This would be our first post, for our new game, on our new profile! Seemed like a good idea to write things down and share what we're doing to all the interwebs!
Overall Idea
To put it simply, we make games that we want to play. I know that's a bit over-said but it's true. And this is no exception. We also enjoy making games that you can play forever, oh and procedural generated content (PGC) too. So we decided to roll all those concepts into a quick game to keep ourselves entertained for hours. And that brought us to a wave-defense FPS game. Think CoD: Nazi Zombies / SAS Zombie Assault. We want to take this simple idea as far as we can. In this it's endless waves of increasingly difficult zombies. The zombies will attempt to break into the house and kill you. Your job is to hold the fort down as long as you can. Instead of your usual bare knuckles zombie battles where there's a handful of guns and the same zombies over and over, we want to crank it up. So we are adding tons of guns, and all guns are modifiable. Of course the good 'ol player leveling and stat systems. Both temporary and permanent elemental features to weapons such as explosive bullets, electric defense vests, acid grenades, etc. Tons of in-game purchasable power ups such as ammo, med kits, stat boosters. And if we can get it working soon enough in Unity, a level editor, mod system, and some procedurally generated content to spice things up some more. I know, big ideas. So, what do we have so far?
On the way to a Tech Demo
This actually happens to be our first time using Unity. We decided to take a break from working on our own in-house C++ engine and give a hand and what is quickly becoming indie devs' favorite engine. And we gotta admit, we had some doubts about a WYSIWYG style game engine with C# scripting (or JavaScript, but that sounded even funnier), but we are impressed. But we are super broke so we are only using Unity Free. SO, on to the features so far implemented...
Guns
We have a working FPS camera system, with a lovely working gun. Currently only one but once we get things working we can start adding more later. The guns are built on a base class so the modularity is there. This way, all the guns will have the same base attributes enabling other systems to modify them if needed (which of course we do). These are things like fire mode, fire rate, bullet damage, reload speed, weight (for slowing the player down), scope style, etc. We do have a simple grenade system in place. Grenades can be tossed and they explode. They too have a base class (think interface) for changing their stats. But we would like to add a bit more realism such as not blowing stuff up on the other side of walls. Oh and there is a VERY rudimentary melee system. There's no graphics to it, it just kind of kills whoever's right in front of you.
Guts
Zombies are sort of working as well. We did have a working system in which zombies would spawn and chase the player around the test scene. They can die, they can pull windows a part, they can climb through windows, and they can attack the player. Mostly all the things we wanted them to do. Now the scripting is there, but the graphics aren't. We did run into a problem though! Path-finding! AI is a tricky beast as it is, but path-finding is a real tricky one. Now Unity comes with a NavMesh AI system which is really nice and could probably have worked for us, be we wanted a level editor and potentially PGC (randomly generated) levels, and as far as we could tell Unities NavMesh was kind of a one-solid-baked collision map style rig. Now Aaron Granberg has a very nice A* Pathfinding Project for Unity that was promising too! But we found a problem in turning nodes on/off. Since you have to purchase your way through doors to expand the level, some rooms can't be used. And all the pathfinding solutions we have tried will do a very nice job of getting the zombies around, but only if all the doors are open. So we have gone towards making our own. And so far it's not too bad! Learning Unities Editor extension took a little while but with use of the custom gizmos during scripting we managed to get back to Unities WYSIWYG style! (potential tutorial coming on this topic) But alas, we have not finished it yet.
Glory
And last off the glory portions. Well, not really. So enemies do give you points AND cash when killed and depending on how they are killed. Headshot's are worth more of course. Windows COST money to repair, but do reward points as well. Doors are like windows in that they cost cash, and reward money, but are a one time purchase. Now the cash is used for in-game purchases and probably won't go anywhere out of the game (that round if you will). But points will. Points will be the main kind-of XP thing in which it will be used to upgrade stuff. Either way, we haven't gotten that far. In theory, once we get that AI Pathfinding, we should have a workable tech demo ready. Waves work, zombies (sort of) work, guns work, 'nades work, doors and windows work. It's all good in the hood!
