ZDay Team
by Andy Rollins · 06/25/2008 (7:04 am) · 2 comments
It's been a while since my last blog, which to say the least wasn't a happy one and after several months of a few personal things to sort out I've decided it's time to work on another project (a successful one!!), after much hunting about I've joined up with the guys developing ZDay.
One of other developers Chris has posted a .plan on here before so I won't go into too much detail on the design for the game but just to say it's a Zombie Survival FPS, meaning you'll have to fight to stay alive (there's more in the design document I've linked at the bottom).
Since joining the team about a month ago now I've been really impressed with the approach, which is to release the game in four stages starting with a simple FPS and building up on the levels of character persistance, inventories, barricading, etc.
We're a small team of indie developers and although the game is still in it's early stages, we've a group of around 20 testers signed up that test each of the new releases and functionality and now a community of just over a 1000 people (and growing daily) interested and active in the forums. I need to say having this community discussing options, ideas, features, etc means we as small team can get instant input and feedback on any element of the game which is a huge bonus to us as a team.
As a new member of the team I can't tell you how impressed I am to find such a community for an indie game that's not yet been released, it means our development process can look something like:
1. Basic design produced by the designers.
2. Discussion amongst the development team (usually in a meeting).
3. Design pushed out to the community for thoughts, ideas and feedback.
4. Sign off design.
5. Plan which release candidate to include functionality
6. Develop (Artwork and Coding)
7. Hand over to testers.
8. Sign off.
It's a real asset to the project having such a great community around us (not to mention a userbase just waiting to play the game - although it has caused us one little issue so far which I'll touch on later).
Those infected get everywhere!!!
Development Log
The last couple of weeks have seem a huge amount of work including:
- Base weapons system to allow for (snipers, shotguns, rifles, handguns, etc).
- Inventory system that can be attached to any object in the game players, zombies, cupboards, safes, etc.
- LOD's creating for most of the buildings.
- Optimization of some of the coding.
- Design for a bug tracking system built into TGE (I'll post more on that once it's finished).
- Detailed AI design being worked on currently.
This is all being play tested on a server we have running, but having such an eager community has meant we are seeing people trying to connect to the servers at times when we want just the development team to meet in game and discuss something. So we needed a way to control this.... without spending weeks of development.
In steps Python and within a couple of hours I had a simple TCP server in python authenticating login requests against a mysql database and the game client (TGE) connecting to it via TCPObject... what's more the server I can bring up in several modes (1-Open Access, 2- Testers Access, 3- Developers) so it's now easy to control who can and can't login to the server at which times. It really works better than I'd expected.
We do have one problem right now though, which we need to resolve!!!!!
Those damn zombies keep eating our 3D Modellers so although the coding side of things is progressing very well the artwork is lagging a little behind and we're finding it difficult to recruit Modellers that produce much work. I'm not sure whether it's because all the committed Modellers are after working with TGEA based projects now with all it's beauty or perhaps we're just being unlucky.
Either way if there's anyone reading this that would love to get involved with developing the game either to do 3D Modelling, coding, sound then please give me a shout, or take a look at the public version of the game design document or check out the video teasers or forums at www.zdaygame.com.
I'll post more as the development continues.. next step is to complete work for Alpha v0.2
THE INFECTED ARE COMING!!!
One of other developers Chris has posted a .plan on here before so I won't go into too much detail on the design for the game but just to say it's a Zombie Survival FPS, meaning you'll have to fight to stay alive (there's more in the design document I've linked at the bottom).
Since joining the team about a month ago now I've been really impressed with the approach, which is to release the game in four stages starting with a simple FPS and building up on the levels of character persistance, inventories, barricading, etc.
We're a small team of indie developers and although the game is still in it's early stages, we've a group of around 20 testers signed up that test each of the new releases and functionality and now a community of just over a 1000 people (and growing daily) interested and active in the forums. I need to say having this community discussing options, ideas, features, etc means we as small team can get instant input and feedback on any element of the game which is a huge bonus to us as a team.
As a new member of the team I can't tell you how impressed I am to find such a community for an indie game that's not yet been released, it means our development process can look something like:
1. Basic design produced by the designers.
2. Discussion amongst the development team (usually in a meeting).
3. Design pushed out to the community for thoughts, ideas and feedback.
4. Sign off design.
5. Plan which release candidate to include functionality
6. Develop (Artwork and Coding)
7. Hand over to testers.
8. Sign off.
It's a real asset to the project having such a great community around us (not to mention a userbase just waiting to play the game - although it has caused us one little issue so far which I'll touch on later).
Those infected get everywhere!!!Development Log
The last couple of weeks have seem a huge amount of work including:
- Base weapons system to allow for (snipers, shotguns, rifles, handguns, etc).
- Inventory system that can be attached to any object in the game players, zombies, cupboards, safes, etc.
- LOD's creating for most of the buildings.
- Optimization of some of the coding.
- Design for a bug tracking system built into TGE (I'll post more on that once it's finished).
- Detailed AI design being worked on currently.
This is all being play tested on a server we have running, but having such an eager community has meant we are seeing people trying to connect to the servers at times when we want just the development team to meet in game and discuss something. So we needed a way to control this.... without spending weeks of development.
In steps Python and within a couple of hours I had a simple TCP server in python authenticating login requests against a mysql database and the game client (TGE) connecting to it via TCPObject... what's more the server I can bring up in several modes (1-Open Access, 2- Testers Access, 3- Developers) so it's now easy to control who can and can't login to the server at which times. It really works better than I'd expected.
We do have one problem right now though, which we need to resolve!!!!!
Those damn zombies keep eating our 3D Modellers so although the coding side of things is progressing very well the artwork is lagging a little behind and we're finding it difficult to recruit Modellers that produce much work. I'm not sure whether it's because all the committed Modellers are after working with TGEA based projects now with all it's beauty or perhaps we're just being unlucky.
Either way if there's anyone reading this that would love to get involved with developing the game either to do 3D Modelling, coding, sound then please give me a shout, or take a look at the public version of the game design document or check out the video teasers or forums at www.zdaygame.com.
I'll post more as the development continues.. next step is to complete work for Alpha v0.2
THE INFECTED ARE COMING!!!
Community Manager Michael Perry
ZombieShortbus
Btw, that picture of the zombie eating the monitor is absolutely horrifying...