WOSP is a "Zombie" - Project now . . .

[Marga]

and you can take this "literally!" [:D]

Yesterday Larkin and two of our friends gathered at my place and I took the advantage to present my secret "WOSP" project.

Everyone could easily recognize that "WOSP" has turned into a "Zombie"-project now . . .

But I'm glad to say that Larkin and the others were not sad about that fact - on the contrary - everyone adapted fast to the new "look and feel" . . .[:)]

I hope to be able to present you with a few screenshots soon - I have to change a few details of the graphics before making the screenshots public because there are some elements taken from another game. It's only about a few graphics - only some character pictures, but you could easily identify the official game their taken from [:o] (so far I created everything - game-engine, graphics etc. - on my own, but these portraits and most of the sounds are taken from other games).

More details will follow soon. . .

Marga ("reanimated"...[:D])

[Black Knight]

What exactly is WOSP, and why is it a "Zombie"-project?

I'm just curious ...

[oldmanmimo]

What a tease!

We lurkers don't like that...

[Thorgrim]

Hey Kai!!
Glad to see you back!! And with news about WoSP too!! That's awesome. Zombies? Hmm. I'm eager to see what you've come up with. Super Heroes fighting hordes of zombies?

WoSP = Warriors of Super Powers

[Marga]

Back in the 1990's I created - just for fun and programming practice - some small games on the Amiga (one based on AD&D, the other was some kind of early round-based Fantasy-strategy-game where you could built cities, raise armies and claim resources like copper, silver and gold. These games never made it to be played a lot, although they were pretty good playable up to a certain degree.

But I did not put any time and energy into developing them further, because I suddenly focused on developing a game on the Amiga, based on a superhero game called "Champions", which I played often with Larkin and which perfectly reflected the atmosphere of Marvel- and other superhero comics. The rules of creating characters and the experience of testing their powers and development in tactical battles against other superheros where so addicting that I decided to create a game based on this rule system, using an isometric map like in "UFO" to make the fights look good while having a certain tactical depth. The working title for this game was "WoSP" -> which stands for "Warriors of Super Powers" (like Thorgrim already explained).

I finished a character generator which completely reflected the Champions rules. You could tweak any little parameter of your hero and the generator calculated all relevant data and values (which took a lot of time and energy if you did it with the pen&paper rulebook and a calculator). The character generator worked fine and I also reached a certain level of development with the game engine - at that moment I called Larkin on phone to ask him whether he would join my game project. Larkin himself at that time had started to develop a game based on the Amiga shareware "Mechforce" and convinced me to freeze my project and join him in the making of "TOS". [:)]

I quickly realized that Larkin had much more spare time and possibilities than I had at that time and so I worked together with him on TOS because I knew that otherwise both projects could be questionable. I never had to regret this decision - you all know the story... [;)]

For nearly 8 years I stopped working on "WoSP", then I restarted the project in 2003 and in private worked 2 years exclusively on the developing tools for making graphics using and controlling a ray tracing program, a screen developing tool to arrange graphical elements and dialog-boxes, a tool for making animations etc. etc. ...

Since 2005 I was working on the game engine, which I already had developed to a certain degree with "C" (Thorgrim was sometimes referring to that version of which I had released some screenshots years ago). In 2005 I restarted the whole thing from scratch in "C++", which was a hard decision, but I knew that at a certain point of development this would spare a lot of developing time and energy compared to working with "C".

To cut this long story short...: During development my preference for superheroes switched to stories settled in some kind of "end-time" setting, especially with the Zombie-element (so "WoSP" is a "Zombie-project" now fits in both ways - the WoSP setting has switched to a "Zombie" setting and also it is a Zombie-project because it is somehow dead, but the engine still exists in the new project with the working title "Zombie-En4Cers").

In the last few years I worked exclusively in my spare time on the new development, which I did totally on my own and in private (to be able to present my friends with the kind of game of which I know they like most [8D] - a game having elements like tactical combat, roleplaying, teamplay against various threats, all types of weapons, skills, abilities, talents, different kinds of enemies, surprises, a good and sometimes thrilling story - all that presented with nice graphics (at least within the limits of my skills and abilities) and sounds (at this point more than 1200 samples and speeches, though taken from other games for now...) and so forth...

I need some time to work on screenshots and finding a web-presentation, but then you'll see more...

Marga

[Thorgrim]

Can't wait to see it!! Post-apocalyptic?
Love the genre. One of the games I most miss is Chaos Gate (WH40K)...

[Marga]

Hi Diogo,

nice to meet you again here...

Well, what did the WoSP project become - Superheroes fighting hordes of Zombies?

Not exactly, although the player characters in my game are very special and - like the mysterious Mr.X said in a note the PCs found in the intro-level: "...You all are very unique and high potential characters..."

In the current version of the "Zombie-En4Cers" project you play with up to 4 characters that find themselves in an odd place, not remembering what has happened. They have to find their way out of the basement levels of a strange building, and guess what will happen to them, what horrors and dangers will lie ahead...[:'(]

I don't want to spoil the story here (although I do not know if I'll ever reach the state to make this a freeware or demo-version, at least not with over 1200 sounds taken from other games. But maybe I find some good freeware sounds for the FX-stuff and present the speeches and other voices through speech-bubbles - we'll see).

I tell you about a few features of the game engine - so that you can get an idea of what the game experience will be like:

- you move in turns with PCs and Creatures having action points, life points etc. Every character and opponent rolls for initiative based on his/her abilities

- The characters have the standard abilities like in AD&D (Int, Str, Wis, Dex, Con, Char) and derived sub-abilities like willpower, agility and so on...)

- agility determines the amount of APs, Str may give damage bonus in HTH-combat, Dex adds to to-hit with firearms etc.

- moving on the map is done by "walking" or "running", where the latter increases fatigue (only in case the PC is threatened by enemies -> all action taken in combat produce fatigue, even firing or reloading weapons - The characters nerves are strained to the maximum in such situations - will the reloading be successful, will the the opponent be destroyed before he strikes back...?)

- PCs automatically gain skills due to the actions they perform, e.g. opening a small box with an electronic lock adds the skill "Opening normal electronic lock", firing with a pistol and hitting an opponent automatically adds the "weapon skill pistol". For a successful skill roll you get XPs, if you manage to raise the skill for a level, you may get e.g. a combat bonus, reduce fatigue produced by the appropriate action, need less AP e.g. for opening a locked box.

- The characters raise levels due to gaining XP (act in combat, using skills, move under threatening conditions)

- The characters can find health packs (small/medium/large), ammunition ,weapons, adrenalin doses etc.

- The map is in isometric perspective, the standard map having 30x30 cells in a level, with up to 5 levels above ground (that gives the possibility to even have tower buildings - there could be more than 5 levels above ground, but there is a certain limit due to the playability. We played with 4 players on a fully developed standard map with an area of 30x30x6 cells for roundabout 8 hours... but during development I tested a large map of 100x100x3 cells - this is indeed very, very large.

- Every cell that is comparable to the cells in "UFO" (but in that game an atomic cell contained a complete creature or wall) is further scaled into 3 smaller cells, which allows creatures to knee or lie behind obstacles for cover or to move through small wholes in the wall or even climb upon a table. In addition this allows for very detailed lines of sight and lines of fire.

- The engine handles daytime with 4 stages: night, dusk&dawn, cloudy sky, full sunlight. These different illumination levels of the different day-times have impact on gameplay: in darkness you get penalties for to hit, reloading, moving, the visibility at full sun light is unlimited, but at night the characters can only see up to 5 cells (=5 meter) if not having a - flashlight - yes, you've heard it right- a flashlight [8D]

- The engine raytraces every small cell (up to this version only simple ray trace up to the first obstacle - later we will have reflection of raytraces for better/more natural illumination. At this state we already have flickering lights and different illumination that add to the atmosphere

- The engine supports full visibility, including terrain memory => the PCs can remember the terrain they saw some time ago (just like in TOS) for a certain amount of time, then the "fog of war" slowly [:'(] reclaims the terrain and the map grows dark [;)]...
((Of course there are modifications possible to memorizing the terrain due to abilities/sub-abilities like Intelligence, Willpower, ... and skills like "sixth-sense"...

..now stopping this and referring to the small pic I've attached to this message.

The small screenshot-arrangement I attached has just picked three small scenes from different larger screenshots - the game has a fixed resolution of 1024x768 with 24/32 - bit depth. Due to the conversion to jpg-format this pic has some artifacts in it - the original screenshot in bmp-format is of better quality...

In the pic you can see: different illumination, transparent glass (and yes, shooting through the glass has glass fragmentation effects, in the pic you can see broken glass lying on the ground as well as blood stains and other remains being produced during combat...

In one scene, if you take a close look, you can see a zombie standing in a lower floor being visible through the glassy floor tile. If you take a more closer look you can even see the shadow that is cast by Leo on the transparent, glassy floor tile...

Well, enough now, I have to fight some more zombies now to make a few more screenshots for you [;)]



Marga

[Thorgrim]

AD&D, UFO, ToS, this can only be awesome!
Can't wait.

[Gargantou]

That does sound great, just be careful about the whole "sounds are taken from other games" to make sure(if it is not from other games you made) to have the permission of the person behind the games the soundfiles are from.

But yeah, that does sound great, I played all the X-COM proper turn-based X-COM games, , X-COM, X-COM: TFTD and X-COM: Apocalypse, never actually beat any of them though, I'm ashamed to admit.

But yeah, this does sound great, there's also another indie turn-based game with a zombie-setting in development, it's more focused on a serious intepretation of how humans would work in a zombie-apocalypse though, incase anyone wanna read about it here is a link: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/08 ... -revealed/

I love zombie games personally, I hope your work on Zombie-En4cers is proceeding well, Marga!