I need feedback on my game idea.

Hello. I'm in the very early stages of designing my game. There will be different worlds. Each world will be a terrain with buildings, roads, mountains, rivers, creeks, other small bodies of water, cities, farms, mansions, suburbs... Stuff like that. Enemies in the form of zombies and unfriendly people. Also there will be wild animals that can attack you in the wilderness. There will also be friendly people that can help you. But will you trust them? To survive and move on to the next world you have to find and defeat the boss of each world and then you must find the secret path leading to the next world and use the key obtained from the boss to unlock the next world. Each world will be more difficult than the last and I plan on making different versions of each world. The boss will be placed in one of 20 random locations as well as the secret path will be placed in 1 of 30 random locations. In order to find the boss you have to explore and you have to go to each of the 20 possible locations and solve the puzzle there to reveal if the boss is there. If there is no boss you might be attacked by zombies or other people instead. So watch out and be prepared to fight before entering each location. Each location will either be home to a horde of zombies, a group of people, or it will be animals. Other enermies might be mixed in but it will mostly consist of whatever the area's main inhabitance is. In order to find the secret path you have to look in houses, under water, in the wilderness, in other buildings, in the city. It could be anywhere. There will be clues but they won't be obvious.

If someone could also help me think of a good title I'd be grateful.

 

It sounds a bit repetitive.

I'd consider adding a story. Why am I fighting the bosses? Why am I in this world? Why do I want to go to the next world? I'd make the worlds significantly different from each other as well.

Just as an example off the top of my head:

Spoiler

Each of the worlds is actually a different planet, all linked together with some kind of gate technology (the path to the next world). At some point in the past a zombie outbreak occurs on one of the worlds, and quickly spread to all connected worlds. You're one of the few remaining scientists with a chance to reverse this plague, but you need to find the source of the original infection. You travel from world to world analyzing the infected, finding new technology to improve your analysis, find clues as to how to determine what world the infection started from, and once you get to that world you can use the blood from "patient zero" to formulate a cure. Each boss on each world would have some significant piece of the puzzle, while patient zero is the final world boss.

You could find minor pieces of the puzzle and new weapons or other technology from the uninfected people interactions, as well as some back story explained about a cold war between planets that never went hot but the zombie virus was created as a doomsday weapon but something went wrong leading to an uncontrolled release. Maybe there is some nefarious actor who orchestrated the release, maybe the one responsible for the release is actually patient zero.

Each world would be inhabited by different alien species, though one of the worlds would be humans, but each are infected with the same zombie virus. Alien species would have different physical traits, appearance, speed, strength, etc, so the zombies would be different from each other world to keep each new world somewhat fresh (fast zombies on one world, flying zombies on another, a water world with zombie fish maybe, 5 meter tall zombies on another, etc). The architecture, plant life, animals, sky, etc, would all be unique for each world.

 

Can we get it distilled down to three sentences? That's much easier way to start.

 

Explore the world to find items and kill zombies. Kill the boss to get the secret key and find the secret exit to complete the world. Repeat for the next world.

 

Initial feedback: please not zombies. It's 2019. Please.

 

Year without zombies? You joking?

To OP:
Is there any specific goal, that you try make game unique somehow? Or just put some mashups thought together?

I am asking, because your idea is at most generic, for what is available already out there.
I mean, personally I don't feel excitement from brief description.

But best, is just start building some basics gameplay as prototype and see where you can go with it.

 

Another thing to do when defining a game idea is say what style of game it is. For example, is it a first person shooter, a 3D person cover shooter, a top down strategy, a 2D pixel art platformer, etc? In theory, a zombie game could be any of those game types and more.

Next, will the game be action, simulation, strategy, survival, etc? Will there be RPG elements? What will success and failure conditions be for a typical level? Will there be items to pick up? Will the items wear out?

Are there specific similar games that you can compare and contrast your game with?

Do you have any sample images created yet for your idea? How about a short video?

 

Legend of Zombies - Breath of the Undead.

 

Could be great, could be garbage- It all depends on how well you implement it.

 

Guys this will be my first completed game. It will be free if I do release it publicly. I don't plan on it being a big hit. I just want to get something completed and out there. It's my hobby. I've bought almost $700 in assets. I just love all my assets. I'm going to use a lot of them in my game. Not all but a lot of them. In addition to this one I'm also working on a 3D Mario game of my own. It's been a dream of mine to make my own 3D mario game for a long time. And obviously I won't be able to make any money off that either but it's not about the money. It's about having fun. And maybe some day I will be able to sell a game. Who knows?

This game will be a first person type of game.

I haven't been working on the game a lot lately. I've just been playing around in unity and thinking of ideas. I've been building a pretty nice asset collection. Been watching youtube a lot and learning new things. I'm also wanting to try to learn Blender so I can make my own models and increase my asset collection even more for free. Something else I've been doing is taking pictures of things close up and making materials out of them. I found a website to generate the normals and everything and it looks suprisingly good in unity.

 

Zombies can be fun, No more room in hell is a perfect example of a good zombie game.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/224260/No_More_Room_in_Hell/

edit: what makes that game good is coop, slow zomibes, high probably of dying from a single zombie bite, low ammo supplies

 

Sorry but I stopped after reading zombies. There literally isnt a more cliched, overused trope in all of game design.

I am sure you want to and are trying to make a good game, but adding zombies to it is not going to help in that. For a lot of people these days it yells "boring" because there are 10000+ of zombie games, literally at least 10 released daily.

Pick something more original and you will already be off to a great start compared to what you wrote.

Not saying there are not good zombie games, just that it is overused and therefore makes it even harder to seem original and stick out from the crowd. In 2019 with an oversaturated market, sticking out from the crowd should be peoples #1 aim if attaining a high amount of downloads/sales is something you are interested in.

 

If you're not trying to sell the game, though, you can just do whatever you want.

 

Absolutely!

Games are a form of expressionism and I am totally all for people making whatever they want how they want

Just making sure OP is aware of the concept of market saturation, I would hate for someone new to game dev to spend a lot of time thinking they will make money off an idea that is unlikely to have legs commercially!

 

Resident Evil 2 HD remake sold very good, last of us is a popular game, etc, etc. Zombie games are not dead.

 

From Wikipedia : "Resident Evil 2 was promoted with a US$5 million advertising campaign."

Clearly it worked, and I'm not one of those "grrr, money steals all my dreams" people. My point is that this comes down to business and marketing skills, not game development skills (or how good your idea is, even).

 

Why did you not complete your other games and what makes you think you will complete this game?

Nicely done. Start with this, maybe as a top-down shooter.

 

Exactly, you just have to be better than upwards of 90% of the existing games in the genre...

 

Focus first on finding joy in the work. If you value results over that you will not the wall soon and burn out

Then focus on maximizing your learning. Failure is a good indicator of learning. Learn from others failures as much as your own. It's not for ego, it's for info.

If you know yourself well and have a predictable gauge on your own learning ability, then you will have good understanding of what you can and cannot accomplish.

 

Yeah, that's true for any genre, and even then there is no guarantee you will succeed. Good games fail every day.

 

To quote a famous Bruce Willis movie . . . Zombie games

Spoiler

Pulp Fiction

 

You missed a great opportunity here...

Head or gut, Mike?

 

What does it take to become a unity zombie game maker / dev?

Spoiler

Dead-ication

And my favourite pondering during the weekends. . .

Spoiler

If there is a zombie outbreak in vegas does it stay in vegas?

 

And a pack of Deadalon medication.

Spoiler

There is this medication called Daedalon against dizziness, nausea and vomiting.

 

I want more zombie models. But I don't want to have to buy them. I also want other models. Regular people... Houses, mobile homes... Restaurants... Museums... Grocery stores... Schools... Hospitals...I'm in the process of learning blender. I can do simple things and if I can find a model that's close enough to what I want I know how to edit it to make it more like what I want. I can edit textures... Make my own materials... Stuff like that. I've also found that my world is too big and the CPU can't handle it. I get low framerates. So I'm going to have to figure out a way to stream it. I want more densely packed trees but I can over 100,000 trees to my terrain via Gaia and they look really spaced out still and the performance is poor. So how would I handle all that plus people, zombies, and all my buildings? I'm thinking it should be done in chunks. Just make each small terrain a scene and use the free asset Scene Streamer to stream the scenes. I'm learning more every day.

 

You need to learn optimization techniques. No game try to render all objects at once. There is always some illusions and pooling involved.

Also, chances are, you are scoping too high too early.

 

Progression of most unity devs.

Unity is great -> let's build an open world type game -> Can't do this alone -> let's buy assets -> Dang I scoped this too big -> Maybe I should do a 2D side scroller instead -> Woah I even this involves a lot of work -> Let's just kill time on general forums instead.

This is where 99% of ppl end up.

 

That being said it is not all doom and gloom have a watch of the video below:

 

Thousands upon thousands of objects is only awful because "default" Unity was never intended to be used like that. Unity's SRP and DOTS are designed to be able to handle that. Unity has demos involving MILLIONS of objects on subpar hardware thanks to these two systems. But you'll struggle to understand them if you don't have a good grasp of Unity and C#.

https://unity.com/srp
https://unity.com/dots

 

Depends on what you are doing, static objects without behaviour and unity can coup with thousands of objects (in the scene not on screen)

Here is my latest scene im working on



Its not even complete yet and containts thousands of objects since its made from a modular asset


Will probably use mesh baker on it before its done though. I just wish unity had better occlusion culling

Anway, for dynamic stuff you are offcourse better of with dots, compute shaders, etc.

To OP: for foliage I cant recommend Vegetation Studio enough.

 

Who thinks I'm scoping too big? And why? I do want very big environments but I think I can do it. I haven't been putting in a lot of actual work into the game lately though. I've just been thinking of ideas and trying different size terrains with various amounts of game objects to see how unity behaves.

I don't know if I'm allowed to post video of my game here but I want to once I get some of it done. I want to at least show it to somebody. It's not as fun if I'm the only one that ever sees it.

 

In general anyone who scopes open worldish games is scoping too big. Especially if it intended for release. For fun, is a different matter altogether.

There's a reason why most successful indie games have a 2D platformer, top down vibe going on.

 

Very large environments require a very large amount of content or they feel empty, and push the limits on performance. Pushing the limits means you need to implement creative solutions to problems which would otherwise make your game impractical. You use trickery to hide or work around the performance limitations.

For example, you could make your open world game very foggy and set your camera's far clipping plane pretty low. Then your rendering performance would get a lot better because even though you have a giant world you're not actually rendering much of it at any given time, and the player won't notice because they will just think the game was designed to take place in a foggy environment. Zombies running out of the fog could also add a lot to the scary factor. Creative trickery, making the solution to the problem a feature.

As for very large amount of content, that just needs a lot of time and/or money, but solo indie devs are usually short on both. I've been working the last 2 years on a large open world game, and I "solved" the content problem by it being set on the ocean. Well, players expect the ocean to have a lot of open space obviously, which saves me a lot of work filling up the place.

Good luck with your game!