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Where’s Deadshed? Answer: Not dead

What I wanted: A beta of Deadshed before the end of 2008.

What happened: Deadshed languished on my PC, ignored by eyes and coding fingers. From time to time, I’d hear a gentle, sad mewing from my hard drive. I’m assuming it was Deadshed, and not a super-tiny kitten caught between the platters.

Basically, between September-December, little was done on Deadshed. A lot more was done on the 4th Ed Power Creator (rewrite incoming), CrawlNotes and, most surprisingly – Zafehouse.

I needed to say sorry to Deadshed. And I did.

Over the Christmas break, disconnected from work and other distractions, I had a chance to give Deadshed some much-needed attention. I stared at the shopping list of features I wanted to add, glared at code that didn’t include said features, and sighed a bit. Then, I got to work.

I redesigned the interface. I added controls for base-building and action-point based combat. Gone are the six survivors, replaced by green-gilled soldiers. The town is now a quarantined city block, and the city generation code has been completely rewritten.

Survival is just one facet of the game now. You’ll have to manage the media, local government and the affected populace. Riots will break out when you mess up. I’ve added semi-realistic infection spreading code so if one building is filled with zombies, it’ll reach nearby buildings if left unattended.

It’s all so much. Too much maybe. But the more I think the scope has blown out, the more I don’t want to code Zafehouse 2. I want it to be new. I want it to be a challenge. I want it to be massively rad.

Yes, I said massively rad. And I’m cool with it.

I’m a little sad to see the survival horror aspect of the game slowly slip away. It will be retained with the action-point combat, the infection spreading and the event timeline. The important thing is, it’ll be something that isn’t Zafehouse. That’s a good thing – really.

P.S. I’ll post a picture of the new UI soon. Would love feedback.

Update: Said UI pictures can be found here.

~ by Logan on January 7, 2009.

3 Responses to “Where’s Deadshed? Answer: Not dead”

  1. […] As promised, here are two screenshots to show the new user interface for Deadshed. There’s even a sneak peek at the Admin UI, even though it’s still in flux. General interface shot […]

  2. Hmm…SimZombie? Sounds intriguing, can’t wait to see how it turns out.

  3. I’ve been looking forward to this game for a while, I am a programmer myself, however I can only program for websites and the like.

    I’d always wanted to give the zombie genre a go, and this game inspired me to do so, I think you should know that it is admiring to see people do stuff like this for others, and not just for themselves.

    Keep up the good work, and let us see some more of your game as much as possible.