Demo for Outbreak Infected

Hosted Games Works In Progress
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I’m writing a book called Outbreak: Infected, and I’d appreciate some feedback. You play as a male, female, or nonbinary person trying to survive the zombie outbreak. The MC will start off their apocalyptic journey as infected. However, they aren’t like any normal zombie out there. While the other infected are mindless, hungry, feral, flesh-craving creatures who aren’t considered to be human anymore, you have control over your urges. You can either gather infected/zombies and try to work with them, help survivors, join a group of bandits, start a cult, help find a cure, just try to survive, or a combination of those!

WARNING: This story includes blood, gore, and violence. Reader discretion is advised

Word count: 63,737 words (excluding code)

Chapter 1 length: 62,630 words

Chapter 2 length: 1,107 words

Updating schedule: Once a week on Fridays

This week’s progress:

  • Finished character customization

What I need help with right now: How’s the pacing? Are the options realistic and diverse enough for your playstyle(s), or do you need more choices? The story is in the very early stages, and I’ve only worked on the doctor’s path as of now, but I’d appreciate any feedback you have for that portion!

Side note: Things that I say and plan for are subject to change.

To play the demo, go here: https://dashingdon.com/play/theconfusedtissue/outbreak-infected/mygame/

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Just played it and I believe you have enough customization options. You did have an error when picking your gender, you put female twice.

Can’t wait to see the updates, interesting premise.

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An interesting starting point! Although you misspelled the male option as female and also were pronouns set to false? When I checked the stats! :slight_smile: Customizations are enough but if you’d like to expand it more to a specific one I suggest body types, Clothing style, facial markings, tattoo or piercings. Just so if should you change your mind and add more! I look forward to your next updates <3

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interesting demo so far keep up the good work :ok_hand: :+1: :grin:

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And as I said in the Interest Check thread, I AM HERE LMAO. You’ve got the customization pretty downpat HOWEVER if you wanna go more in depth or make it ‘pretty’ I guess, sorry if that came out wrong I have trouble finding the right words sometimes, you could add shades of color to what you already have. The customization is pretty good but when looking at what you have for hair colors it looks a bit bare bones, you could add options like strawberry blonde, auburn, ginger, etc to spice it up a bit and make it more appealing if you want. Other than that the demo is pretty good so far for what you have but I have a question, is it also possible to have a college or high schooler option/background to choose?

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I might include those in the future, but as of now I have no plans for it.

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Thanks for pointing that out! It was an error in the coding, but I believe I’ve got it fixed now.

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In the description of the hair you can add the description of the length of the hair since for men and women the words that describe the length of the hair by themselves. To know medium you can say that the length reaches the shoulder and long for lengths beyond the shoulders.
In skin tones you can describe it by comparing the color with something that has the same color. You can follow this skin tone chart.
image
Skin tones that best describe in my opinion to contribute without intention of being racist:
-Pale skin
-Clear skin
-Olive Leather
-Brownish skin
-Milk Chocolate Leather (as the drink)
-Coffee Leather (like the drink)

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You can follow this advice and take as a previous idea the zombie exodus games and explore the limits within the zombie genre in this type of stories.

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I like the concept of that, but it’s obviously way too short to give detailed feedback.

The customisation feels okay - I like to have more hair colors, and I’d replace the light skin tone by pale skin tone, but that aside, it seems fine to me.

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Please do not compare skin to food, specifically not to things like coffee, chocolate, or spices. Many indigenous people (particularly people of color) and their cultures were invaded and pillaged, sometimes destroyed, in order to take those things. Comparing people’s skin to food is not a good way to use description. Please check out resources like the writing with color Tumblr for better explanations and help if you are having trouble with descriptive terms for skin/hair.

EDIT: This is not a response specifically to @Francisco_Mendez, just a response to that specific suggestion.

EDIT 2: added the link.

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The truth is that I have a terrible memory to imagine skin tones and in my Spanish language the words to describe colors are also used to describe objects of that color, for example “cafe” in Spanish is the same for coffee and Brown. So unless you have other things of that color to imagine skin tones well I can’t use other metaphorical words to better imagine skin tones correctly.
How I mentioned it in my original comment, I did not intend to give a racist comment, as it is difficult to describe so many skin tones, so in my language they use objects that have the same color as color descriptions. There are even love poems from the viceregal era to describe the love between people of different castes, for example, an indigenous man describes him with cinnamon skin, with a heart as sweet as the same spice.

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I even tell you that in Mexico, people who have darker skin tones, instead of taking the offensive words you told me, take for example some precious metals such as copper or bronze. Even in their fervor for the pre-Hispanic era, they describe how the bronze race was before the conquest and the beginning of miscegenation.

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It wasn’t intended as any kind of attack on you personally, just an explanation and resources for accepted practices when writing in English. Other writers often look through WiP threads and take advice and criticism with them back to their own work as well. If a game made it past the staff’s publication practices (and I doubt it would) with skin tones described that way, it would certainly come up in reviews. That’s because it is generally accepted as offensive language, intended or not. I’m only explaining, not accusing. And I’m not trying to draw attention away from the actual WiP, just wanted to leave the link for anyone who needed it. I hope I didn’t make you feel attacked or like I was accusing of you anything; if so, I’m sorry, because that wasn’t the goal.

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Now this caught my eyes! I always like the idea of playing as a (half) zombie. It’s becoming too cliché to play as a human survivor in a zombie apocalypse, so this is definitely a step up. As Palpatine said: “We’ll watch your career with great interest”

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Do not worry. Like me, we wanted to contribute to our grain of sand for an interesting story and inadvertently it seemed the beginning of a heated debate about the use of skin tones. It was a good explanation that you gave me about what it means to describe this aspect of our bodies and I wanted to expose the context of why I and my close Mexicans do not take offensive to use words that are synonymous with others. For example, I think that to replace the wrong description of dark skin tones, it would fit between cinnamon and dark like copper skin. If there are better proposals, let her know that this is a free speech forum for a story that has the potential to be great.

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This is a very nice start! Your writing is very fluid and appealing to me. I’ll echo the other comments with regards to adding more depth in the character customisations. But that’s something really minor.

Some questions that desperately needs answering...

With the story revolving around virus mutation (or i assume that it is), will we have an option to turn into different types of zombies? Like a Left4Dead kinda zombies? If so, are there any ROs?

. . . are you catching my drift? :no_mouth:

Can’t wait to read more! Bookmarked!

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The zombies themselves will be pretty standard, and the RO’s will be survivors (since they’re the only ones not driven by mindless hunger aside from the MC). I appreciate your comment though, and I’m sorry to disappoint on that front, but I do intend to make the game fun regardless of my limitations.

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That’s not disappointing at all :slight_smile: It just gave me a clear idea how the story will be, and I’m here for the drama, moral dilemmas, and the beauty of surviving in an apocalyptic setting.

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Regarding character customization, would you consider the player to choose their physical attribute? It could play nicely to the stats and immersion. I’m not expecting in-depth character customization like Zombie Exodus or Breach, but nevertheless, I think it would be neat. :blush: :blush:

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