The game will be developed mostly by myself when I have time. I have been designing this game when I had time for the last 1.5 years. I have tried many technologies to determine what route I should take in developing the game. I will be using proven technologies and I will be using alot of art from http://www.TurboSquid.com for the initial development.
The initial idea of Outbreak is to design a game where a player is not subject to stats to determine how fast they can level up. A player can waste alot of ammo with an automatic weapon to kill many zombies, but a player with an accurate bolt action rifle with careful aim can get more experience points per kill without wasting money on ammo. Currently, there is no "story" behind the game. For now, this game will be developed to be an endless zombie shooting spree.
Some basic key points currently developed or under development
- aiming system (holding breathe to shrink crosshair, different weapons affect the crosshair size)
- various skills a player can choose to level
- zombies will ragdoll on death
- zombies will have multiple hit zones
- experience points and damage reflected on where you hit the zombie
- looting
- many weapons/items to acquire from zombie drops/looting/in-game merchants
- 3rd person shooter style camera except the mouse moves independent of the view (much like most MMORPG's except this one is a real-time shooter; the player will shoot wherever the mouse pointer is located on the screen)
future development
- barricading
- item mall will be implemented eventually so you can purchase items
technology used
- Ogre3D Graphics Engine
- RakNet for networking
- OgreNewt wrapper for physics
- tinyxml
- BASS for sound
- Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 w/Visual Assist
- Blender 3D, the best free modeling/animation package
- Gimp, 2D image editor
- MySQL as the database (server will be developed using ODBC so any database can be used in the future)
Below I have a basic screenshot of the current state of the game. You can see a few player models in a ragdoll state.
