise. Just have to decide if I want to buy this on hope or not.
Edit: Herrrgh, talked myself out of Zomboid for the moment. I’ll wait for either the public demo, or word that the alpha has more content in it. Really wanna jump in, just rubs me the wrong way buying in this early.
many moons ago I used the keypad for movement before shooters/mmo required all the buttons, I just translated that over the WAXD when more buttons were needed.
I like having a finger/thumb for each movement because reaction time to move a finger off a key to another key is slower than just hitting the finger already on the key. It also helps when hitting diag combos.
RPS impressions:
The last few sentences are very unnerving.
I’m using a Nostromo n52 with great success. Makes a world of difference for WASD challenged like me.
I’m surprised they’re using WASD as up, down, left and right. “Back in the day” those keys mapped to the isometric world, so right would be SE for example.
I am, however, pleasantly surprised that they have put so much effort into tone. I hope that, even as the world opens up, this is not lost and that the little story moments are used wisely but with enough variation in conclusion not to bore with repetition.
I almost picked it up for the music alone, but have decided to wait until I can experience the complete product.
Patched today! I’m curious about #7, “zombie flocks”… going to make a video soon to check it out. :)
Note, this is just main features there will be numerous fixes not mentioned here. There may be new balance issues / bugs due to some of these but hopefully it’ll improve a lot more than it causes new problems. ;D
- N, E, S, W / NE, SE, SW, NW directional control toggle
- Inventory grows to fill vertical space of sidebar.
- Fixed various bed related bugs. Added option to sleep to avoid accidental clicks, or to inform player why they can’t.
- Fixed pot dupe bug.
- Fixed the death sound screw up. WHEN DID THAT START HAPPENING?
- Planks of wood will be useable melee weapons
- A few stragglers aside, zombies flock together and slowly migrate around the map in one or more groups, meaning the zombie density around the map will differ massively, and this will change over time. This means that your safe-house may be left alone for some time before suddenly being in the centre of a massive shambling swarm… This may need some balancing in future updates, but should provide more strategy to avoiding the horde. (Also running nonchalantly down an empty street at night then bumping into a ton of zombies is cool) This makes the opening section easier since you can find areas with low zombie numbers. It also makes it harder since if you happen to have a swarm around your house you’re in trouble!
- Scratches have only 25% chance of infection, and you will only find out a day or more later when you get queasy if you were infected. Bites are 100%.
- You survived for…
- Bite / scratch / death sounds.
- Uhoh! Something that’ll catch people out a fair few times before they adjust their plans slightly.
- Can barricade with hammer in your offhand. Forgetting to do this if you have wood selected and try and barricade a door, it will fail but NOT open the door to all the zombies you’re trying to protect yourself against.
- Context sensitive clicking is disabled when CTRL is held.
- Beds can only be used when within ‘open container/open door’ range.
- Skipping tutorial will retain the ‘safe zone’ until you venture out, to make it a way of skipping the tutorial without punishing the player and thus making it a more attractive option. You evil, evil person.
- Experimental - Raised day length to 20 minutes from 15 now we have fast forward. Have also doubled speed of fast forward (CPU dependent)
- Food / pills can be eaten by putting them on the heart icon, in parallel to putting things in inventory.
- Couches / sofas can be slept on.
- Eating / pill popping no longer clears item from mouse. So eating multiple is just multiple clicks.
- Restarting after death. Will skip front end and load the map again immediately. May cause obscure ‘second playthrough’ bugs from restart we’ll have to deal with as they become apparent. May also be pushing it for memory on lower end PCs if the old map hasn’t been garbage collected in time.
- The heart icon does a little wiggle (like the moodles) when you sustain injuries, as a reminder that you might need to tend to some new ailment.
- Mouse hotspot offset removed on Mac until proper cursors are working. Also option in lwjgl cache to disable on PC or re-enable on Mac.
- Options file saved in lwjgl cache with game resolution. For those Mac users that need a different res for offline. Will have no effect when played in the browser.
- Random buildings / doors will be locked and only openable from the inside. Fire axe can attack doors. (Well everything can but most are ineffectual)
- Craftable full-tile barricades made from 2 plank + 2 nails + hammer. Exact #'s still to balance.
- Smashed doors either by player or by zombie yield some planks to pick up.
- Game pause/resume and speed control buttons on the hud.
By contrast this is the exact reason I’m looking forward to this game.
Rogue Survivor attempted to scratch this itch and that trailer for Dead Island hinted it might go that way, but a Z game where you’re scratching out an existence before it all goes wrong is precisely what I’m looking for.
There are plenty of survivable zombie games out there - I’ve been longing for a DF-style “losing is fun” zombie game. No endless crates of ammo. No fast zombies, just the weighty realisation that one of these things is eventually going to do for you. Probably because you yourself screwed something up.
I want a feeling matching that from John Steakley’s book “Armor”, where the main character, Felix, is at war with an endless enemy whose strength comes from their mass. Felix states in the book that he knows one day the [zombies] will kill him, but he also knows it won’t be this [zombie] that’s standing in front of him right now.
He’s resigned to his fate while also being determined to fight against it for every second he can.
Apparently I like being depressed. I should mention that to my therapist.
Me too. I love how it comes with the inherent challenge of trying to beat your previous record for survival.
I look forward to someone setting up a Project Zomboid marathon survival for charity, with live cam.
Talked myself back into Zomboid and bought it, even this early on. Seems like they’re patching it fairly quick, and since I’m so interested in the game I figured I might as well bite this early on.
Even the “Pre-alpha tech demo” that’s up is kinda fun so far.
So is it anything like the zombie X-Com game everyone has been waiting for? Everything I’ve seen so far makes it seem more like a zombie RPG. Which is fine, but, you know.
This looks cool, especially with multi-player. I didn’t see anything on the skills or character building though. Do you gain skills by doing or do you level up and get skill points? Do you have stats, like a firefighter vs a school teacher. One is stronger and more athletic while the other may have far more academic smarts.
Skills are being added. I saw a mock-up screenie on the devblog about it.
You want Dead State.
EDIT: Assuming you mean the tactical element. If you want a strategic zombie war, well I don’t know of such a thing.
Surely that’s tactical?
Public standalone client demo of this is now available:
http://projectzomboid.com/blog/index.php/2011/06/free-public-demo-released/
Awesome. I bandaged my wife (?), gave her some painkillers, and successfully raided the next-door house for food. But it was all for naught: after I crafted some soup and put it on the oven to warm up, the kitchen caught fire. Then I caught fire. Then I died after frantically running around the house looking for something to put myself out.
A zombie game where you can die by accidentally burning yourself to death from a pot of soup? Day one purchase, no sarcasm.
This happened to me too and i’m not really sure why. My resulting feelings are also… different.
The game has a huge barrier to entry to people who aren’t hardcore gamers (and perhaps specifically those who have experience in old style/ds puzzle games where you combine tons of non obvious things to do “stuff”). Things aren’t quite obvious and the controls take use getting used to. I would have had a lot more problems finding everything if i hadn’t watched the previously posted preview/playthrough.
So i make the can of soup correctly, put it in the oven, turn it on and wait… Every few seconds i keep checking the oven to see if the can of soup changed in any noticeable way, but it never does so i assume either my character will say something when it is done or it will change its name to “cooked soup” (example). After a short while my character smells something burning, so i rush over to the oven, thinking the soup is finally done, but it instantly bursts in to a huge fire which covers the entire kitchen and kills me.
I got the same message from the preview video though. This is a game where there is a lot of trial & error, situations where you won’t know what to do until after you die.
Next time i am going to try putting it in the oven for only a second and assuming it is done. If that doesn’t work, i will have to watch the video again and see how it worked that time.