Ah no worries 
In JimD we trust, you make a great cult leader
All hail JimD!!! Nya
When do we drink the punch?? Nya
I was wondering if the story will only take place in one area, if not we be able to go to other states?
I wouldnāt go as far as a cult lol.
@adjppm1227 If individuals were required to be above average to survive and reproduce then that would mean that less than half of the species could survive and reproduce. I donāt think thereād be nearly as many humans as there are today if that was the case.
Itās not like a zombie āapocalypseā is such a big deal. Humanity have survived far worse in the past when they didnāt even have guns or antibiotics. Part of the reason I find traditional zombie media so hard to get immersed in is that zombies really are just humans whoāve been infected with a disease that removes the one trait thatās allowed the species to become the alpha predators of the known world. In a way zombie media shares a lot in common with religion.
So long as you establishāwhich you just haveāthat the MC has spent a lot of time with the child, the āguiding hand,ā if you will, that makes the MC stick by the child is inherently human nature (action by constant association via fear of change) and is nothing I can complain about.
I know what you mean when you say a writer can only handle so many choices. A couple times Iāve tried to make a game (my last game was actually going well, but I got bored with the repetition because of the little differentiations based on choice) and I realize how much a dramatic statistic would alter the scene. I believe I had several combat scenes where I used the phrase āyou instinctivelyā but then I remembered that I had given an Impulsive v. Restrained statistic. No extremely restrained person just instinctively does something. So I realized that I had to offer choices to the scene in accordance with the fact that they wouldnāt instinctively do something, and from there, what was supposed to offer perhaps three choices turned into a long chain that probably offered thirty (after accomplishing all choice paths) before I could logically terminate it where the character needed to be.
Also, you mentioned that thereād be NPCs to help the MC with the dependent child, which prompts me to thinking: Are we forced to go to a certain group? I recall, perhaps incorrectly, that if one survived in ZE1 they had to go with Emma and Heather and the others (itās been a while since Iāve played, so I forget their names) to the island. While this is the correct choice, or rather, the best choice, itās still not the choice I want to make, per se. (Even if the city is infested, I donāt want to go to an island I know nothing about. If itās a strictly residential island, thereās probably no native farmland left.) However, in CoZ we were allowed to choose between two groups (three, but one always strangely lost. >.<); albeit the story always terminated on the island (unless you died), the choice to go somewhere as opposed to elsewhere was refreshing.
And I hate to be this guy who asks, but do you have any idea when the update is coming? Such a great game and waiting is killing me. 
Youāll find that during the times of the Bubonic Plague, twenty-five percent of the European population died. The Bubonic Plague did not get up and chase you after the host was dead.
In normal times, youāre logic would be right. If only fifty percent survived, the population would generally remain the same, and it clearly is not. However, apocalypse is not normal times. The mass infection effect is widely powerful. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that we live in a city of one million people over (this number might be off) over fifty square miles.
1,000,000/50=20000. Assuming that the plague, of any kind, starts in an area of high traffic, you can have 20000 people exposed in a matter of, say, hours? I would estimate approximately one to two hours. But this event occurred with just one carrier. You now have 20000 carriers and 49 square miles. If it took one carrier two hours to infect 20000 people, it will take 20000 carriers approximately 14.4 minutes to infect the remaining 980000 people. I think the math works as:
1 carrier can infect 20000 others in 120 minutes.
408 carriers can infect 980000 others in X minutes.
Find the value of X.
1=20000 in 120
408=8160000 in 120
980000ā¦8160000
------- = ------
Xā¦120
8160000X=117600000
Divide by: 8160000
X=14.41176 minutes.
So, in essence, 1000000 infected in 2 hours, 14.4 minutes. I donāt think the spread rate is *that* overrated.
@JimD I had never reach the underwater sceneā¦ Maybe later. But, can zomb-heads survive underwater??? Some kind of floaters maybe???
@JimD For the pool party scene isnāt it possible to run after Goth girl when she loses? (Also is it possible to win the game?)
Does the race,scars etc. Change the actual game play or is it just there for details. :>
@adjppm1227 People donāt just become zombies, they have to be bitten, then die, then come back to life. Moreover they have to escape so that they arenāt eaten before they can turn. The means by which a zombie type virus spreads is just ridiculously inefficient. Look, itās horror entertainment media. Thatās all well and good. If you like turning your brain off and being scared then go ahead. Hell, zombie stories can even be thought provoking, teach us about human nature, but donāt mistake this fantasy for having any reality beyond that which you give it in your mind.
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Can someone post the link please?
@adjppm1227 A zombieās top predator, major(or only depending on what zombie lore you are choosing) food source and only means of reproduction is an uninfected human being. Any person with a basic knowledge of evolution will realize just how shitty of a chance a zombie has of surviving long term.
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@adjppm1227 a theorical Zombie virus was studied by virologists in a discovery channnel doc . They say never could cause that level of apocalypse seen on films due inefficient spread rate. the spanish flu, the black blight were millions killers only because they spread by air . Zombie virus has a real parallel rabies that transformed sujects in agressive psychos and end cause the subject dead , that illness was in Earth since forever, and no apocalypse yet, but if you mutate the virus to spread by airā¦ humanity would be dead.
@Iconic_De multiple areas. Iām still working on which states, but yes, the player will be travelling.
@adjppm1227 eventually you will be forced into certain situations and must join groups but those groups will be dynamic. Like in ZE, you will take in some new members, kick out others, people will die. You will again have impact on who comes and goes, lives and dies.
Next update is likely at least a week away, as I am prioritizing work on my other title.
@theNoobZHead when you encounter them, you are submerged in water, and they walk through it to attack or pull you under. Itās a tough scene.
@gollum yes if you choose full profile, people will ask about your scars or tattoos, or judge you on race/ethnicity as happens in real life.
Are we aloud to suggest locations?
Iām not trying to suggest that the spread mechanism is effective, Iām just contending that itās not āridiculously inefficient.ā The fact remains that if you put a large number of people in a condensed area, inject a moving virus, and let the virus spread, then youāre going to notice that the virus willāinitiallyāspread quick, if only because people do not know what to do about it. A few things are simply ridiculous about a classic āzombie,ā I admit. Foremost, any infectious disease that takes control of the host for the point of spreading the disease is not going to kill what the host is attacking. Thatās obvious. Additionally, the disease, to be successful, would have to be able to distinguish other infected bodies so that the two could move and work together. The idea that the zombies would be just meandering about as though some lifeless drones, not noticing or cooperating, is ridiculous.
However, if we do put an infected person such as Iāve described in a densely populated area and let them loose to spread the disease, I should imagine that it will spread quickly, if we accept the points that people will panic, that people will, for the most part, separate, and that people will not learn how to deal with these creatures until it is too late. Of course, the creatures wouldnāt be effective in *this* time period once they infect a city because people would notice a city of seemingly inhuman creatures with human bodies roaming around and respond accordingly.
I few things I would have to find wrong with your assertion.
First: A zombieāperhaps I am misinterpreting youādoes not reproduce. The viral cells that exist in the cells of the zombie reproduce (assumedly, some cells of the brain must still be active and thus the virus could reproduce in them; however, my virology could be wrong there). As a matter of fact, the longer a human is infected, the closer they become to being the zombie but never actually becoming the zombie, for being a full zombie in the correct sense would dictate that all your cells are made up of the virus.
Second: You assume a zombie requires nutrients. Assumedly, the viral cells in the zombie do, but those are so minute in comparison to the size and amount of cells we have that Iām sure the ingestion of a small animal by the host would feed the virus for some time, assuming that the virus has mitochondria, ribosomes, and a nucleus or pseudo nucleus.
Three: Define long-term. Pikaia gracilens (those two words should be italicized) lived during the Cambrian Explosion and is traceable as a crude ancestor to humans . . . from about 525 million years ago. Furthermore, modern members of the Crocodylinae (italicized) family have remained relatively unchanged for years. However, both of these examples were not microorganisms. For microorganisms to survive this long, they clearly need to adapt to better exist in there host. The zombie virus clearly wouldnāt work long term because the virus either destroys everything before it can evolve or evolve in such a mannerism that it must move to a new sort of host, thus making their current hosts pointless. However, their current hosts can only, generally speaking, infect the same type of host, if the current host is that which was a human. Of course the virus could not survive that long. Anyone who believes that a fish can give birth to a human (*shutter* scientific illiteracy) could have told you that. I never contented otherwise.
Assumedly, the first host could not have been infected by another host (for the same reason, the first cell could not have come from another cell). Clearly the virus can spread by other means and that is just never mentioned in stories because that part is boring. I would contend that the virus can almost undoubtedly spread by either air or water. How else would it have infected the *first* host (which inherently does not need to be a human unless the virus is able to survive only in humans)? The only defense I can see for you is evolution that caused the first viral cell to become such as classically described, but thatās more evolution towards extinction than evolution towards success. No; simply, it must be that the virus can spread by means other than contact infection or it would not be a successful virus. Unless, of course, it acts in a manner such as HIV, remaining undetectable in the human body for X period so that it can spread to other hosts without the actual host developing symptoms. Then in follows that the oldest host develops symptoms, and perhaps the virus stimulates the host to release a hormone, causing all other carriers to develop symptoms and so forth.
Do forgive any scientific illiteracy (I try to avoid it, but understanding all of science isnāt easy), Iām writing on the run.
So essentially what youāre saying is that eventually I will be forced into a certain group but if I meet the group at time X they will be different than if I meet them at time Y? And that if I meet them at time Y (assuming the timetable flows X:Y:Z), I can influence them in such a way that they will be different at time Z as opposed to if I had never met them?
Also, if weāre adding NPCs, will some of them be acting in a manner negative to me?
Canāt wait for the update! XD for this great game.
@adjppm1227 Evolution is merely the process by which life forms change over time in an attempt to survive and reproduce more successfully. Sometimes the changes arenāt successful. Thatās why things go extinct. A virus doesnāt know that a change will or will not be successful before it happens. I mean, weāre millions of times smarter than viruses and we canāt even tell that reliably. How is something without a single brain cell supposed to do it?
The virus could possibly be the result of human evolution. Specifically, our evolution of the trait of creating things to kill others of our species, that can do so without our direct input. Chemical weapons are a very common zombie virus origin.
The outbreak in this particular story didnāt even start in the US, but started in Africa, and then was somehow allowed to spread throughout the US. Even if it did start in some large US city, people wouldnāt all just start panicking and letting themselves be bitten. The whole point of fear is to keep you out of danger. Furthermore, thereās the simple fact that zombie media is so freakishly prevalent in our society. If a zombie outbreak somehow occured in reality despite all of science as we know it, people have been conditioned by popular culture to recognize the signs. Sure theyāve also been conditioned to believe that thereās nothing they can do to prevent it, but thatās just because itās horror media. The point isnāt to be reasonable, itās to instill irrational fear and dread.