Question: Diverse Zombies

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Hello,

I have this question and I am not sure where to post it. Sorry if making a seperate thread is too much.

Well, I am just wondering if it is our goal to eventually reduce the “regular” zombies to a minimum.
Right now we have plenty of special zombies.
However, is it our goal that at some point you’ll find teacher-zombies in schools, doctor/nurse zombies in hospitals, basketball player zombies, football zombies, grandma/grandpa zombies, postman zombies, mechanic zombies, skinny zombies, etc.?

I believe that could increase immersion, and even let players plan ahead more, as the player may think; okay, the teacher zombie might carry a useful book, I’ll try to kill it, but run from the grandma zombie as they give a morale penalty for killing. Or something along these lines.
All of this can be done with .json, which is very convenient, of course.

2

I don’t think there’s any plans to get rid of the generic zeds. They’re just supposed to represent adult civilian zombies with no particularly obvious profession or otherwise visibly distinctive features to set them apart from any other adult civilian.

So in your example, the teacher zombie and the grandma zombie would both fall under the heading of generic green capital Z because you can’t readily look at them and say ‘that one’s clothes obviously imply that she’s a -blank-’ the same way you can look at a police zombie and say ‘it’s obvious from the crusty uniform that this zombie started out as a cop’.

3

Okay, thanks for the reponse.

I didn’t want to abolish the regular Zombies though, just gradually replace more parts of them with diverse zombies, that:

a) have a certain profession/situation assigned to them and therefore according items
b) may spawn in certain areas for flavour

So, if I wanted to add a variety of zombies, which are the ones (perhaps even from my list), that are the most interesting?

4

I think the idea is that unless their equipment or mutations set them apart in terms of stats from regular zeds, they’re a regular zed.

It would be cool if there was a way to tweak what kinds of stuff dropped from zombies, based on where they spawned at.

5
equipment

Yeah, that’s what I meant. I guess you could find specific equipment for virtually every zombie type.
But does a different item set justify a new type of zombie? Or does it also has to have a unique ability or appearance (though, abilities can be added to match the type)?

6

no need to make it a new monster type, that just clutters things up, though we might add the clothes to the description at some point, so you can tell what the profession is from a distance.