kidkonia blogs

So, I'm still working on the Wesnoth Strategy series, but a side project has come up while I was doing more multiplayer research.

A while ago I made an IRC game called Zombies!, which was sort of loosely based off of an audio-only miniseries Olothontor and I produced an episode of a while back. It was a turn-based game with support for a few different kinds of weapons, and user-created maps. It was pretty fun, but then I started building on its success.

The patches brought the game to its knees. To this day I still have two branches of it living in my code folder: one of which was the culprit of the breakdown, the other an unsuccessful rescue attempt. In trunk I had the game, which I would just patch in-place. Then it broke. I quickly "branched" it to groups-dev for the new patch (allowing groups of players instead of just one), and then tried to remove all the modifications I'd made. Not using any actual source control, this failed miserably.

The other day I found it and thought to myself, "this would be a nice thing to finish." So I started re-writing it from scratch, using a lot of the same mechanics but entirely new code.

It's a special type of game in that I'm writing only the backend code. I did this with a Dvorak game a while back as well, and it worked very well. Basically, all I'm producing is code that is filed under the Zombies module. Any sort of frontend can be used so long as it can create a new instance of Zombies::Game and communicate with it. There's a simple demonstration console in the repository that I use, and once it's playable another IRC bot will be attached for network play.

The spirit of the game is pretty much what you'd expect from a Nethack player: it's rather detailed (you can get each hand bitten off) and statistics will only take you so far (zombies entering the room and clawing your face off on their first turn is a possibility).

If that sounds interesting, or you've got a patch, or just want to check out the code, visit it on GitHub: h0rs3r4dish's Zombies! 2