Comments on: Zafehouse 1.5: DIY Under Extreme Conditions

By: The Shed

The Shed — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:03:41 +0000

Sounds extremely like Urban Dead, if a bit more focused. Will try shortly.

By: Carra

Carra — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:16:11 +0000

Loved it :)

Bit too easy though, tried again after a first try of 20 rounds. Beaten without loosing a single survivor and 6125 score.

By: Weylund

Weylund — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:19:20 +0000

@James and Ian: I might release it somewhere. The changes do make things more interesting — what used to be “oh shit” moments now become “holy crap, this guy might make it!” moments. And resource management is really intensified — I had a five-day run where all I was doing was searching for water to try and keep alive my ever-growing tribe (people survive quite a bit longer in my version, but this is not inherently a good thing, especially over 240 hours — I’m considering chopping that back a bit, or removing “church” survivors altogether, since the game mechanics just can’t handle the massive numbers of survivors + long periods of time).

Overall my version is a little less “gamey”, but the 240-hour timeline really makes things plod, and the much stricter and easier to understand outcomes of the original game are pretty much thrown out the window. The guy who designed it knew what he was doing, definitely.

I am considering greatly increasing the number of zombies that are attracted by people outside at night… zombies’ll attack buildings, but unprotected fresh meat should send droves of them into a frenzy.

By: Ginger Yellow

Ginger Yellow — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:27:15 +0000

My first successful run saw me get a pretty low score – 14 survivors, 2988 points. I think I was trying to man too many buildings – I kept running out of supplies. Now that I realise that survivors outside aren’t going to be overwhelmed (if there are lots of them), I won’t be so fetishistic about keeping all the buildings with full barricades, which killed me at the end. I reckon focusing on a few buildings during the night might work better.

By: Ian

Ian — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:36:24 +0000

YAS! I beat it for the first time. Sadly, it looks like most of my tactics which got me through won’t be possible with the changes. :p

If we re-download the game will those changes be in the new version, then?

By: James

James — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 06:41:46 +0000

Brilliant little game. Vanilla sucked me in for far longer than I expected, though I’ve yet to actually win a round. Personal best was being overrun with nine hours left on the clock. That was painful.

Also, those changes seem like they could be interesting, Weylund. Any chance of releasing it publicly for us coding-illiterate folks? It seems like they might throw the (Relative) simplicity of the vanilla version around a bit, but I’ll try anything once.

By: Weylund

Weylund — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:07:34 +0000

Oh, and I forgot to add: “…and it’s way cool. Hope you’re all having fun with the source code.”

By: Weylund

Weylund — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:28:48 +0000

I’ve made some changes to the source, mostly fiddling with combat and gameplay, plus some annoyance-reduction.

Changes I’ve made:
- increased time limit to 240 hours

- randomized weapon damage (using original as a base of course)

- allowed multiple zombies to be killed at once

- randomized ammo usage

- allowed melee users to defend barricaded buildings at reduced ability

- randomized building bonuses

- increased building capacities

- increased initial resources

- given building bonuses for inhabited buildings only

- implemented “courage” — more courageous survivors will do bonus damage; killing zombies and surviving fights will increase courage, losing friends or getting hurt will decrease it, survivors with courage <= 0 will refuse to fight

- survivor perks are automatically given based on courage / weapon at time of promotion

- allow reinforcement for inhabited buildings only

Being worked on:
- increase sizes of zombie attacks at all times
- reduce chance of zombie-less evening hours

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:47:09 +0000

I have a horrendous hack of the source code that lets you specify your own player names. Good if you’ve ever wondered how the British Olympic Team would fare if they were faced with a village of zombies.

http://sekritforum.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=1167

By: Weylund

Weylund — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:01:45 +0000

@David: Most skilled programmers can code a game in a week (or much less). The games just might not be this good, or this much fun.

It also got served out through Kotaku… I can’t imagine how an indie dev could possibly get a better jump-start.

Congrats, Logan, wherever you are. Fantastic game. I played it about six times last night. Hope you like the new job!

By: Sum0

Sum0 — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:25:49 +0000

What would be awesome in 2.0 would be a psychological simulation: your survivors would all have different levels of morale and different psychologies, so seeing your best friend reanimate as a zombie would send them batshit insane (others might refuse to shoot them, or maybe curl up in a ball and give up) and if you left them out on the street with no weapons, the angrier types might burst into your buildings and try to redress the balance by force.

By: Quirk

Quirk — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:09:08 +0000

On my first successful run through, I realised at the end of the second day that I had too many people. Way too many people. All the older hands holed up in the buildings, but the rest of the survivors were forced out into the streets to face zombie peril.

The zombies didn’t swarm my street survivors every hour in vast numbers. They attacked them at roughly the same rate as those in the fortified positions, and there were enough of them that the zombies repeatedly got a kicking. I was edgy about sparing medicine and ammo to those outside, but I did – and got through the night.

Come sunrise, every building was well-defended, and I had a raiding party of about eight street survivors. They went out to find water. They weren’t very good at it, and they were taking a regular beating off the zombies, but they were just good enough. Once the water situation was somewhat resolved, I turned my attention to ammo and fortifications, rebuilding the zombie depredations. It was with something of a shock that I realised I only had a couple of hours left to go. The final zombie rush was a slow-motion, shambling Charge of the Light Brigade into prepared positions and overwhelming numbers of well-armed enemies.

(29 survivors, 7 lost, 996 zombies dead. 1168 survivor hours, score 5222).