Zombie Zeppelin Defense - My Saturday afternoon distraction

This started as a reply to someone's post on the forums about having a space ship with multiple thruster points and how to do it. I thought it was an interesting problem to solve, and had not done anything with multiple thrusters in Unity before so thought I'd give it a try. Initially it was just going to be a "solve the problem and post the code" kind of task, but I started getting in to it and it morphed in to a little Zeppelin flying around with multiple thrusters, zombies on the ground, search lights hunting the zombies, and poorly developed snipers with laser sighting on their rifles (still working on that part).

The prototype is "not real fun right now." Originally I wanted the game to be about herding the zombies towards a farm yard where they would be attacked and devoured by crazed farmyard animals, specifically chickens, because that's what I had available in the prototype pack. A sort of cross between "herding sheep" and "tower defense" where you could arrange your chickens in the farmyard to exact maximum damage to the incoming zombies. Instead the game became a "let's shoot the zombies from the air" but I haven't yet got it clear in my head how to make that "fun."

I very much doubt this will ever be more than a prototype because I just don't see myself making this kind of game, though the ponderous movement of the zeppelin somehow suggests an iPad game. Also, if anybody wants the source code and project direct just PM me (don't forget to say "please") and I will send it over, though I first have to strip out the Unisky and Frogames Prototype assets first.


http://www.otakunozoku.com/ZombieZeppelinDefense/WebPlayer.html
And now I am off to reply to two disgruntled artists who I have been ignoring for three days.

 

It is an interesting idea, but I had alot of trouble controlling the thing D:

 

I know, and that annoys me too. I haven't quite gotten the whole thruster thing working well enough yet. Keys move it around, and because it is a zeppelin, it is not going to move quickly. It is a slow and ponderous vehicle. More visual feedback would certainly help, I think.

A radar or arrow to tell you where the next group of zombies are.

A wider hit box for the search lights to detect zombies in.

Things I do like: the interplay of the search lights as they project the shadows of the trees on the ground. But I hate how the trees instantly light up, i.e. they pop.

I believe these are all issues that could be solved, I may tinker with this a little more over the next day or two as there is the monthly game developer show case meeting on Wednesday in my area so I should probably have something to put on the laptop for that get together.

 

It seems interesting (at least somewhat unique) but was not actually fun I would just drop the idea.

 

I probably will, but not because you said so.

 

I like this ideal if you're not going to develop it trade it to me for reading your 5 page post on concise communication

I like it because as a kid, a friend I went out egging and did have helicopters and police cars with search lights sent after us (we're from a very small town near a national forest with a marijuana problem and no doughnut shops).

They didn't catch us, but we had to low crawl and sprint from tree to tree. They should have brought out their German Shepherds.

So imagine the fun of us evading those cops and unattackable unless a spotlight from one of the helicopters or police cars are on us. No zombies, blood or guts needed to entertain just a good chase and evasion game. The 'excitement' level raises itself when you are avoiding capture rather than mindlessly shooting zombies.

Being stupid teenagers we stole the eggs we used, went trick-or-treating amd told we were to old, broke our bottle of pure grain jumping a fence, left my empty jacket in the hands of the cop reaching for his handcuffs, raided the refigerator of a church during our 'escape', and lost contact for 3 or 4 hours before we found each other again.

You can add other halloween theme activities for marketing purposes and release it next year.

Easily extendable to MMO but why not avoid that for the time being and make it a 1 or 2 player (as a coop team, via bluetooth or whatever it is you use on ios to do that) versus the computer type game.

It's be really cool to import low poly topo vector maps and 'facegen pictures' from the endplayer's 'home town' and compile cache on first config but I suppose that kind of thing is still a few iterations of support off.

 

I would need to strip out the Frogames Prototype Pack and Unisky addons before I could distribute it in source form. The actual code is less than 300 lines of code, with the longest piece, at 40 lines, being the state machine that makes the spot lights dance around and lock on a target. It's like maybe three hours of work total to re-create this prototype in Unity.

I am tinkering with the project right now oddly enough (Saturday afternoon distraction) and trying to figure out how to a) turn it in to "Steampunk Elite" with airships over Victorian England instead of spaceships, and b) How to render two cameras so you control both air ship and sniper rifle to pick off ground targets with head shots.

Original code to control the thrusters was written to answer a different forum post that the OP never followed up on: OP: "Hey, do I do this?" Me: "This is how you do this." OP: *silence* Me: "So how'd you get on?" OP: *silence* Never to be heard from again. /heavy sigh/ Such is the way with forum hit run help requests. It might explain my recalcitrance to actually go to the trouble of stripping out the addons to distribute this package.

Needs a radar to inform you where the next group of zombies are lurking.

 

Thanks for that. Just kidding about the code though, I'd replace the Zepplin with a Helicopter and the 'modelling the physics' of that would be the only difficult part. Well, I lie, the difficult part would be creating sufficiently fun chase and evasion actions while balancing the two and making it exciting for the players. Working laughs into game play would be easy, provided your player has been up to harmless mischeif as a kid.

I may start on ideal from the 'zombie's' point of view in June but I have other ideals I want to try first and I'm not so prodigious a coder typing with 1 finger even when I was full time RT systems programmer. My style is code to learn, adapt to earn.

Reading 5 page posts on concise communication doesn't help, though I did look at your code.

 

Sorry for Threadnomancing but, this idear i think is realy cool if it still exists i think it has great potential airships always have interested me. if you want a free airship you can have this (sorry i cant offer you exclusive right):