I was think about what makes a good zombie movie/game is the fact that people lose each other and the sadness that comes from that.
Although its a depressing idea I think that in people’s houses there might be notes to loved ones saying goodbye. This would add great immersion an hit home on what it means for you to be alive.
It also might be cool if your character had a family or girlfriend that you could add during customisation as another quest choice. Although the buggy NPCs probably die soon after finding them this would also add a huge morale boast when the family is discovered.
Implementation-wise, it would be fairly simple, we could have a few item types like “diary”, “letter”, etc that you either 'a’ctivate to read or have some kind of override for the description code so it displays the text when the item is examined in the inventory. These could then be hooked up to data files that have chunks of prose, so that any time one of these is spawned you get a random chunk of text attached to it. Then we’d probably throw it out to the community to write the prose that would be included in the game.
The player having a family would be much more complicated, not least of which from the fact that NPCs in general would have to work right first >_<
I would like the ability to tag and write on things, like paper, weapons, and walls. So I could engrave my katana and name it: Your Mother killing sword
I remember there was a spraypaint mod for vanila a while back. I believe it was run on eronarn’s ssh server for a while so it was neat seeing messages from other players.
In any case, flavor is good, and stumbling across writing helps with that. I certainly enjoyed reading the stories from The Mine and The Lab so if someone wrote some more “mundane” (though likely similarly twisted) stories to find wherever I think it would add positively to the game.
I’d think that reading a survivors diary would have some effect on morale. A boost from touching or uplifting notes, a penalty from paging through some psychopath’s kill list, and so forth.