PC Developer Discussions: Alpha 17
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chaosterone
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Why not make the glow diminish as it is damaged, and increases as it heals? No hit bar required.
Save the paperclip for in my corsette.
(Edit: my corvette is already rusty, and spell check sucks)
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Xtrakicking
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Yeah, and it would flicker throughout the entire night as it changes from one zombie to another.
The glow is supposed to be radiation. Why would radiation vanish as they get damaged?
How about a bleeding effect such as the one used in Half-Life 2's Antlion Guard?
It's hard to see, but those who played HL2 know what I'm talking about.
toores
New member
Maybe ditch the regen altogether and make tough zombies always run and have more hp. I’m not a big fan of hp bar but without it is really impossible to understan how fast the regen works and if it’s possible to even kill te zombie with your gear. You could set up the best trap, activate the best buffs but the regen could still be better the your weapon damage.
Endless bullet sponge, oh joy.
Regen isn’t intuitive...
Endless bullet sponge, oh joy.
Regen isn’t intuitive...
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bayaholic
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Now this might be a better idea. A bullet sponge. At the very least, you would know it is a sponge, or tank, however you see it. I am not a huge fan of the regen health but you know what you are up against. Make the boss have some crazy armor and you would also know that you need help. Or have his health in stages, i.e., he will lose he arm armor once he is getting hurt, then he will lose his chest armor, then he loses his head armor, etc. Or loses limbs.
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The Gronk
Colon Pounder
The problem, as far as I can see it, is the current focus on Z's with increasing magic powers. This isn't a bad idea to a certain extent but there should be a reasonable limit instead of just piling HP and perks on the rotting shoulders of a single Z.
The true end-game threat should be the human element, smarter and better armed bandits.
The Z's should be a mass of mindless individuals which are easy to kill in small numbers but get dangerous in large hordes. It's not often I criticize TFP directly but in this case I think there are enough resource savings to be had in Z spawning and AI calculations to significantly increase the number of Z's available at a single time.
The true end-game threat should be the human element, smarter and better armed bandits.
The Z's should be a mass of mindless individuals which are easy to kill in small numbers but get dangerous in large hordes. It's not often I criticize TFP directly but in this case I think there are enough resource savings to be had in Z spawning and AI calculations to significantly increase the number of Z's available at a single time.
The-Walking-Dad
New member
I've come to believe that you know what you're talking about, and are man enough to admit when you don't. So what you said has given me some hope that it can be done. And if anyone can, TFP can.
As for health bar; losing limbs as they suffer damage seems like a decent visual indicator to me.
Roland
Community Moderator
The thing is that this game is part tower defense and tower defense works best when there are a variety of enemies with abilities that force you to diversify your defenses. So regen is good because you need explosives to really be effective with them or pairing blades and electrocution or turrets and spikes to compound the amount of damage being done.
Additional zombie abilities are good if they are done with player countermeasures in mind AND current player metas that are trivializing the threats. These threats that make players have to rethink defense strategies don’t have to be introduced from the beginning but can emerge later in the game.
For example, perches and underground have been discovered to be defenses that trivialize threat of the game but the concern has been “What about new players?” Well then diggers and player placed block busters can be introduced at higher gamestages so that new players can have their easily defensible bases at first but if they can’t adapt eventually their 100% safe havens will become threatened.
Zombies that the Duke has encased in steel could shred blade traps if they get caught in them but not until later in the game once players have been able to use them successfully.
And then bandits will be another story.
Additional zombie abilities are good if they are done with player countermeasures in mind AND current player metas that are trivializing the threats. These threats that make players have to rethink defense strategies don’t have to be introduced from the beginning but can emerge later in the game.
For example, perches and underground have been discovered to be defenses that trivialize threat of the game but the concern has been “What about new players?” Well then diggers and player placed block busters can be introduced at higher gamestages so that new players can have their easily defensible bases at first but if they can’t adapt eventually their 100% safe havens will become threatened.
Zombies that the Duke has encased in steel could shred blade traps if they get caught in them but not until later in the game once players have been able to use them successfully.
And then bandits will be another story.
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The Gronk
Colon Pounder
Digging Z's were tried and discarded. Gore blocks that allowed Z's to climb walls were tried, failed, and discarded. The only option left is to try and brute-force the defences with a greater enemy strength either through HP or shear weight of numbers.
I hope both digging Z's and gore-blocks both make a return, they could be best solution to the problem but they'll need a lot of work to get them functioning properly.
I agree with pretty much everything The Gronk has been saying recently.
I'm also not in favor of additional UI elements like enemy HP bars, nor in favor of regenerating zombies. Talk about video-gamey! That a rotting corpse would be healing, and quickly, is mind-boggling. The mutant-like wight maybe since it appears to be living but not the run of the mill zombies...
Why not have the crawlers' attack aim down just a little, so if its target is a non-block entity like a door or player it damages the block beneath a little bit? Not quite a digger, but could eventually do some digging damage.
The sheer accessibility of tons of concrete is more of the issue than anything else. Fleshy zombies grinding through meters of the stuff wouldn't be as much of an issue if you had much more trouble making meters of the stuff. A separation of steel tools from steel-as-blocks would help, too, so you could get your stamina-debilitating pickaxe without suddenly also being invulnerable to nearly any horde out there.
The most fun I have in this game and a few others is when I'm cowering up a tree or 3 blocks under the surface, or carefully poking around the first few blocks of a ruin for basic supplies. The gymnastics the game has to go through to make late-stage challenging has, so far, just cheapened the whole experience. Any single entity that takes a whole horde's worth of damage to take down isn't worth the fight to me. Survival includes knowing when to avoid the confrontation entirely.
Xtrakicking
New member
The thing is, what makes zombies scary is in the numbers they come in. When there's hundreds of zombies everywhere and they completely swarm your defenses, the only hope is for those defenses to hold until the threat is eliminated. No special abilities, no complex features or mechanics, just numbers.
Obviously, this game will never be able to achieve something like that because the game can barely keep the framerate up to a decent level when there's more than 20 zombies on screen. We've truly come to a point where there's not many options to try, unless we make the terrain static.
Ravnespromise96
New member
hi (new user ) been scouring the thread single MM's last post this was the comment i wanna open on first. Basically could we not have static terrain so any block randomly generated is static with a hit box, any damage that applies to the hitbox will toggle the static coding off for each block for say maybe 10 mins ?
this could also prove benefit to the optimisation of the game for older/legacy GPUS to handle such a big generation simply because every block in the world thats generate is a static hit box until hit, then its a full block for 10 mins but for every single block in the world
bloodmoth13
New member
It would probably take alot more work on the art side, but would it be possible to have model damage stages, like at 66% hp they get covered in blood/mud or whatever and have a few chunks missing, then at 30% they get big gouges out of their body, would remove some of the need for health bars, look cool as heck, help with immersion and convey useful information.
This damage could just be exclusive to the torso, since thats the most visible part of the zombie, which could save some time for the animators, and limbs have a tendency to drop off.
You could destroy the clothes in the process and just have a generic male and female damage models also to save time.
Also, perhaps have different sound effects for bosses, if the boss has really high HP, give him a cocky sounding grunt or something, SFX can be great also to convey info, and probably alot cheaper than animation, saving the more grunty grunts for the big bads would not only convey useful information, but would make players ♥♥♥♥ themselves when they hear it
I mind the health bars alot less than others, but i do understand why they are bothered, thought i might suggest another solution.
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