this is sadly True Mara my Nephew & Brother both don’t like reading, & my brother is just 2 years younger than I am, I have tried to get both of them to read, tempting my my nephew with his favorite Genre which happens to be Zombies but he has yet to read ZE, CoZ, or Zombien.
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I think you must start with the Cog rivals With Zombie high school or whatever it’s called. I tried it and was terribly linear, simple and boring. But it’s written in a teens’ language has more pictures and a video gamey appearance. It is weird, but for me was video games who attract me to books. My dad were intelligent enough to play with me and for instance for monkey island when i was 6 he presented me the treasure island saying "See this guy it’s like Guybrush and he wants to be a pirate too. " Many parents blame video games and manga, but never tried watching them with their children.
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i’ll try that, thanks Mara.
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Hey @JimD I just recently bought Zombie Exodus and have been enjoying it so far. I have one question though that involves Heather’s relationship. I’ve been trying to trigger the scene where she enters your room after you save Carl but it hasn’t happened throughout several of my playthroughs. I’m playing as a guy and I’m taking her side any chance I get but I don’t get the scene and it just continues on to the month later chapter. Am I perhaps doing something wrong?
Thanks again for your time!
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Well, I’ve now played through Zombie Exodus, and I must say that despite my general lack of interest in the genre, I was quite impressed and even moved.
I did… I guess one and a half playthroughs, So I’m gonna talk about my story here.
[spoiler]Played as a scientist, Mark. I generally played as a nice enough fellow who wants everyone to like him and would’ve been a bit of a coward except where it comes to putting people at risk, which turns out to be almost all the time, so actually not much of a coward as it turned out.
Story picked up for me once I joined Emma and Heather, at which point I quite liked Heather and kept siding with her. Once we picked up Devlin my original thought was basically “well, he sounds cute, I wonder if he’s a romance option” followed by “no no no he’s a creep out of the car!”
Well, those reactions certainly changed.
Enjoyed getting to know the big cast of characters at the Cathedral. Heather gradually started annoying me more and more, though. For some reason I got really invested in trying to save Dave from dying but obviously that did not work. Next, awkward kiss with Heather. She took my lack of interest way rudely. Basically everything went downhill from there and she started annoying me more and more (but not in a poorly written way).
Probably my favorite early game bit of story was going with Mindy to see Devlin and Eugene (probably because it combines Mindy and Devlin, and I love those people.) At first Mindy didn’t seem like someone I’d be friends with, but then she was amazing. Devlin really made me squirm in my seat with all his comments about “I’m not abandoning Eugene, know what I mean?” I kept feeling like "I’m sorry! I thought you were a creep! I was looking out for Heather! Please don’t hate me :’( "
The other character I ended up liking in a major way was Candace (both before and after her character development). She was just, you know, nice, and so lab assistant-y and aw, happy friend time! I liked Emma for similar reasons too.
Well, at that point I liked Tom well enough too, but later events colored that opinion.
I welcomed River and Starr with open arms. Nice people. Sad that Uncle Lou didn’t like them 
Choose-your-own-missions was pretty exciting! I opted for supplies run with Mindy first, partly because it sounds super-important, but also because Mindy and Devlin (yay!). I went on the Emma thing, because if she says she’s got something important, then that’s something I’ll follow up on. I didn’t go very far in, though, because I wanted to respect her discomfort. And I went for food with Heather, because people need food. Not so much out of any desire to spend time with Heather. I was a little disappointed that there was no option with the dog to be like “well, I’m not a dog person, but I’m not a meanie who chases dogs off by throwing things at them.”
Awkward Tom romance offer was awkward, but at least he was nicer about it than his sister. Devlin’s offer of flirtation was, however, adorable. He gets surprisingly sweet. (And apparently Mindy was into me too, if Uncle Lou knew what he was talking about it. I must be a babe!)
I was really curious how Heather was going to react to my new boyfriend, considering she blatantly hated him, but then she died. I mean, yeah, there was a whole attack and stuff. (Clearly my priorities as a reader are relationships and characters more than fighting zombies XD )
So around the whole car crash plotline I generally took the line of “suspicious of Tom but innocent until proven guilty and also aw man I really trusted you, Tom.” I also felt a little bad because I’d just told Uncle Lou that Emma thinks of him like a father figure but didn’t choose to say that I did too… and then he was dead. I mean, I wouldn’t’ve felt that way, but it’s a nice thing to say before someone dies. Also Devlin’s big “Mark, don’t goooo <3” was pretty heartrending. This was another storyline I really liked, or I mean thought was well-written, because it wasn’t exactly happy reading. Especially Hadley because I tried to help her make it as far as possible, hoping maybe I’d be able to vaccine her or something (ignoring that that’s really not how vaccines work -_-).
Said I needed to talk to Tom and apparently shot him in self-defense. Could’ve gone worse, I guess.
So until this point I’d wavered back and forth like crazy on whether I should stay at the Cathedral. Great job for making this a difficult choice! What ended up deciding me was the desire to follow up on my medical work. But then everybody died. After messing around I realized that, yeah, I didn’t have enough defense to survive there. So turned out we all had to leave anyway.
Got that secret base ending. It seemed like a good ending overall, apart from the whole massacre thing that apparently happens just before the epilogue. The people I cared about the most made it to the end, which was nice. That’d be Candace, Mindy, Devlin and Emma. I think I was best friends with all of them except Devlin… despite being boyfriends, Devlin’s relationship score was always one of the lowest, I guess because of the whole leaving him to fend for himself in a zombie apocalypse thing I did.
I also died a lot, but you know, that’s to be expected.
Second try, I chose the missions I hadn’t done and focused on defense so I could stay in the Cathedral and cure the virus. But then Emma died. Very bittersweet ending there. I feel like Mark ended up a lot happier the first time around, despite the second time being the one where he achieved his great goal.
So yeah, definitely lots of room for emotion and characters I cared a lot about. I’ll be looking forward to checking out Safe Haven.
Characterization-wise, there are a couple points where Devlin confuses me… the biggest is when he’s ogling Heather at the beginning, despite the fact that he ended up apparently being gay in my playthrough; or was he bi? Maybe Heather was mistaken? It’s something I’d’ve liked to discuss, though.
Despite all his talk about not abandoning people, he was also awfully cavalier about the idea of going off with just me, him, Emma and Eugene and leaving the rest alone. And there I was feeling like “Candace and Mindy are to me like Eugene is to you it would feel to me like abandonment and I thought that was the whole thing you were against.”
[/spoiler]
Next I’ll be reading through the code to see what all I’ve missed, so I’ll plan on leaving more detailed feedback then. What level of feedback would be useful at this point, when the game itself is finished and you’re mostly working on another one? Mostly sticking to proofreading/continuity, or would you still be interested in other stuff too?
The big thing I remember at this point is that at one point Heather popped back to life. Just for a single line of dialogue. I forgot to note where, though. In the second run through, in the cure epilogue, there’s a point where Jasmine turns into Emma, and we also seem to act more like siblings than friends. I’ll make a closer note once I’ve seen the code.
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