Project Zomboid - fun little indie Zombie Survival RPG

Project Zomboid | The Zombie Survival RPG

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Originally Posted by Their tl;dr

Project Zomboid is a Zombie Survival RPG. Here are some of its planned features:

• Retro-isometric style with plenty of zombie insides thrown in for good measure.
• A massive city and the surrounding areas to traverse, explore and loot.
• Open-ended sandbox world – survival is your only goal, and we’re sorry to tell you… you WILL die eventually.
• Get infected. How will you spend your final days? Will you have a heroic moment of self-sacrifice, or end up chewing your best friend’s throat out?
• Meet other survivors who you can join forces with, trade with, undertake missions for, or fight with for resources.
• Loot, salvage, and build what you need to survive the apocalypse, from food and medical supplies, to weapons, even just booze to help get you through the nights.
• Advanced item crafting allows you to use looted items to build weapons, traps, defenses, and many other things to help you survive.
• Character progression. Learn skills and perks to help your character face the challenges of survival.
• Starvation, illness, loneliness, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, insanity, trust issues. There’s more to zombie survival than shooting zombie heads off.
• Join your friends and survive the apocalypse together in co-op multiplayer.
• The world changes the longer you survive; power plants fail, plunging the city into darkness and making batteries and tinned food prized commodities. The army rolls into the streets to perform ‘clean up operations’ and other gamechanging events occur the longer you survive.
• Play in your browser, or stand-alone, on PC, Mac and Linux.
• It will be released Minecraft style, where there will be continual updates adding new features, weapons, game-play and locations.
• It is available here and there will be a tech demo coming soon.
• The tech demo will just show a fraction of the planned features and is merely a taste of what is to come. We will continue developing after this point, feasibly for years and years, improving and expanding the game.

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Anyway, I've been playing the demo (found here) which right now is the full game as yet anyway, and I gotta say it is a lot of fun. Download it and give it a whirl - you'll enjoy it!

I really like the emphasis that has been put on survival rather than the usual suburban fantasy of "KILL LOTS OF ZOMBYS!!!!" as just meeting your day-to-day needs is a challenge. Which, in all fairness, it probably would be in a zombie apocalypse.

Oh, and if you're planning on making the worthless "HURRRR ZOMBIE GAMES ARE OVER-DONE THERE'S LIKE 4 ZOMBIE GAMES OUT THERE NOW" post that somebody usually makes when there's a zombie game thread, well, don't bother 'cause no-one cares. Go tell your mom instead. And hug her too - I'm sure she'd appreciate it. :)

Is "hug" what the censor changes that word into? Wow.

I do enjoy zombie games, not because you get to kill zombies (but what a plus), but because there are elements of survival in them. The zombie part of Call of Duty is awesome because it is not about killing all the zombie waves that come at you, but seeing how far you go because you are going to die eventually. Left 4 Dead really makes the urban exploration and sneaking about pretty cool, though that is all you do eventually. And Dead Rising is great because you have a home base, you have to bring in more survivors, and (pretty minor) deal with a few trust issues and resolving drama in the safehouse. The chance to kind of smash together all these elements and turn the main focus on survival is something for which I have yearned.

I have watched this since its early teasers and am happy the demo is out now. Time to see how hugging excellent it shall be.

It really hugging is.

I decided to load up on whiskey, painkillers, sleeping tablets, beta blockers and rotten meat and observe the outcome. The game described me as "Utterly trout-Faced" and after passing out for 12 hours, I stumbled into a horde of zombies with a hammer and it went about as well as you might expect.

But what if I want to smurf your mother?

Get your sister to dress like her?

I'd rather get Quin's sister to dress like her.

I'm manly enough to admit - the music freaked me out so much I exited the game before the 1st zombie popped up. I've been watching videos, though, and it looks really good. Definitely one of those games to have my friends come over to my house and play so I can watch them get pissed because they don't get the concept of life over glory.

So I accidentally smothered the woman. I then wandered around, got a hammer, ate some soup, and beat up a pair of zombies to get batteries and an axe. Then night fell, my left hand was injured, and the park was swarming with zombies going on dates. Group dates. Like, twenty zombies hooking up. Times a million. I survived all of a day and eight hours.

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Originally Posted by Genius Lynx

So I accidentally smothered the woman.

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Yes. I, uh, accidentally smothered her too... :shifty:

Truly a glorious game. I urge you all to play it.

Mad bastards on the official forums are already modding this thing (Dev comments suggest they're big supporters of modding, which is top.) Someone made a hospital. I was extraordinarily pleased because the graphical style means it looked like Theme Hospital.

Sorry to toot my own horn by referencing my own thread, but I had posted earlier about a zombie game I really wanted to play.

http://forums.eyesonff.com/general-g...o-zombies.html

It seems a lot like these developers read at least parts of my ideas and either put them in, or wants to put them in. Overall, this game is really great so far, and it's only in it's very beginning stages. I have very high hopes for it, and hope to see more of my ideas and desires pop up in it.

Also, I started a competition with my friend on this game. We developed a sort of points system to playing, and whoever racked up the most points would be the best at the game. Basically, we made it so we got 5 points for every hour survived, 20 additional points for a whole day, 50 points for each building raided (max of 21 total, not including the starting house), and 100 points for managing to survive a serious zombie attack long enough to actually become a zombie. I made 760 points on my first playthrough, and he managed to accrue 2,710. Using this scoring system, what are you guys' records so far? I do have to say, though, I'm sort of ashamed of mine. But it's not my fault. A horde randomly knocked on my door a little too hard on day 3, and right when it turned day 4 I died. I did manage to go zombie, though.

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Originally Posted by I'm my own MILF

Mad bastards on the official forums are already modding this thing (Dev comments suggest they're big supporters of modding, which is top.) Someone made a hospital. I was extraordinarily pleased because the graphical style means it looked like Theme Hospital.

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Ha! I love it. Bloaty god damn heads, son.

I just downloaded this bad boy: http://theindiestone.com/community/v...hp?f=27&t=2882 gonna give it a whirl and see how it goes.

e: http://theindiestone.com/community/v...hp?f=27&t=2882 this looks even better actually.

Also here is a tale that my dear LJ pals already read. For those who have not, this is my adventure. It is why you should play this game!

(SPOILER)The game begins with the text "This is the story of how you died." Well, listen to my story. It may be the last ch... oh smurf it.

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e3...ngness/pz3.jpg

Here's you. In the demo you are Bob Smith, and you have a wife with a broken leg, Kate. It's implied they were attacked by human looters as opposed to zombies. Anywho, you're holed up in a house. There's a brief tutorial where you tend to Kate's wounds, board up the windows and doors, and scavange at a nearby house. This is all easy enough. The next challenge the two face has not been so easy for me.

See, an unfriendly gentleman will barge into your fortress. This might not prove so problematic if he wasn't armed with a shotgun, but he is. Ordering to drop your hammer and to go upstairs, he takes one look at Kate, decides she's infected and blasts her. Any attempt at heroics...well... even if you do pick your hammer back up, there is only one outcome.

Not this time, mothersmurfer.

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e3...ngness/pz4.jpg

Here is the ground floor of the house. You can see the kitchen and back door to the left, and the lounge and front door in the centre. There's some other room off to the right but whatever. Kate is upstairs.

In PZ you can craft items. Hammer + Boards + Nails = barricade. And I decided to build a barricade right where Bob is standing now, and hide upstairs for the unsociable caller to arrive. I think his name is randomly generated; this time his name is Ben Wallis. Ben spies me through the bathroom window and begins his usual spiel. However, when he walks into the house, he cannot get past the barricade! Success! Of course, he could've just gone round the back, which is something I had not initially considered, but neither had he so it's all fine and dandy.

Anyway, I can now come and go as I please through the back door, while Ben is in the lounge. A slight problem occurs; I can see his shotgun through the wall and it is trained on me, following me wherever I go. I have to walk past the front door, which is wide open, and he has a clear shot on me. I quickly sneak round to the side, pull the door to, and immediately hammer some boards over it. The asshole is sealed! Hurrah!

This is not enough for me. I want revenge. I decide to scavenge in the city for some form of weapon. I was hoping for a molotov, which I could chuck in through a window and watch as he burns, but I figured I'd settle for a shotgun.

The stories I could tell about this point would be interesting of themselves. As I went from building to building, avoiding zombies (ha, this is their first real mention!) I managed to secure a shotgun but no ammunition. I took a light wound to my shoulder, and I made a makeshift bandage using torn sheets. Unfortunately this plagued me throughout, as I kept having to down more and more painkillers raided from bathroom cabinets to stave off the pain. I think I was addicted.


I also had to eat rotten meat, which made me quite ill. The night I found my 12 shotgun shells, my guy was cowered in an apartment building as the door was banged on 'til the early hours. He was titting himself. I had to down a lot of whiskey to keep him calm, as every bang seemed to unsettle him. Regardless, I was alive, it was dawn, and it was time to head home to finish off an asshole.

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e3...ngness/pz1.jpg

This picture is to break up text :D Anyway, the zombies in this game seem to swarm around the map in a little horde (there are a lot of stragglers of course) which I guess is quite realistic for zombies. My heart fell when I was on the street where our home was and was greeted by a titload of zombies. No. No. NO. Not now! Why now?!

I sprinted through the crowd, and cleared the zombies from the front yard with my shotgun, not wanting to be attacked from behind. The horde had seen me and would be moving in soon, so I had to be quick. I pried the boards from the door and burst in. "Son of a bitch!" yelled Ben, and we both fired at each other. He missed; I did not. My second shot did not miss either, and Ben was dead. smurf yoooooouuuuuu! I raided his corpse for his 35 (!) shotgun shells and baseball bat, which I modified with some nails.

However, I could not deconstruct my barricade with my hammer as I had assumed and head back upstairs to Kate. No matter, I'll just head out the front d... oh. NOW the screenshot above is relevant. You can see Bob desperately fighting his way to the backdoor. You can't see the zombies behind him because he's not facing that way, but I assure you it is smurfing packed behind him. The back yard was apparently full of zombies as well, which was always lovely.

I desperately slammed the backdoor behind me, knowing full well I had no boards to secure it. I took stock of the situation. Bob had been bitten. I don't know if it was an infectious bite, but being bitten is not ever a good thing. I went upstairs to Kate, and, exhausted, collapsed in bed with her.

I woke up in the middle of the night to some loud banging. I knew what I had to do. I downed an entire bottle of whiskey, and smothered Kate with a pillow. She was so sorry for slowing me down, she said, as she died. Better dead than zed, right?

Time to head downstairs and make a valliant last stand. Valhalla, here I come.

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e3...ngness/pz2.jpg

I had to brighten this screenshot for you. Anyway, I was on the stairs, my gun trained at the back door, where I had assumed they were attacking. I had seen them out there through the bedroom window, and as that was where they had last seen me, that was the logical point of attack. And attack it they did - and I was ready for them. What I did not know was that these were just the back yard zombies. The zombies from the street - the huge horde - had been lured in by free lunch that the corpse of Ben provided. They wandered in through the open front door (you can see in the earlier screenshot that I foolishly left it wide open!) and were now hammering on the barricade I erected to keep Ben out.

Yeah, the back door was a diversion. And my back was to the barricade they were pounding on. Clever girl. They broke through, catching me totally off guard, and grabbed me. I desperately fired off two shots. I don't know how many I took down, but you can see there's zombie corpses and blood everywhere, so I must've nailed a fair few. Not as many as I would've liked, though. And that's the story of how I died.

I read Psy's LJ entry last night / this morning and made a note to check the thread he referenced. I have to say it's certainly intriguing and I'll possibly give it a go sometime this week if I'm bored.

EDIT: I notice it follows the whole "losing is fun" philosophy of Dwarf Fortress, in a way, in that there is no way to survive / win the game. I'd like to see someone make a mod where you can outlive the virus (or zombies, or whatever) but have that require you constantly be on the move between different regions of town or whatever somehow. In other words, not have it so you can kind of cheat your way by locking yourself into a room with a somehow never-ending supply of food. But rather have it so that you can, over the course of say three years or so (and that would be some accomplishment), get to a stage where there are almost no more zombies and then you can just finish them off. Either that or have it so that there is a maximum of 7 billion zombies, so technically the game can end if you kill that number of zombies because you have effectively killed every other human (turned zombie) on the planet. :D

Basically, an impossible goal, but a technically achievable goal all the same, rather than the goal of simply surviving. I'd only like it as a mod, though, as I quite like the losing-is-fun philosophy overall.

EDIT2: Psy, both of your recent links are exactly the same.

I think they've been reading all kinds of things about "How I would do zombies". They have specifically said things like "We've all thought of a game like this".

Also I love how the guys write. It's like Paul is really making a game!

Can you share save files of this game? 'Cause if you can I'm pretty sure we should be able to get a full EoFF game out before Steve manages to finish his turn on Dwarf Fortress (Not his fault guise, it's not that he sucks at it he just "prefers pwaying with his fwiends").

There are no save files (yet).

But there is planned multiplayer, so we are clearly going to have to go on a drunken, painkiller-addicted, molly-hurling zombie trolling extravaganza :cool:

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Originally Posted by I'm my own MILF

all kinds of things

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I'm suddenly feeling a wave of nostalgia for when people still used to comment on LJ. Also I was first comment, aw jeah

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Originally Posted by I'm my own MILF

There are no save files (yet).

But there is planned multiplayer, so we are clearly going to have to go on a drunken, painkiller-addicted, molly-hurling zombie trolling extravaganza :cool:

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I'm in. I'm going to acquire this game at some point soon, inbetween writing and getting trolled alongside you in Civ

I will form The Independent Kingdom of Carmine part II. Come near me and you're getting mortared. :colbert:

I will ressurect the Genetics Lab good times party and get absolutely blitzed and hurl abuse at all of you via radio. Come near me and you're getting knocked down and forcefed whiskey. :colbert:

I will attempt to organize a tactical and strategic playbook to keep us alive, which will be resolutely ignored by all and sundry. Come near me and you'll be given polite advice.

I'll provide the refreshments. Come near me and you'll be fed peanut butter cookies :3

I'm having problems trying to run the game :/
Also, runnin Windows 7, if that helps anything

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Originally Posted by DK

Come near me and you're getting knocked down and forcefed whiskey. :colbert:

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Woohoo, remember what happened last time? ;D

No. No! NO!

I will not remember. :(

To be fair, I don't remember, I only know it happened because of the video. =x

Just you wait until New Years son, I will pay you back tenfold. :colbert:

Moving very swiftly away from a kiwi crotch diver extraordinaire, I'm going to get back on topic. :erm:

I decided to do precisely what I said this game wasn't about in the OP - KILL THE ZOMBYS!!! That makes it sound like this was my goal from the start, and it really wasn't. I was having a jolly old lark, exploring that new map I posted about.

When you just have a hammer, you feel very naked and exposed. Flitting from building to building, rummaging for supplies, desperately hoping for a shotgun. Shotgun shells? By all means! But no smurfing shotgun for you, no sirree!

The thing about this game is that you constantly feel that you are being hunted. There is no escape, and the zombies will be one step behind you. Or possibly one step ahead of you. Walking out into the street and seeing them all around you is bad enough, but nothing is quite so bad as sweeping a new potential safe house and that smurfing noise plays when you open a door. It's genuinely scary. The worst part is when your character begins to hallucinate and merely imagines zombie attacks. After a while you don't know what's real and what's not. You find out the hard way when you're on the receiving end of a bite.

After stumbling across a replica of the mansion from Resident Evil (and boy did that make me double-take!) I found a grocery store. Inside was a survivor. This excited me; you do not often encounter survivors. His name was Gareth, in case you care. Gareth was not entirely pleased I had come into the Grocery store, and demonstrated his displeasure by shooting at me until I left. This is partially why I was on yet another quest to find a shotgun, by the way. People shooting at me just rubs me up the wrong way. Having obtained one, dear Gareth was swiftly dispatched and the grocery store and all of its foody goodness was mine! I took a hoard up to the tower block, planning to barricade myself in and survive for a week.

AND THEN.

I woke up the next day to find that I had not escaped from my scrapes with imaginary zombies unscathed. I had been infected and was slowly becoming a zombie. Lovely. I have approximately 80 shotgun bullets... BETTER DEAD THAN ZED!

So off I charge, down the stairs, right as the zombies had broken through and were charging up the stairs. A brief battle ensued, and I emerged from the tower block victorious.

Then I met this.

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e3...gness/zom1.jpg

Well bollocks. 50 bullets left. Let's do this.

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e3...gness/zom2.jpg

50 bullets later. Hmm. There are still zombies. And there is still me. Time to switch to the spiked bat!

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e3...gness/zom3.jpg

Now there are no zombies. And there is still me. Or rather, what's left of me. I am starving, I am infected, I am in pain, I am wounded, I am bleeding, I am physically exhausted, and I am so very tired.

I am dead.

:cry:

This is how I died.

Kate... I had to do it. I just couldn't protect us both in that house. Her wound was getting infected, who knows if the disease really would get into her? I couldn't leave her to die, I couldn't shoot her. I smothered her with a pillow. Gathered what few things I could carry and hoofed it across town.

I don't know how they knew I was in there. The windows were all boarded up. There was no more power to use the lights. I crept around. But after three days safely ensconced in a small duplex house, where I had managed to secure some decent supplies, I heard them. Hammering. Pounding. I went down to check; the door shook with each rotten fist that smacked against it. It would hold, it would hold for a long time, but they would get in in the end. And there was no other way out.

So I decided to do the only thing I could: I was going to fight. I waited, shotgun in hand, whiskey in belly, for what I was sure would be my end. And I won. I killed them all, there must have been thirty or so of them, and I destroyed them. Quickly, I boarded things up again and retreated upstairs.

Two days passed. Nothing. I didn't know how they had missed me; that shootout made more than a little noise. I guess all the ones nearby had already been attracted and then killed? I don't know. But I was running low on food and it was time to start thinking about what next. This place was... safe-ish, and it housed many supplies I had gathered. It would take two, maybe three runs to relocate everything, so I would either have to take a lot of risks, I would have to keep this as a base, or I would have to BAM! BAM! BAM!

How? How did they find me again? And why did it take so long? If any had seen me go in, or heard me shooting, they should have arrived at most a couple of hours after I retreated. I don't understand it. It doesn't matter; this place is no longer safe, the doors are falling apart and I'm almost out of wood to barricade them with. Okay. Only one solution. Take what I can carry, fight through the horde, run. Find another place to hole up.

Is this going to be the rest of my life?

I opened the door. Shotgun in hand. They poured in, a lot more than just thirty of them this time. Seventy, maybe eighty. The shotgun tore them apart, but it wasn't quite enough. They got closer. And closer. I avoided their bites, but a couple of them scratched me, one on my leg, one on my arm. I finished them off, went out of the house, and ran without looking back.

Found a small apartment. Had a zombie in it, took care of him with a baseball bat. Nice and quiet. Very messy. Looked around; enough food for a couple of days here. Saw to bandaging up my wounds, they weren't major but it was better to try and be safe than sorry. Took some painkillers and a sleeping pill once I had used the last of my wood on barricading things. Slept for about 12 hours.

Sick. Stomach churning, head spinning. Threw up in toilet bowl. Grim. Probably the infection, from a scratch or blood that splattered on me or something. No hastiness though. Don't be hasty. Took some more pills, ate more than I could really spare, found a book to read and enjoyed it by the evening light with a fair amount of booze. Not a bad day in the circumstances.

Sicker. Dwefinition the virus. Hear pounding, but door is holding. Another surviver they found? Just beating doors for no raisin? Don't know. Still reading, good book. Atwood. I like Atwood. Virus there too.

Sleep. Wake. can't see words now too blurry. bread andples not tasty. eat steak. not cook, tastes good, fills belly. Drink. Drink lots and lots. Okay. Get it together. Blaze of gory bob, blaze of glory. Load up. 65 shotgun shells. Bottle of booze. Another steak. Bat with nails.

Open door. quiet, eserted. Stride around town like the duke of new york. hardly any zombies. the smurf? where were they all they were ruining my last stand. SMurf it, going to get drunk. Found a bar, raided it, got completely smashed. pills too! might die of od hahahaha hope you all get poisoned by my corpes you smurfs

i dont rememberthe alst few days that's a lot of corpses and fire though what the hell oh god my head

http://i789.photobucket.com/albums/y.../PZhiscore.jpg

4 itchy tasty

God bless, you crazy son of a bitch.

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Originally Posted by I'm my own MILF

(POST OF THE YEAR, ALL YEARS)

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I am going to go start a thread that is specifically devoted for this sort of thing.

I killed an awful lot of zombies.

http://i789.photobucket.com/albums/y...PZhiscore2.jpg

The trail of corpses proceeds both up into the park and down to the yard in front of the apartment block. I was based in the fourth floor (You can see one of my window barricades) and one of the horde spawn points was right by the bank's back door, which obviously made life smurfing difficult. I eventually grabbed all 200~ of my shotty shells and went completely berserk over the course of three days. (Properly speaking the trail continues in through the tower block's front door and up to the third floor landing)

Many a fun moment had with this game! :D
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Hoard, and outta shotgun shells...

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