I know its been over a week and I sorta ruined that streak I had going of frequent posts. I wasn’t really in the mood for programing and replaying Deus Ex is a constant timesink. But I got back into working on They Do Not Die (the Wii version) yesterday and did a bit more today.
You now have a set amount of health which you obviously lose whenever your harmed by zombies. You also have energy which you can use to move faster (just hold down the A button) but if you don’t have any energy left then running will instead consume health. Both your health and energy regenerate.
The camera zooms in and out based on how much remaining health you have. There is some darkness around the borders of the screen which turns red when your losing health.
The iconic arrow sprites from the PC version are now in the game and they rotate and everything. There are now also corpses that get left behind when you kill someone.
When your health hits zero then your sent back to the new start menu from which you can can choose to begin playing again with everything reset.
ThatOtherDev 
This is a cool little game. I know it’s in the early stages, but here are some suggestions that would really improve it:
Health seems to regenerate too rapidly.
Also, it seems to decrease too rapidly from running.
I like how the screen zooms in when you’re wounded…. Another way to make it seem urgent would be to have a beating heart on the screen (with sound effects) that goes faster the more you are wounded, and slower as you recover. It could even replace the Health gauge.
Replace the circles with some little graphics of top-down zombies — I’m sure you can get some people to donate graphics, even if they are simple ones like in Gauntlet.
Your psychic. I’m working on the game right now and I actually JUST tweaked the numbers relating to health so it regenerates slower, goes down slower when hit by zombies and goes down a LOT slower from excessive energy usage.
I like the heart beat idea. I’m rather fond of meters and numbers so I don’t think I’ll be removing the on screen health display (though I could make displaying it optional once I get an options menu in place) but I definitely like the idea of having a heart beat sound effect growing louder and quicker as your dieing or coming close to it. I’ll check freesound later for a good heart beat sound effect and probably work it in for the next update to the game.
I’ve heard that last suggestion before. probably at most 10% of people approve of the arrow circles and the other 90% think its the worst and stupidest thing they have ever seen lol.
I like the arrows though. It makes it really quickly obvious exactly where everyone is, exactly what direction they are facing and exactly how close you can get before you start getting hurt. It also makes the game a LOT more recognizable. Plus as soon as you replace the characters with something that actually resembles people then it quickly draws attention to the fact that they aren’t animated which will then inevitably lead me to sinking a ton of time into getting animation working.
The idea with the PC version was to encourage people to not only make their own levels but also their own graphics and things. You could for example have multiple texture sets and choose from within the game which one you wanted to use. That had the upside of obviously encouraging the arrow haters to provide themselves and each other with alternatives. But as far as I know only one person ever made alternate textures and no one ever used the level editor. I still intend to build those kinds of features into the Wii version but I’m not really expecting there to be much of a community to support it.
Ok, I made some test images. Here, just try these out:
Tell me it’s not more fun to kill zombies when you’re wearing a headband!
I think I could make those with a bit better quality and make them fit better within a “circle,” if you’d use them….
Come on, if only 10% of people like the arrow circles, I bet at least 30% of people would like my zombies! 🙂
The red headband. The orange skin. Its Ninjabread man!
lol those do look pretty freaken great 😀 I love my arrows and will never abandon them but I’ll post a copy of the game with those sprites included next time I post an updated version and once I get an in game sprite selection screen in place I’ll include them as an alternative.
I don’t mind fixing them (it will only take a sec) but just so you know you should use the same color as I did for what parts you want transparent (0 red, 255 green, 255 blue). Also I’ve increased the size of the image a bit so each tile has a 1 pixel border of empty space (it seemed like even with the characters being circles parts of the edges where getting slightly clipped in rotation).
Let me know if you make any more or any changes.
Who should I credit them to? Just Aaron? Is there a site or something you want me to mention?
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On WiiBrew I go by Mr. Reaper
You can credit that name.
If you set up a page on WiiBrew for TDND, it might be easier for you to get feedback. Although for the last day, WiiBrew has been giving me a lot of problems getting pages to load…. It makes it really hard to edit stuff when it keeps failing to load. Is it doing that for you?
I haven’t really been back to wiibrew in a probably a week (I mostly only visit when I have something to post). It seems to be running fine for me right now though.
I figured I would put off making a wiibrew page until the game was farther along but I suppose its already more of a game then a lot of the other junk I’ve posted. I’ll make a page for it the next time I post an update.
I made a Hombrew Channel icon to go with my zombies and guy (who I officially name “some guy”), heh:
And here’s a suggestion for the meta.xml:
“You are some guy. You wake up one morning to find everything is normal: the flowers are blooming, the birds are singing, the zombies are rampaging. Wait, rampaging zombies!?! Good thing you bought that chaingun from eBay!”
And a gameplay suggestion: Run button should be Z on the nunchuck.
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