[Live Interview] Zombie Master

[Liquidize105]

Zombie Master - a Half-Life 2 modification
8-03-06
Jonathan S. "Liquidize105"



Jonathan: Hey guys

TGB: 'lo

Angry Lawyer: Hello Jonathan

Jonathan: So, what've we got here? Zombie Master huh?

Angry Lawyer: Damn straight. I'm Angry Lawyer, otherwise known as Tony Aldridge.

TGB: I'm TheGreenBunny, also Stefan.

Pi Mu Rho: My name's Neale Roberts, I'm old, and I've been mapping for ... well over a decade. I've also worked on some games that you'd be ashamed to admit to having played. :)

Angry Lawyer: :D

Jonathan: What are the games?

Pi Mu Rho: Bad ones.

Jonathan: Don't leave us hanging, what are they? :cool:

Pi Mu Rho: At least one my previous employers wouldn't take too kindly to my name-dropping them *cough*dereksmart*cough*

Jonathan: ;)

Jonathan: I understand that you guys are all from Planet-HL, is that right?

Angry Lawyer: They interviewed us once. That's about all of the involvement they have with us.


TGB: If anything, you could say we come from halflife2.net.

Angry Lawyer: And even then, not quite: We met on Halflife2.net, but the project was made independently.

Jonathan: Tell me about that.

Angry Lawyer: So you want to hear about the birth of Zombie Master, then.

Jonathan: Well, tell me about how the pieces fell into place.

Angry Lawyer: Basically, we were all posters on Halflife2.net, and we'd chat, and the like. The actual conception wasn't exactly glamorous.

I was thinking for a while, one day (as I often do, on my "thinking throne") pondering on the nature of Zombie mods. There were loads of them announced, but they were all pretty similar.

Angry Lawyer: Anyway, I had recently written some code for an RTS mod (which seemed to disappear and reappear based on my mood and amount of free time) and I thought "Hrm, now, if I combine the two..."

And the sparks of a new idea burst into life.

I cut the useful bits of code from what I had (which was very, very rough stuff) and stuffed zombies into it. I then showed it to Stefan and Neale, and a few others, and it pretty much swelled up like a snowball pushed down a mountain from there. From the rough-edged hacks we started with, we've got something that's now what I'd consider pretty special. And the guys I've had the fortune to work with have blown me away with what can be done with the Source engine.

Jonathan: Feel free to add to that, gents.

TGB: You could say the original was special as well, in an "I can't believe this works" way. :p

However, as an early prototype it covered the core gameplay well. In the months after that (I believe we're nearing 1 year old now) we've essentially expanded that concept.

Jonathan: And I think it really does sound very novel; it's a new take on the FPS/RTS hybrid.

Pi Mu Rho: It’s expanded in ways that we really couldn't have foreseen when it started.

Angry Lawyer: The ideas, individually, are pretty cliché, but they're put together in an interesting way.

TGB: What I personally think lifts the concept up a notch from the straightforward FPS vs. RTS deal is the environment interaction. It's an area we've been expanding lately, letting the ZM player set traps using what we call the Manipulates and lay ambushes using zombies, for the human players to fall into. It adds a bit of a Dungeon Master-like vibe to things.

Angry Lawyer: Manipulates are definitely one of the jewels in Zombie Master.

Pi Mu Rho: I'll back up TGB's comment there - the manipulates offer such a fantastic opportunity to make really diverse maps.

TGB: To clarify: Manipulates are special events in a map that the ZM player can trigger, for a price. The system employs Source's entity system to let these events encompass anything from falling objects to lights turning off to lightning striking.

And in turn, for a premium, these can be turned into traps that trigger when a player comes near.

Pi Mu Rho: For example: One of the maps is set in a city, where the humans have to escape. We found in testing that they'd tend to hide out in a specific building and just barricade up.

So instead of removing the weapons and ammo, I added a manipulate that causes a gas leak, followed by a big fire.





http://www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/zombiemaster/thumb.manipulate_3.jpg (http://www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/image.php?image=www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/zombiemaster/manipulate_3.jpg)

Manipulate Case Study 1: Zombies are being moved into a line, and then one of them ordered to push a barrel.

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Jonathan: We're definitely getting ahead of ourselves here.

Jonathan: First thing first, there have been other attempts at FPS vs. RTS?

Angry Lawyer: The two most notable I can think of are "Natural Selection" and "Iron Grip."

Jonathan: Those aren't the same. Those are FPS / RTS vs. FPS / RTS.

TGB: Natural selection wasn't truly FPS vs. RTS though. Indeed Iron Grip is, and they extended the concept in interesting ways as well.

Jonathan: What you have here is a new take on the hybrid formula.

Pi Mu Rho: It'd be nice to think so, but someone almost always proves you wrong.

Jonathan: Natural Selection (tm) is a RTS-based game with a heavy dose of FPS - that's going by the victory condition.

Angry Lawyer: I never thought of it that way. Zombies, RTS games, and shooting things are three of my favourite things, so it seemed natural to mix them all together

TGB: Heard of Iron Grip? Also a HL2 mod, it has one side of an imperial commander who commands troops RTS style, and another side of rebels playing FPS who try to oppose him.

Jonathan: Yes I have, it’s interesting nonetheless.

But I think that for a zombie game, which is characteristic of the mod scene, the subject matter works really well with the setup.

It's very easy to understand.

Angry Lawyer: Well thank you :)

Pi Mu Rho: It works surprisingly well.

Angry Lawyer: Getting it working, full stop, is an achievement. The first builds were notorious for melting down at the slightest provocation.

Jonathan: Explain the basic goal and rules of the game for me.

Angry Lawyer: It's pretty simple: The game is divided into rounds. At the beginning of a round, a player is picked to be the "Zombie Master". The rest become humans.

Jonathan: Picked how?

TGB: At weighted random; well, it will be weighted as soon as we implement that part :p

Angry Lawyer: Randomly, by the computer. The code tries to pick someone who's not been the master recently.

Pi Mu Rho: Players can opt out at the moment. But I'm not sure if that feature's going to stay in...

Angry Lawyer: The Zombie Master becomes an RTS-style camera, and floats above the world. The rest are survivors, they play as an FPS.

Pi Mu Rho: As for the game goals - they vary according to the map. One current map has the humans foraging for parts to repair a truck. Another has them trying to escape a zombie-infested city, another has them just having to survive for 20 minutes...

TGB: You could say the goal for the ZM player is to prevent the humans from completing their objective, generally by killing them all.

Angry Lawyer: Aye. One of the useful things in Zombie Master is that objectives are completely up to the mapper. We like to place as much power in the mapper's hands as possible.

Using entity logic, plus a specially created "win" entity, you can pretty much make any objective - just as Neale stated earlier.

Jonathan: I imagine that it'd unbalance the game without some kind of cautious overlording on your part.

Angry Lawyer: Play-testing the maps a lot help us keep things in balance.

TGB: By moving more design-like tasks to the mapper, part of the balancing also needs to be done by the mapper. And indeed maps are balanced by playing them a lot.

Jonathan: Tell me about the rules of the game, for both the humans and the zombies.

Jonathan: How does respawning work for either side?

Pi Mu Rho: There's no respawning. The Zombie Master can't die, and the humans have to wait the round out.

Jonathan: And the zombies?

Pi Mu Rho: Zombies are expendable :)

TGB: The zombie master creates his zombies on certain locations by spending resources. To speak in RTS terms, the ZM builds his zombies. When those zombies die, they die.

Angry Lawyer: Zombies are created at designated spawn points. Currently, they're red glowing spheres that only the Zombie Master can see an interact with.

Jonathan: How does resource work for either side? Where do they come from? Do the humans find weapons or do they have a load-out at the start of every round? Does the ZM gather resources or does the pool increase by the clock?

TGB: The ZM receives resources gradually as time goes by, and gets a bonus when he kills a human.

Pi Mu Rho: Also, the resources received scale with the player numbers.

TGB: Currently humans mostly gather their weapons, unless the mapper gives them from the start.

Pi Mu Rho: That's under review anyway.

TGB: Yeah, we've been discussing stuff there.

Jonathan: How many humans to zombies? What's the ratio for a standard size map?

TGB: Our usual play-testing games have player numbers around 8 to 10.

Seeing as the ZM's resources increase with higher player counts, you could have larger games, but we find those counts work well.

Angry Lawyer: Smaller games also work well, and tend to be quite atmospheric, as the Zombie Master focuses his entire attentions on one or two humans.

TGB: As for zombies, currently the main limiting factor is server resources. If you keep spawning them there comes a point where the zombie AI starts to take up too much processor power to play decently

I'm not sure of the exact numbers right now, somewhere above 50 ... 75-100 perhaps. It all depends on the server's power. This is an obvious area we'll be looking to optimize in later releases.

I can say that as ZM, you don't need as many as that to do your thing. The key is in using your zombies in clever ways.




http://www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/zombiemaster/thumb.manipulate_1.jpg (http://www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/image.php?image=www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/zombiemaster/manipulate_1.jpg)http://www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/zombiemaster/thumb.manipulate_2.jpg (http://www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/image.php?image=www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/zombiemaster/manipulate_2.jpg)

Manipulate Case Studies 2 & 3: Igniting and pushing of barrels from height and the falling ISO container.

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Jonathan: That's my next point.

Jonathan: Now, if this were running on any other engine, I wouldn’t even bother to ask. But this is the HL2 engine after all.

Jonathan: What gameplay possibilities are there aside from the usual stock - shooting, knifing, biting, maw-ing, etc.?

For example, can I shamble my zombie onto the 2nd floor of a crumbling house and have it fall onto a human player as he runs by?

TGB: Here I'd reference my earlier mention of manipulates and traps.

If the mapper creates a crumbling floor as a manipulate for the ZM to trigger, that's definitely possible. Either the ZM can manually hang around and trigger the manipulate as a player walks by, or he can set it up as a trap where the player unknowingly triggers it himself.

Jonathan: I don't mean stock behaviors, those are predictable; I’m talking about gameplay feature(s).

Angry Lawyer: Well, the AI supplied with HalfLife2 was pretty beefy to start with, so we've extended on that.

If players barricade an area with props, you can tell your zombies to try to shift them out of the way. Banshees also utilize the navigation code of Fast Zombies from Half-Life 2, so they path-find really well across a map, bouncing from rooftop to rooftop. They're great for attacking from curious angles, like just above the doorframe of a house as the players leave.

Angry Lawyer: There's also the Ambush system - you can tell any group of Zombies to wait until players enter a defined area. When they do that, those Zombies spring to life, and go hunt down their triggering players.

TGB: The ZM needs to employ surprise to his advantage. Like you would expect from typical zombie canon, humans are faster and have superior firepower. The ZM can negate that for example by using surprise, ambushes, closing players in, manipulates, etc.

Angry Lawyer: Yeah

Jonathan: Exactly my point: How would you allow the ZM to be creative? Do zombies have special abilities like playing dead, hiding in the walls, or falling from heights? Would half-blown zombies be able to crawl into vents, etc. etc.?

Angry Lawyer: Well, we currently have five flavours of zombies:

1.) There are the shambling, generic ones, which are cheap and useful screens, and distractions.

2.) There's the hulk, which is quite fast, take a hell of a beating, and can kill you pretty quickly when they close in.

TGB: But they're expensive.

Angry Lawyer: Yup

3.) There's Banshees, which jump all over the place, and are rather quick. However, they're frail, and need something to divert the human fire to stop them getting slaughtered.

4.) There's the drifting flavour of zombies, too, which float a few inches off of the ground, can't take much punishment, but have a close-ranged vomit attack which causes the human's vision to jolt around, making them perfect for disarming humans.

5.) And, the fifth kind we have needs its bugs ironed before we consider its viability, but a zombie that starts off inert and slow, but when it gets close to a human, ignites and goes into a frenzy.

Jonathan: Sounds like a legitimate RTS game.

TGB: On a side-note: Some of the things you mentioned bring their own implementation difficulties, for example players will very quickly pick up on when a zombie is pretending to be dead or really is dead. I won't get into details here, but there are a lot of challenges in the field of special zombie abilities. We're definitely adding a special power that allows the ZM to hide zombies, much like we have one that gives him night vision or spawn a zombie anywhere on the map as long as humans can't see it, allowing for surprises.

Angry Lawyer: However, making shamblies fall from windows is a really good idea :D

Jonathan: Well, the hybrid genre tends to have smaller battles than your typical RTS romp. The need to knit elements of the players, units, and maps together into one cohesive mass is stronger than ever.

Instead of brawls and number, which is the staple of any zombie mod/game, use ZM to its potential by using trickery through a smaller number of zombies.

Angry Lawyer: Indeed it is. It generally doesn't work if you just throw Zombies at the players, so it calls for some strong tactics.

And generally, what makes the game exciting and unlike a run-of-the-mill shooter is that the zombies are controlled by a person. The zombie master's chief skills are learning how to distract and outflank.

Jonathan: I’m aware of the depth of commitment here to implement a lot of these feature, and it'd definitely be interesting to see how Zombie Master turns out in the end.

Angry Lawyer: Indeed. After it's stable and playable enough to release to the public (which is quite soon), we fully plan to release regular updates. It's an iterative design. To work out how it's going to play in the long run, we're going to need to release to a larger audience than our testing department.

TGB: We fully intend to give the ZM as many different options as possible, both globally and map-specific. Then it's up to the player to use what he is given in new and inventive ways, which in turn keeps things fun for the human players.

Jonathan: There's the need to balance variety and predictability. Give options, but also maintain a consistency of core gameplay.

Pi Mu Rho: It's all working out really well in that regard.

Angry Lawyer: The development cycle is that when we think of a feature, we implement it, and then test it to death to see if it works and ties in to the game. Generally, we find that, after playing with a feature, it would work better if such and such changed, so we change it, and test some more. Our design document wasn't very much - we add based on what works, and what doesn't,

TGB: We're not about to give the ZM a "meteor storm" ability or anything :P

Angry Lawyer: And that’s what slaps you in the face at 3AM and goes "Wow, that'd be really cool"

Angry Lawyer: All of the powers and abilities the Zombie Master has are there to compliment the zombies themselves, which gives for consistency.

We're avoiding having the Zombie Master being able to directly kill a player, or anything, but being able to support his strategic movement of zombies.

Jonathan: Sounds a lot like “The Summoner.”



http://www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/zombiemaster/thumb.shot2.jpg (http://www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/image.php?image=www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/zombiemaster/shot2.jpg)http://www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/zombiemaster/thumb.shot3.jpg (http://www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/image.php?image=www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/zombiemaster/shot3.jpg)

[Liquidize105]

Jonathan: Coincidentally (not really), I come from a modding background myself.

Jonathan: That was years ago, I did some mapping back in the days of StarCraft, we had out own click.

Anyway, there was this map called “The Summoner” that used all spell-casters with no direct attacks to summon units into battle, and they’d in term support them with spells.

So that's a kind of a flashback for me.

Angry Lawyer: Sounds awesome :D Sadly, back when I played StarCraft, I'd always end up joining a really poorly-designed map.

Pi Mu Rho: I never played StarCraft :)

Angry Lawyer: And then WarCraft - that's a hotbed for interesting gameplay ideas. But then, 99% of games are made up of "Tower Defense". Every time someone creates a Tower Defense map, I die a little inside.

Jonathan: Remember “Scream?” A very popular Battle.Net map back in the days, my buddy created that one. It’s now the basis for Hidden.

Angry Lawyer: Never played Scream, but to think a Bnet map inspired one of the great source mods is a nice concept.

Jonathan: The basic idea is that one player is the killer, the others are civilians. Civilians would run away from the dark templar killer. The killer has a civilian of his own to confuse everyone.

At the end of the round, everyone would vote to guess who the killer is.

Angry Lawyer: Was that for WarCraft 3? Because I distinctly remember playing that, and absolutely sucking at it.

Jonathan: A lot of stuff migrated to War3; I’m happy to say that my map did so as well.

Angry Lawyer: Heh, wow, I didn't realize it had such a legacy.

Jonathan: My map is called “Aeon of Strife.” It’s a whole gametype in itself now. I believe I made the very first one ;)

Angry Lawyer: The name rings a bell.

Jonathan: I think they call it “Defense of the Ancient?”

The script language in war3 is light years ahead of StarCraft’s, the mappers did very nice work in DotA.

Angry Lawyer: Ahh, I know that!

Jonathan: Yeah, stuff like. It’s amazing how far people would take an idea when they just run with it.

Angry Lawyer: Heh, so true. It's just sad to see the WarCraft custom maps dissolve into nothing but rehashes of that Tower Defense thing. All people do is open the map, change the art and the names of the towers, and release it, saying they made it themselves. Damn it, that's what happens when you don't make modding really difficult!

Jonathan: That's one of the reasons why I called quits (that and I just didn’t like War3). 4 out of 5 times, people dished out clones instead of original ideas. It happened to WarCraft, then it happened to Counter Strike. In the years following 2001, plenty of modders simply rehashed CS, that or they wouldn’t vacate the confines of the base game.

But I'm glad to say that in recent year there seems to be a resurgence of creativity in the modding scene.

Angry Lawyer: Bah, the thing is, loads of people said "I'm going to make a mod that's like CS but better", but because you need some semblance of skill to mod the Half-Life series, it pretty much culled a lot of the ideas. The crap ideas, I mean.

Natural selection at its finest :D

Jonathan: Right, it can't be better because it's the same basic game; mods have to come into their own creative space to order to catch fire.

I have a lot of respect for natural selection (Darwin’s) by the way.

TGB: Heh

Angry Lawyer: Most people who suggest CS clones don't intend to do anything but be an "ideas man", so thankfully they never get made. NS was one of the sparks that made me get interested in modding.

Jonathan: And it took a professional developer to do that.

Angry Lawyer: That, and an obscure Quake 2 mod called "QWAR2". It was an RTS in the Quake 2 world, and inspired me to learn to code.

Angry Lawyer: Heh, one of the sad things about today's modders is that many of them think they're professional developers. Not mentioning any names, but there's so much middle-management in a lot of mods these days, and a focus on nothing but media releases.

The day people started placing PR guys as more important than mappers, artists and coders was the day my heart broke.

Jonathan: Well, have hope.

If there's nothing of value in life, create value yourself.

Angry Lawyer: Exactly the thoughts that spurred me to code.

Jonathan: The industry, despite everything, has a lot of potential for growth.

Angry Lawyer: Someone whose name eludes me said that "modders are more interested in dressing up as professional developers than actually making mods."

Whereas the industry is moving forward and improving, the modding community seems to be trying to be like the bad parts of the industry -- focusing on graphics, avoiding new ideas, and just trying to clone things that have been popular in the past.

It's shifted from making something fun and new to making something that's going to be as popular as possible.

Jonathan: In the corporate industry, it's called "to sell as many units as possible."

Angry Lawyer: Yes, but modders aren't getting paid :P

Jonathan: Uh huh, yeah.

Angry Lawyer: Well, a few are, but they're exceptions, and ironically, they tend to be the ones who never set out to be like the industry.

Garrysmod for example: He just thought it'd be interesting to stick some elements together, and it just aggregated.

Jonathan: Garrysmod is a great tool.

Jonathan: And you know, same with ZM, it comes from this one original idea ... about dead people walking. There’s definitely a legacy being passed along.

Pi Mu Rho: We've actually been quite surprised by the level of attention we've received, given that our goal was to make something that we wanted to play.

Jonathan: And you'll make a lot of changes through out the testing phase (which is the actual developing phase) for modders.

Angry Lawyer: Yeah. The amount it's changed since the very first build is crazy.

Jonathan: So just keep doing what you're doing, do it for passion and something will open up.

Angry Lawyer: Very true.

Jonathan: So there's my little bit of fuel for you guys for the years ahead.

Angry Lawyer: :D

Jonathan: I talk to developers and press members all the time, and you know what gets people excited?

Angry Lawyer: Nakedness

Jonathan: Of course, that and new & exciting prospects.

Angry Lawyer: :D

Angry Lawyer: Just being able to try out new ideas is the thing I love most about modding.

Jonathan: There it is.




http://www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/zombiemaster/thumb.shot5.jpg (http://www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/image.php?image=www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/zombiemaster/shot5.jpg)http://www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/zombiemaster/thumb.shot6.jpg (http://www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/image.php?image=www.evilavatar.com/images/previews/zombiemaster/shot6.jpg)

[Liquidize105]

Jonathan: Okay, let's wrap this up then.

Angry Lawyer: Plus, when people get pumped about something I'm working on, I get pumped too, and eventually, I might flip out, ninja-style.

Jonathan: :)

Jonathan: So what's the ETA on Zombie Master?

TGB: The tough question

Pi Mu Rho: Heh

Angry Lawyer: "Soon"

TGB: 2006

Pi Mu Rho: We really don't have a specific ETA. We're not working to a deadline.

Angry Lawyer: Yeah, most definitely this year. We're really quite close to a release, I feel. The bug tracker we have is pretty much mostly coloured in the "complete" colour.

Pi Mu Rho: Yes

TGB: The problem is that giving out a release date is like dancing the funky chicken in a minefield - sometimes you make it, other times it will blow up in your face.

Jonathan: 2006 is good - not too far away, not too right away.

Angry Lawyer: Gives us plenty of leeway

Pi Mu Rho: Before TF2 :P

Angry Lawyer: D: When is Episode 2 released anyways? End of year?

Pi Mu Rho: It'll be interesting to see what the new SDK release will break.

Yeah.

Angry Lawyer: Heh, back when code updates came thick and fast, it was like trying to bail water out of a sinking ship. You never knew if it was something you did, or they did, that blew it to pieces.

TGB: Well, they did give us some 400 days to prepare for this one.

Jonathan: Comes with the job

Angry Lawyer: Right, I'm going to have to vanish in the next few minutes, so any last questions?

Jonathan: Okay, anything else to say before I take off?

TGB: Timing there

Jonathan: You have the podium, take it away.

Angry Lawyer: Hrm… "More zombies per square inch than Haiti"

Pi Mu Rho: We really are just doing this for the fun of it, and we hope that it will show out in the end.
Jonathan: Cool. We’re all done, I'll see you guys during the open beta.

Angry Lawyer: Legendary.

Pi Mu Rho: Look forward to it :)

TGB: Indeed

Jonathan: From which you'll then slip me the "Always ZM" cheat code.

TGB: I'm afraid we'll have to delay it for 6 months to implement that one.

Angry Lawyer: *crosses off the proposed release dates from his calendar, and flips to 2007*

Jonathan: Haha

Angry Lawyer: Thanks for the chat, It's been great talking to you, Jonathan. :D

Pi Mu Rho: Great stuff

TGB: Thanks for the interview, good luck with compiling it into something readable :)

Pi Mu Rho: Heh, yeah.

Jonathan: Take care fellows :)

Pi Mu Rho: Cya

TGB: G'bye

Resources:
Zombie Master Official Site (http://zombiemaster.org/)
EvAv's Screenshot Archive (http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15971)






http://img116.imageshack.us/img116/3971/zmlogooo1.jpg

[thecrazyd]

Sounds really great. I am surprised I haven't heard of it sooner. I will have to check it out when it is released.