Operation Fix Late Game By Killing You Before You Get There

[LeoIvanov]

tl;dr - individual GUI "minigame" for each window make for bigger threat when zombies have your house under siege. Force less escape routes in stressful scenarios, reward for patience, punish for hastiness. With illustration!

 

 

 

Before I could drift off to sleep or do something else and lose this line of thought - there's another thing that has struck me about the old, hand drawn spritey Zomboid times and why it was so terrifying seeing zombies crash through your doors.

 

Little options to escape. Back when doors were the ONLY way to get in and out of the house, any of us who've played the game were THANKFUL for a house that had an additional doorway. When you've carelessly ran through a city for whole day, bringing a horde on your safehouse during the evening, there was this dreadful feeling crawling up your spine - they are there, they are all there and you DON'T have a choice but to either fight them, or pray for luck and charge through a herd of deadheads, hoping that noone bites or scratches your sorry ass on your way out.

 

That doesn't seem to be the case anymore. In a new Muldraugh every house seem to have atleast 2 doors leading outside, tons of windows for each room with access outside, whenever a huge horde crashes into your party, the only thing you really are scared about is leaving your stuff behind (if it's your actual safehouse). If it isn't, you just immediately bail out of the house through some vacant window.

 

What if windows had a separate mechanic for opening/closing/locking/unlocking? Like a small mini-game that you have to go through every-time you want to access a window?

 

Make it a basic action - to unlock a window from inside, you have to clang the bolt to the side and push it open. To LOCK a window, you have to do the same action but in reverse. To OPEN a window, you'll have to simply hold LMB on a "handle" hotspot and push the window up, while to close it you have to do the opposite.

 

Let me illustrate my idea :

 

 

let me introduce you to the basic window Graphical User Interface, accessed from interior of the house.

1 - a "Handle" hotspot.

2 - a "latch" hotspot.

 

To "Unlock" a window, you have to :

 

- click-and-hold left mouse button on a red hotspot of the latch.

- Move the mouse up while still holding the LMB. ("clang")

- Move the mouse to the right. ("click")

 

To "Open" a window, you have to :

 

-click-and-hold left mouse button on a red hotspot of a window handle.

- Move the mouse up until the window opens.

 

Alternatively, you can hold LMB on ANY part of a lower half of the window and move mouse up to open it, but it doing it like this will take several tries to open fully. (Imagine dragging the mouse up, but instead of opening fully it will only open like 37% of the way up, making you release LMB and re-drag it again.)

 

 

And finally, HOW DOES THAT BENIFIT TO EVERYTHING ABOVE?

 

First of all, when in a situation of high panic ("Zombies crushing through my doors/stove is on fire and everything is burning, holy shit what the fuck do I do?! I have to get out!") it will FORCE them to act calm and take their time doing the task that they've already used to do in their day-to-day life in Zomboid. Clicking on that small clang to swing it open and then unlock the latch, reach for the handle and pull it up to open the window, then climb out of a window... When you are, as a player, panicking, taking things slow and steady is the last thing you want to do, and that is usually what makes you waste extra amount of time performing any kind of usual task. 

 

They will be put at the dilemma - "Do I try and get this window to open and risk getting eaten if it takes too long? Or would I rather take my chances and look for a door first? Few more seconds and zombies are going to chomp on me, but I still have time to open a window... Do I take extra second to cling on a handle and open the window, or should I not waste my time and spam-drag it up? Did I lock this window last night? Should I bother wasting my time escaping through locked window?"

 

Imagine a scene from Dawn of the Dead (The new one), when a woman fled to the bathroom with only 1 door and a tiny window as her escape routes. A door is occupied by her infected husband, and the only way out is the window. She panics and tries to open a window with her palms, pressing on a window, but because her fingers are damp in her husband's blood, she slips and takes extra time opening it. All the while her zombie husband is smashing at the door, nearly crumpling it apart. She barely manages to escape from there, unharmed. I WANT THIS in Project Zomboid, again.

[migulao]

I get really sleepy when I'm bored, but I also have sleeping issues so take that with a grain of salt.

Mmmmmh... Grain of salt...

 

[Viceroy]

For all the people saying zombies Are not difficult. Try it with insane # of zombies, sprinters, super human, and tough and that they can hear, smell and see you from 200 yards away. Then you find out its difficult for even veteran players. A simple scavenging mission can get you killed. Shit even with the walking type and with all those characteristics they will chew you up.

I like the game as it is. All i would love to see wpuld be the wondering packs of UD.

This won't do I'm afraid. The lore changing is out of the question when it comes to difficulty. It should be possible to cater to people who prefer the default lore but want enhanced difficulty. Changing the lore to make it harder is unreasonable if you ask me, it would be akin to saying that if the game is too easy you should stop barricading. It is a rudimentary workaround in my opinion.

[Badpaladin]

Hello every one. Long time lurker, first time poster here. Reading some of ideas here, I think there really only one solution. I think farming has to go. I played one game where I went to farm and built it up to live there  a long time. After about 6 months was bored out of my mind as a player and went back to town with a few weapons and killed zombies till I died. No matter how good they write the AI, player will find spot to camp,fort up, and farm.

 

If we want to try and make long term survial possible up to a point I think we need to add 2 new items. MRE and can goods. MRE can come from a military surplus store and possible from house of a survial nut as your exploring etc as a example. Can goods from same and toss in the local grocery store as well. This let a more experince player conserve good long term food for the final "This is how I died story......".

 

Heck fishing and maybe trapping may have to go as well depending on good they produce food as well. Just my 2 cent for folks.

[Kajin]

Hello every one. Long time lurker, first time poster here. Reading some of ideas here, I think there really only one solution. I think farming has to go. I played one game where I went to farm and built it up to live there  a long time. After about 6 months was bored out of my mind as a player and went back to town with a few weapons and killed zombies till I died. No matter how good they write the AI, player will find spot to camp,fort up, and farm.

 

If we want to try and make long term survial possible up to a point I think we need to add 2 new items. MRE and can goods. MRE can come from a military surplus store and possible from house of a survial nut as your exploring etc as a example. Can goods from same and toss in the local grocery store as well. This let a more experince player conserve good long term food for the final "This is how I died story......".

 

Heck fishing and maybe trapping may have to go as well depending on good they produce food as well. Just my 2 cent for folks.

That's an awful idea. You can't just remove ways to get food. Your character will eventually starve to death after you've looted everything on the map, and that's no way to treat your players. Hey, thanks for playing the game long enough to get good enough to survive this long! But now you've reached the end, so time to starve to death! It'd be like removing all the weapons from the game and forcing your players to push the zombies away without killing them.

[Rathlord]

Maybe a more constructive compromise could be reached for farming. As it stands, there is indeed a problem with how easy it is to farm, as it completely negates the food concern. However, that's just not how it works in real life- and I don't see any reason to stray from real life for the game in this situation since it's actively detracting from gameplay quality.

 

Instead of just removing it, why not simply make it take much longer? Even short-gestation corn takes 90 days or some such. Farming should be a great way to supplement your food, but I can't think of any pre-Modern Era civilizations that managed to sustain themselves solely on farming, simply because it isn't practical without mass produced means of preserving it.

[Kajin]

I'd compromise by making farming tiles produce a fair bit less food and take a little bit longer to grow (not quite up to real life times, but as it stands now farming is way too quick) so you'd require more land to get the job done and feed yourself. I'd also suggest streamlining the farming process a little bit so it's not so damn boring. Make it so the characters dig out larger plots or long rows and have farm tending actions concern that whole plot or that whole row so it's not so click intensive. Still time intensive and exhausting for the character, but less click intensive. That's the biggest frustration for me, the fact that I have to do so much damn clicking.

 

As it stands with foraging, trapping and fishing we have enough options for food gain in the short term to keep our characters alive long enough to see the day of harvest.

 

 

Farming should be a great way to supplement your food, but I can't think of any pre-Modern Era civilizations that managed to sustain themselves solely on farming, simply because it isn't practical without mass produced means of preserving it.

I did some research into this and apparently, in order to be completely self sustaining on just farming alone, you'd need about an acre and a half to two acres of land to feed a family of four comfortably. More if the land is infertile. And it's a lot of backbreaking, labor intensive work to get that food because one acre of land alone is 43,560 square feet. You'd need a silo to store the food and a drying barn to dry out the crops as well, but it's definitely possible.

 

Having animals helps a lot, I imagine.

[Viceroy]

I agree with Rathlord and I'd like to see it take longer or even realistic periods of time. Preservation should indeed be possible realistically (Salting, smoking, drying etc. etc.) but the time it takes is the key factor you see, because let's take for example Banished, I'm sure lots of you are familiar. It has a simple premise to not die from starvation, and preservation is not a factor (as food does not rot like in PZ) so essentially you have an easier set of circumstances than PZ. However and this is vital, the time it takes for food to be produced is large enough that it starts becoming harder and harder to anticipate just when you do have food and when not. Resulting in a very difficult game in terms of things going south. Now apply this to pz...

 

Then what will happen is looting and whatever means of preservation and hunting etc. etc. will make up for your food when you have nothing to harvest or eat, possibly for weeks or months. This is where the gameplay gets boosted, for the simple reason that you MUST find food whilst your plants grow. You must loot, you must hunt, you must rob or steal or do something. And this forces the player to move away from safe territory and into unexplored territory. This is what we need to combat the ease of building a castle-like keep. This will (IMO) make the game more entertaining because it breaks monotony, it combats turtling, it exposes the player to hazards.

 

It is a change I very firmly agree with. Simply changing plant growth time to a realistic timeframe (or even just sufficiently extended.)

One change and I am willing to bet on it making most if not all of my predictions above true to some degree.

 

Now this does not yet touch on zombie difficulty and that is a good thing, because this level of difficulty in *management* and *thinking* is the same kind of problem a group would face, player or npc. Because take just one moment to imagine the game with the crops growing at the speed they now do... Except you have a castle AND a NPC tending to the crops... Seeing what I am worried about? Unending food and essentially your own ingenuity and success have rendered the game mundane and boring.

 

I sincerely hope that at the very least it is considered or if there is some variable to adjust the global food crop growth rate, that it is exposed at the very least in sandbox settings.

[Packbat]

Maybe a more constructive compromise could be reached for farming. As it stands, there is indeed a problem with how easy it is to farm, as it completely negates the food concern. However, that's just not how it works in real life- and I don't see any reason to stray from real life for the game in this situation since it's actively detracting from gameplay quality.

 

Instead of just removing it, why not simply make it take much longer? Even short-gestation corn takes 90 days or some such. Farming should be a great way to supplement your food, but I can't think of any pre-Modern Era civilizations that managed to sustain themselves solely on farming, simply because it isn't practical without mass produced means of preserving it.

 

I actually looked up a University of Kentucky PDF about home gardening a while back - it seems to have a lot of the data that you're talking about, especially in the "One Garden Plot: Three Garden Seasons" chapter. Going through the crops that exist in-game, only radishes can be grown from seed in as little as a month, and of the remaining, only broccoli in less than two ... and broccoli is supposed to be started indoors and transplanted.

 

...you know, I didn't look at this PDF before. If there are any gardener-slash-game-designers reading, you could probably make some truly awesome contributions to Project Zomboid by pulling out various practical suggestions (e.g. the vegetable storing advice) and boiling them down into usable game mechanics.

[Blasted_Taco]

I agree with Rathlord and I'd like to see it take longer or even realistic periods of time. Preservation should indeed be possible realistically (Salting, smoking, drying etc. etc.) but the time it takes is the key factor you see, because let's take for example Banished, I'm sure lots of you are familiar. It has a simple premise to not die from starvation, and preservation is not a factor (as food does not rot like in PZ) so essentially you have an easier set of circumstances than PZ. However and this is vital, the time it takes for food to be produced is large enough that it starts becoming harder and harder to anticipate just when you do have food and when not. Resulting in a very difficult game in terms of things going south. Now apply this to pz...

 

Then what will happen is looting and whatever means of preservation and hunting etc. etc. will make up for your food when you have nothing to harvest or eat, possibly for weeks or months. This is where the gameplay gets boosted, for the simple reason that you MUST find food whilst your plants grow. You must loot, you must hunt, you must rob or steal or do something. And this forces the player to move away from safe territory and into unexplored territory. This is what we need to combat the ease of building a castle-like keep. This will (IMO) make the game more entertaining because it breaks monotony, it combats turtling, it exposes the player to hazards.

 

It is a change I very firmly agree with. Simply changing plant growth time to a realistic timeframe (or even just sufficiently extended.)

One change and I am willing to bet on it making most if not all of my predictions above true to some degree.

 

Now this does not yet touch on zombie difficulty and that is a good thing, because this level of difficulty in *management* and *thinking* is the same kind of problem a group would face, player or npc. Because take just one moment to imagine the game with the crops growing at the speed they now do... Except you have a castle AND a NPC tending to the crops... Seeing what I am worried about? Unending food and essentially your own ingenuity and success have rendered the game mundane and boring.

 

I sincerely hope that at the very least it is considered or if there is some variable to adjust the global food crop growth rate, that it is exposed at the very least in sandbox settings.

 

You just took what i was about to post that.

Farm should be an addition to your current food supply, a potato should take around 4 to 5 weeks, in the mean time you need to loot to sustain youself, and also you should need to find the soil for farming, normal backyard dirt wont do for some stuff, like carrots.

 

The farming really needs a nerf with the times it takes and how easy is to sustain yourself on it, imagine if PZ farming was like that in real life, we would be autosustainable 

 

Back then when they were first talking about farming, i always imagine it like having a little pot plant with a plant growing insde in the rooftop of a apartment and having to go out of my way to loot chips in a store to live long enough to eat whatever is growing in that pot.

 

I guess 4 to 3 weeks could be good? I mean pretty much you would need to survive 1 month on pure hunting, looting to be rewarded to eat your fresh food that should give a bonus because is fresh after so much time.

[k12314]

Maybe a more constructive compromise could be reached for farming. As it stands, there is indeed a problem with how easy it is to farm, as it completely negates the food concern. However, that's just not how it works in real life- and I don't see any reason to stray from real life for the game in this situation since it's actively detracting from gameplay quality.

 

Instead of just removing it, why not simply make it take much longer? Even short-gestation corn takes 90 days or some such. Farming should be a great way to supplement your food, but I can't think of any pre-Modern Era civilizations that managed to sustain themselves solely on farming, simply because it isn't practical without mass produced means of preserving it.

 

Mix trapping, fishing, and farming. Infinite food, but lots of hard work, and plenty of errors you gotta account for.

[Kajin]

Okay, a couple of additional thoughts on the whole farming issue. Extend the time to grow out to anywhere between a month and a half to three months (depending on how difficult we want to make things) and halve the amount of food each tile produces. Then add a bunch of daily upkeep tasks that triples the amount of food you get per tile on harvest, but only if someone is tasked with maintaining the fields on a near daily basis. Tasks like hoeing the ground to soften it up and promote good root health, pruning away damaged leaves and stems and removing weeds so that the crops have less competition for water, nutrients and sunlight. If current yield is two units of food per tile, the new figures should by one unit of food for untended fields and three units of food for fully tended fields.

 

All this together should vastly increase the amount of work necessary for making farming a completely self sustaining endeavor. Too much work for a solo survivor or a small group to ever achieve anything more than a supplement to their diets. Large groups should be able to protect and maintain large enough fields to become self sustaining, and that would entail a whole new array of problems and difficulties to overcome.

[Ohbal]

Okay, a couple of additional thoughts on the whole farming issue. Extend the time to grow out to anywhere between a month and a half to three months (depending on how difficult we want to make things) and halve the amount of food each tile produces. Then add a bunch of daily upkeep tasks that triples the amount of food you get per tile on harvest, but only if someone is tasked with maintaining the fields on a near daily basis. Tasks like hoeing the ground to soften it up and promote good root health, pruning away damaged leaves and stems and removing weeds so that the crops have less competition for water, nutrients and sunlight. If current yield is two units of food per tile, the new figures should by one unit of food for untended fields and three units of food for fully tended fields.

 

All this together should vastly increase the amount of work necessary for making farming a completely self sustaining endeavor. Too much work for a solo survivor or a small group to ever achieve anything more than a supplement to their diets. Large groups should be able to protect and maintain large enough fields to become self sustaining, and that would entail a whole new array of problems and difficulties to overcome.

 

There is a lot of people complaining about the clic-madness related to Farming as is it right now. 

 

I think there could be some stuff added, like the so many times suggested compost box, which you could use on your crops to produce bigger harvests.

 

However, complicating Farming and making it a full-mini-game on it self wouldn't cut it IMHO. I think we just need to adjust the time it takes for the plants to grow... and making it so depending on the month you are currently on your harvest will be more or less abundant. 

 

In any case, just increasing the time it takes may prove insufficient as well. I could just plant a few tiles each week to make sure every week I would have fresh food. It would be just  a matter of timing different tiles to get a constant fresh production. 

 

Making it impossible to grow in the winters would be something. You introduce the need to stockpile.... but I think that we need to find other reasons for the player to abandon their safe houses. I think we will always be able to exploit farming, one way or the other. 

 

Cheers!

[Suomiboi]

Good points on the farming and I couldn't agree more on most of these! Longer farming is a must imo. A survival game needs to feel like you actually have to do something to survive. Not just farm and be merry.

 

I somewhat liked Kajin's idea of adding more options to make the food grow more abundantly, but I'd maybe limit those options to a high farming skill and/or a farmer profession/hobby. Again as said before, this would create diversity for the group dynamics.

 

And for Ohbal, there are also those people who like the clickfest, due to the rewards, so why not allow it for them. The point would be making the farming stuff fun while giving you something in return for the time.

[Kajin]

Not sure what you're saying, in regards to making it a mini-game. I never suggested that. In fact, one of my last couple of posts went over the concerns of too much clicking and how this could be streamlined (mostly concerning plot management and having crop maintenance actions cover whole rows of food at once instead of just individual tiles). Farming still needs to be harder and more labor intensive to get full use out of it, but anyone who wants to devote all of their time to it should be able to have a more streamlined experience to ease the burden placed on them by the clunky interface.

 

But yeah, a more streamlined way of handling farming that involves less clicking is almost certainly a given at this point. I'd love to be able to designate a whole area or row as one big plot of land for farming and just tell my character to tend to that whole section at once in order to ease the burden on the player's end. And if you're gonna streamline it to make it less difficult like that, you might as well add a whole bunch of new farming tasks that'll give more depth to the chore that it currently is. Might even make it interesting. Pruning, weeding, and hoeing like I said. Composting like you said. Stuff like this would be far less of a pain with a more streamlined gardening interface like the one proposed, but it would also add to the much sought after difficulty spike by making gaining food take more effort on the survivor's behalf.

[Viceroy]

Perhaps make crop tending actions have an area of effect instead of simply one tile. That way you don't need to arrange data into structures denoting farming zones that are linked, but instead can judge for yourself where to water or spray or what have you, but instead of one square it is 3x3 centered on you. Something like that. Maybe. Farming isn't my forte though so take it on face value.

[Suomiboi]

Perhaps make crop tending actions have an area of effect instead of simply one tile. That way you don't need to arrange data into structures denoting farming zones that are linked, but instead can judge for yourself where to water or spray or what have you, but instead of one square it is 3x3 centered on you. Something like that. Maybe. Farming isn't my forte though so take it on face value.

I'd prefer connected strips like Kajin suggested. This gives me somehow a very gamey feeling...

[Kajin]

A three by three area of effect would definitely be a massive step in the right direction, but I'm not sure how much it would help. Remember, every decrease in the viability of farming to provide adequate sustenance will translate directly into a much larger area of land required in order to assure self sufficiency. With some of the proposed changes, having only a three by three area of use could actually leave the player in a worse position, interface-wise, than as compared to where they are now.

[Viceroy]

Not quite sure what constitutes 'gamey' though, but the connotation seems to be abhorrently negative.  As I said I find farming to be so fucking boring to be honest I rarely ever do it in game, and the click-fest is a large contributor to it, so I'd be in favour of any way of streamlining it.

 

EDIT: Ninja'd by kajin so this is my response to him. Indeed I agree with what you are saying, especially when it comes down to the finer points of managing a large area. Ideally you'd want to be able to maintain large fields (as a group.) and it's true that the only logical and streamline way would be to treat the entire field as an arbitrary unit of size that is maintained in one fell swoop. So I agree that it would be better to be able to designate a 'field' much like one would in DF for instance.

 

If the growth time is realistic and the working field size nears realistic proportions, the scale of unexpected trampling and damage on the field becomes greater and harder to manage without tending or at the very least overwatch. So I am in favour most certainly.

Edited October 16, 2014 by Viceroy

[EnigmaGrey]

Really, the simple way to decrease the click-fest is to make it less about individual plants and about areas of effect -- watering a whole group of plants, spraying a large number at once. Having these as actions for items rather than through the context menu could also improve farming to some extent, but would likely prove difficult to separate from combat.

[Kajin]

That seems like it might be a fair bit of hassle. Instead of area of effect, why not just row of effect? You set your character up to perform the action you want, then it plays an animation of your character walking up and down the row performing that action. Rinse and repeat for every chore that needs doing on every row you have. It's going to be a bit of a slog either way, but having it as one big action on the player's end seems like it might reduce a substantial amount of the associated annoyance involved with clicking.

[Rathlord]

Why not have each farming action work on the plant you click and every plant that's in a plot connected to it, but taking more time per tile?

[Kajin]

Seems like that might be more difficult to program over having one big plot, but I'm not a programmer so I wouldn't know how that all works. (I swear I say that so much it should be my title. Not A Programmer, but Definitely Fluffy?)

[Walther]

Why not have each farming action work on the plant you click and every plant that's in a plot connected to it, but taking more time per tile?

 

not too bad, but wouldnt it look odd when my char is standing there for a while, whilst all connected corn-crops get watered from the distance?

[Suomiboi]

 

Why not have each farming action work on the plant you click and every plant that's in a plot connected to it, but taking more time per tile?

 

not too bad, but wouldnt it look odd when my char is standing there for a while, whilst all connected corn-crops get watered from the distance?

 

Pathfinding should be quite easy to do in this situation... You'd just see the character wak to each crop and water them automatically.