The fights are starting to look fair :D

I've been able to get most of the combat done today. I added in the blood effects for the pistol, sub and shots along with adding in ammo for the sub and shot. I've decided that the player has unlimited pistol ammo, don't ask why or how just be thankful, this was mostly to get around the difficulty of some zombies and how both attacks were needed to get past some tougher zombies healing. I fixed the exp bar at the top and the addition of the exp for the final zombie kill. I also was able to greatly improve the zombie AI along with it's stats generating around a more reasonable level. I also added a combat stats screen that shows up once all zombies have been defeated, this shows you the exp you have, still need along with the ammo and money you've found and how much you now current now have. I have just a few finishing touches like adding a finished button to the combat stats screen. I also have to clean up some of the animations and attacks.

I think you lost an arm there....

Working on combat, I have a lot of other projects on the go now so it's not going as quickly as I wanted. The zombie that appears is randomly selected however it's only currently from a list of three. A function is then called inside the enemy class that assigns all of it's stats like attack strengths, hp and lvl.
I was able to get to so that the player can scroll through the weapons they currently have, select which they want then attack. It plays the corasponding animation and the selected weapon appears in their hand. The 'blood level' in the zombies heart also goes down depending on what percent of it's maximum hp it's currently at. After the melee and gun attacks have been made it plays a function in the enemy class that; using data like it's different attack strengths, it's current hp, the players current hp and a bit of random math; chooses an attack and plays that animation for either it's ranged, melee or healing. I'll update with a video later :D

Hallways And Room Upgrades

It's only Tuesday but I'm posting again, I've gotten all the remaining hallways and rooms finished, just the computer pods left. I also drew up all the upgrades for the weapons. I'm falling behind slightly, haven't started my student or zombie animation yet, but at the same time I'm getting a lot done and have more work in my other classes then I thought I'd have.

This upcoming week I'm hoping to finish off the rest of my graphics and then I'll be able to sit down and tackle the animation. I was talking to Ayla, my girlfriend of four years, and she was telling me that someone in her class was using flash and discovered a tool that allows characters to be linked together, allowing for easier animation. I'm going to definitely check this out before I start animation, if it works like I understand, then it will end up saving me a lot of time and frustration.

Weapon Upgrades

Combat Screen

This week hasn't been as productive as last week, too many other projects and meeting going on, however I did get all 15 weapons created, the combat screen layout and graphics finished and several hallways drawn.

One problem I did run into was when I was placing all the weapons into the students hands for the combat screen. The MP3 player that I had drawn for the first tier of blunt weapons just didn't fit into his hand like I wanted, causing the hit zone to be way off from the Baseball-Bat and Crowbars hit zones. This would mean that I'd have to create two different attacking animations for the blunt weapons, and I'm already looking at around 9 animations for the students so I just changed the MP3 player to a Hammer, and switched out everything that had the MP3 player with the Hammer.

I feel like I haven't fallen behind schedule yet, however I will need to put quite a few hours into this next week to stay on track.

Week 1 of Zombie RPG

So my project has been approved and I'm now into creating the assets for the game. I've drawn the rough working versions for the four students and the twelve zombies. I've also drawn the rough working version for the chibis of the students, the four zombie types and the two parents. For each set of three zombies, it takes me about two hours to get them from a rough sketch to bodies that are colored and can be animated; the chibi's took about thirty minutes each.

One thing that I started using a lot was the swap button for graphics, this would allow me to just duplicate a zombie and all the body parts, then just change the individual parts and swap them out on the duplicated zombie, saving about 10 minutes with each zombie skin, just setting up the body structure and creating new graphics for all the moving parts.

Something that I noticed after doing several zombies was the speed it took, to go from the rough idea to a working rough section, was decreasing and I was creating cleaner drawings quicker. I'm glad to see some improvement after just one week, who knows where I'll be by the end of this product.