Viral Resistance

[yufra]

It kinda died back then, in the previous year... Did you manage to work on it more, or did you abandon it?

Hey Deon, good to hear from you! The project hasn't moved forward too much since I lost momentum and decided to improve my Lua coding and understanding of T-Engine by improving bits of ToME. I am still interested in finishing VR, and would definitely appreciate any graphics you want to contribute to the cause. I am going to be shifting from the survival horror theme to more of a survival arcade one, closer to Fallout and further from Walking Dead inspiration. I would really like to do a horror game someday, but I don't know quite how to capture that in a RL.

So what needs to be done for a complete beta:

1. Create an outdoor base map, probably static at first.
2. Create a research lab zone. This is where the player will be hunting for the original virus sample for anti-viral analysis. Any suggestions for new zombie types, friendly NPCs, interactions, etc are welcome.
3. Finalize the chapter once the player returns to the hospital with the original sample. I have ideas for I want it to end, and this should be pretty quick.

At that point I will release a beta version, and start emphasizing:

• Expanded talents/classes. This is quite limited right now.
• Balance of damage/HP... might be too "realistic" right now.
• Bugs
• Randomness (play with randomly generating outdoor maps, and possibly even indoor maps in a modern setting).

Anyone wanting to contribute ideas/work, feel free to either post here or find me on the #tome IRC channel. Cheers!

[Sirrocco]

I might suggest building it as a survival arcade game and then maybe working your way to survival horror.

One of the defining factors of survival horror is the constant limited resources. Every important resource should be limited. If you can rest and recover things like HP, then time needs to be a limited resource. There shouldn't be anywhere that you can safely sit and grind without burning through some resource (time, if nothing else) that sitting and grinding won't give you back. A big point of survival horror is constantly having to move forward - often before you're really ready to - because if you sit still you'll just die.

good limited resources include:
- Time: as time goes by, the world becomes more dangerous, without necessarily increasing payoffs. After too much time passes, the game becomes unwinnable and/or you lose.
- Daylight: Connected to the above - you have a limited amount of time during the day. As day turns to evening, the enemies get worse, and once full night falls, you pretty much need to be battening down the hatches and trying to ride it out or you die. Inflicting fatigue if you don't sleep enough at night (and then making it not entirely trivial to ensure your own safety while sleeping) ads to this.
- Ammunition: Make firearms a viable primary path - but have a strictly limited amount of ammunition in the game. If there are 500 rounds of rifle ammo in the game, then once you've fired them, your rifles are just fancy clubs - and at least 100 of those rounds are in out-of-the-way places or in caches that you have to seriously work to fight your way to.
- Durability: If wearing armor and wielding weapons is a viable path, then have melee combat slowly chip away the durability of the armor and weapons that you use, and have that armor and those weapons also be a strictly limited resource.
- Money: If you want people to be able to buy things, have the money that they use be actually precious
- Health: Get rid of easy rest-healing, and have the only real ways of recovering health be precious and rare consumables. Include a fair number of consumables that aren't true healing, but that are close enough that they'll be valued (like staunching bleeding, or reducing poison/disease) and then make *those* limited too.
- Carrying capacity: limit the amount someone can carry, and then set it up so that they can't depend on having anything they aren't carrying on their person.
- Sanity: The great Lovecraftian standby - have any sort of magic or superpowers cut into an initially large but essentially unrefillable pool of sanity. Having certain monsters that take off a bit of san every time they fight you is also good here - if you take to long, and run into that kind of monster one too many time before finishing the game, it won't matter what else you have going on.

As a delightful little add-on, you can also go the other way - offer a way to break some of the above rules that requires the character to start becoming more and more of a horror themselves - and then have the relative innocents that they're trying to save react accordingly. You go far enough and you'll still be able to finish the game - but you'll do so over the bloody corpses of all of the relative innocents that you set out initially to save. In between and you can still save them - but don't expect any thanks for it.

[Sir Jaded]

I am Intrigued.
Firstly I would like to say this Module sounds awesome.
Secondly I would like to play it - very much.

So... How do I untar and compile this elegant piece of code? If I could get some idiot-proof instructions (& not just idiot resistant--) I would be pre-zombie grateful.

The descriptions in discussion make this really appealing.

[yufra]

I am Intrigued.
Firstly I would like to say this Module sounds awesome.
Secondly I would like to play it - very much.

So... How do I untar and compile this elegant piece of code? If I could get some idiot-proof instructions (& not just idiot resistant--) I would be pre-zombie grateful.

The descriptions in discussion make this really appealing.

Thanks for the compliments and interest! I have been busy reworking some of the tactical AI for ToME, so sorry for taking so much time to get back to you. The best thing about the T-Engine modules is there is no compiling necessary. I have uploaded a new zip file to the Downloads page here: http://code.google.com/p/viralresistanc ... z&can=2&q=

Grab that, unzip it and put the viralresistance directory in one of two places:

1. Your t-engine/game/modules directory, right alongside tome
2. Your settings directory (varies by OS) modules/. The settings directory is where you can find your tome/save, etc.

Feel free to post, PM or IRC feedback to me. Cheers!

[Sir Jaded]

Muchos Gracias, Yufra!
I will be carving some time shortly to run your digital gauntlet.
Feedback will be coming (I am a 27 year veteran of Roguelikes, so you'll get a considered and appropriate opinion-)
Thankyou for listening, and thankyou for coding.

You get the Ronald Reagan salute.
If you can find the Quote from him regarding this, kudos! If you're really curious I'll tell you.

[Deon]

Glad to see you didn't lose it!

Do you know "Rogue survivor" game? It's a great indie game. I would like something like this, but with more AI/interaction with players. If you manage to pull something like that, you're a god


So yeah, I would be interesting in anything survival-oriented. The arcade part is okay, just don't make it too easy . And work on details, sometimes details are the most important thing.

Maybe this will inspire you (this guy makes awesome Let's plays, if you are into that kind of things, watch it ):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avzIr1hZ ... ture=feedu

Here's my fan art for that character:
http://i56.tinypic.com/25tdm45.png

[Sir Jaded]

Yufra, the Module quite simply rocks, more specifically the Hospital.
As a veteran RL player (lets see...28 years now? Yeah, I cut my teeth on Hack and the Amulet of Yendor-) I can see where you're going with it.
Though it sounds like you want to change tack from the direction you went with the Project, it still looks quite sound. Open the throttle, see where it goes...

The bullets ran out fast (don't they always?), and having worked in a couple of Hospitals in my time, went furiously searching for an IV drip stand as a club/spear and a bedpan helmet to protect my brains. I tried to push the beds against the doors. I tried leaving false trails of blood from bloodpacks to distract them from my scent. I tried locking doors and trapping nurses to sate the hunting Zombies (that in fact was a bad plan...)
What you have is rather good. I see the 'bones', all it needs is some 'flesh'
Looking forward to the Not-So-Bright Future.

[yufra]

Thanks Sir Jaded, and you gave me several good ideas. I will have to think on how to make the environment more manipulative... what if I added pull and push commands to the right-click menu? Then you could right-click on the bed, select pull and move the entire bed towards the door. There is currently no concept of directionality when opening doors, although that could be fixed... exciting ideas! Oh, and the idea to have blood packs for distracting zombies... amazing!

More ideas please! If you want to talk about (spoiler) storyline stuff feel free to PM me since the next step the story is taking needs more interesting things in it.