Zombies design document

[Nazsgull]

Hello everyone, this post stems from a past zombies event that took place on October 23rd. Many people voiced their thoughts on wanting zombies onboard, something crewmembers should survive. It WILL induce chaos, but we get another biohazard different from spiders, blob or xenos.

This could be either a gamemode or a midround event.

Syndies send a number of infected onboard through a infiltration shuttle.

A short time (depends on virus stages and balance, still to be determined) after someone (non IPC) is infected with the virus they turn into a ZOMBIE

• Their mob changes to a simplemob (a new mob/living/human/zombie) which sprite should be green-ish.
• Cannot use anything aside of bare hands, dropping whatever they had in them when they turned.
• They keep their equipment.
• They are hostile to EVERY other form of life they see
• Cannot speak normally, they just say guuuh or braainz or variations of that whenever they speak (inspired on the tape gag speech). Them not being able to communicate is to promote relying on numbers, playing dead and straight up tanking damage. They could still be able to point tho.
• They infect on bites and have a chance (25% ? ) to also infect on regular attacks (always slashes).
• They do not know who is infected (this is for them to just attack everyone evenly instead of ignoring infected ones)
• Biting would be a spell to be casted on one adjacent crewmember that guarantees they will eventually turn.
• They are as fast as a well fed human crewmember, not suffering from slowdowns from being injured (unless they're missing a leg or two, regular one/zero legged humanoid movment would apply).
• They can eat handcuffs (matter eater).
• There is no reliable way to tell if one is dead from afar, medhuds always show them as dead. You have to be close by to check (making posing as dead actually a valid strategy).
• They have no bloodloss.
• They have moderate regeneration. 
• They can lose arms and legs impairing their movement and regular attacks but they would still be able to bite.
• Are still zombified if dead and revived with a defibrillator.

About the cure (it is intended to be hard): 

• Crew would need to get a blood sample from the Patient Zero, which would be one of the zombies, selected randomly.
• This would require crew securing their corpses (remember, they may fake being dead) to check if they are the patient zero,
• The virologist doing their job.
• Medbay being somewhat functional and safe-ish.
• Only the blood sample from the patient zero would yield a cure when placed in the PanD.E.M.I.C2200, the other vaccines would straight up kill whoever gets vaccinated, to avoid people just spamming them without testing (monkeys).
• The correctly vaccinated zombie (using a syringe gun or smoke/foam grenades), then would fall in a "regenerative coma", waking up as a bald human, all their injuries healed, except missing limbs. (this also solves crew overwhelming medbay with injuries from when they were a zombie).

Open to changes, removals and additions.

 

Edited November 10, 2022 by Nazsgull
Added cure and cleaned up old ideas (sprite turning green and such)

[Walmartian]

On 10/23/2022 at 4:37 AM, Nazsgull said:

 

• Cannot speak normally, they just say guuuh or braainz or variations of that whenever they speak (inspired on the tape gag speech)

 

having a language that sounds like grunting would be better so that zombies can communicate

[PeakPerformance]

A big reason xenos were so hated was because they gibbed the infected person so I'd tend to stray away from that, and you need a wincon for crew that doen't just involve eradicating everyone who's a zombie.

What if instead we focused a bit more on the viral aspect of the outbreak - their virus could have a very very specific cure, like a mix of multiple chems, or more virology work like requiring multiple people's blood or different stages to fully identify it. The goal would be more containment of zombified crew (even dead, as the dead rises !) and experimenting on them to try and cure them a-la I am Legend.

Only brain damage means laser to the head won't kill, forcing ballistics and thus broken bones and all, pain in the ass for crew who get de-zombified later and will quickly overwhelm medbay, I think just regular damage with some damage mod, regen or regen mechanics would be good. Maybe giving them matter eater too so they can eat cuffs, and and having them still take like half stamina damage so they're beefy and fairly uncontainable but can be handled nonlethally if sec is good ((or DARING >:D))

Edited October 25, 2022 by PeakPerformance

[Generaldonothing]

On 10/22/2022 at 8:37 PM, Nazsgull said:

Hello everyone, this post stems from a past zombies event that took place tonight. Many people voiced their thoughts on wanting zombies onboard, something crewmembers should survive. It WILL induce chaos, but we get another biohazard different from spiders, blob or xenos. 

This could be either a gamemode or a midround event.

A number of crewmembers are infected, or syndies send a number of infected onboard through a infiltration shuttle.

A short time (one minute or so) after someone is infected with the virus (it would be a incurable disease, like kudzu), they turn into a ZOMBIE

• The sprite of their character turns pale green
• Cannot use anything aside of bare hands, dropping whatever they had in them when they turned
• They keep whatever other equipment they had (helmet, suit, etc)
• Cannot speak normally, they just say guuuh or braainz or variations of that whenever they speak (inspired on the tape gag speech)
• They infect on bites and have a chance (25% ? ) to also infect on regular attacks.
• Biting would be a spell to be casted on one adjacent crewmember that guarantees they will eventually turn
• They are as fast as a well fed human crewmember
• There is no reliable way to tell if one is dead from afar, medhuds always show them as dead. You have to be close by to check (making posing as dead actually a valid strategy)
• They have no bloodloss
• They have a slight regeneration effect
• Only brain damage (head damage) damages them
• They can lose arms and legs impairing their movement and regular attacks but they would still be able to bite

A further development would be that whenever a zombie eats a brain (regular attacks should gib people after a certain amount), they heal and get to specialize into more advanced zombies, perhaps some of the variants from Left 4 Dead? Willing to discuss.

Of course open to changes, removals and additions.

 

Very readable and clean design document, a few things stick out to me though.

1. I would keep the starting zombies to ghost players, people randomly getting zombified while in round would lead to frustrations 

2. Zombification should be cureable, even if extremely difficult to do so. SS13 is not a great game to have fail states in, and the roleplay from knowing that you *might* die is significantly more useable than knowing that you *will* die.

3. Cannot speak normally- I'm a bit concerned on this, letting them speak to crew normally and lure people into traps would give them a very cool difference between the other midrounds. I'd probably give them some way to communicate with other zombies at least, would be frustrating most likely otherwise.

4. RNG infection chance is pretty wack and it's something that is being moved away from, it would be for the best if it was guarrenteed to occure if some prerequisite is meant 

5. Do they have slowdown? I dunno if you mean well fed as in "they get the slowdown from being obese" or not

6. It needs to be more than just brain damage, limiting this to just brute being an effective way of killing them is pretty eh

7. Eating brains seems like a bad way to progress, due to this being permakilling. 

8. Letting them use nothing in their hands might lead to same-y rounds, could give them big fingers to prevent them from using guns and let them do sabo?

Overall, nice idea with some solid ideas behind it, happy to see what comes of it

[Eric6426]

Just in case this stems out to something in the future - As the one who did these events, I'm happy to hand the .dmi(s) and .ogg(s) (icon and sound files respectivelly) files used for such. For the former, they're a simple 4-sided simplemob sprite, so if there's a desire to make them carbonmobs (So they can grab things/etc) there would need to be some extra coder/spriter work put out.

I'm quite happy to see a lil event of mine spinning out such a wide-span desire for something, at that, but I'll be staying out of any discussion about it due to my inherent bias for it, and I will most likely not be hosting this event (or any) in the near future due to issues.

However I'm happy to see this (and other) suggestions/requests coming from something I put some work into.

[Nazsgull]

On 10/25/2022 at 7:02 PM, Walmartian said:

having a language that sounds like grunting would be better so that zombies can communicate

I disagree, one of the cornerstones of zombies in popular culture (The Walking Dead, Project Zomboid for example) are that they only form hordes because they react the same way to stimuli, not as some sort of hivemind or team. Lacking a proper way to communicate (they can still mimic and point to stuff tho) should make them rely on numerical superiority and straight up tanking damage, not coordinated tactics.

Not that I wouldn t add grunting languaje if enough people says so :)

 

On 10/25/2022 at 9:49 PM, Generaldonothing said:

Very readable and clean design document, a few things stick out to me though.

1. I would keep the starting zombies to ghost players, people randomly getting zombified while in round would lead to frustrations 

2. Zombification should be cureable, even if extremely difficult to do so. SS13 is not a great game to have fail states in, and the roleplay from knowing that you *might* die is significantly more useable than knowing that you *will* die.

3. Cannot speak normally- I'm a bit concerned on this, letting them speak to crew normally and lure people into traps would give them a very cool difference between the other midrounds. I'd probably give them some way to communicate with other zombies at least, would be frustrating most likely otherwise.

4. RNG infection chance is pretty wack and it's something that is being moved away from, it would be for the best if it was guarrenteed to occure if some prerequisite is meant 

5. Do they have slowdown? I dunno if you mean well fed as in "they get the slowdown from being obese" or not

6. It needs to be more than just brain damage, limiting this to just brute being an effective way of killing them is pretty eh

7. Eating brains seems like a bad way to progress, due to this being permakilling. 

8. Letting them use nothing in their hands might lead to same-y rounds, could give them big fingers to prevent them from using guns and let them do sabo?

Overall, nice idea with some solid ideas behind it, happy to see what comes of it

1. I agree, sudden zombification may be a bit lame, that means the optimal way this could be handled (that I know of, again, feel free to say out loud any ideas you might have) would be for the zombies to be offered to ghosts or picked up at roundstart from whoever had the (to be created) zombie antagonist enabled and then the Syndicate sends them after a few minutes (say five/ten minutes?) using an infiltration shuttle.

2. I think I might have found a solution on how to implement a "Hard" cure: getting a blood sample from the Patient Zero, which would be one of the zombies, selected randomly. This would require crew securing their corpses (remember, they may fake being dead) to check if they are the patient zero, the virologist doing their job and then medbay being somewhat functional and safe-ish. Only the blood sample from the patient zero would yield a cure when placed in the PanD.E.M.I.C2200, the other vaccines would straight up infect whoever gets vaccinated, to avoid people just spamming the vaccines. This could be tested on monkeys, which could also be offered to ghosts if they turn :). The correctly vaccinated zombie (using syringe gun or smoke grenades), then would fall in a "regenerative coma", waking up in the same state as they were infected, all their injuries healed, except missing limbs. (this accidentally solves most of what PeakPerformance said in their second paragraph).

3. At the top

4. At 1

5. That was bad wording on my side (to be edited), I was referring to the slowdown you get as carbonmobs whenever you are badly hurt.

6. I was thinking on basing their HP on the state of their brain, on how damaged it is, so people focus on attacking their heads (as depicted in The Walking Dead). Note that incinerating them would also work. However I feel this may be complicated to do. Maybe regular HP would be better?

7. Yes, eating brains as progression was to enable some sort of it, but I still haven t thought of another way to do it. Maybe counting the number of carbonmobs infected by that zombie in particular? Still have no idea on what "abilities" should a zombie get.

8. Yes, they should be able to grab a lance or chairs or even glass shards and go unga on crew. However that raises the question of whether they should be able to infect people that way. Maybe an ability so they could coat the weapon in their blood to infect them? I however don't see a zombie sabotaging the SM, hacking a door open (they should be able to punch them, but it would take time) or turning off equipment through an APC (they could just smash them to pieces).
 

4 hours ago, Eric6426 said:

Just in case this stems out to something in the future - As the one who did these events, I'm happy to hand the .dmi(s) and .ogg(s) (icon and sound files respectivelly) files used for such. For the former, they're a simple 4-sided simplemob sprite, so if there's a desire to make them carbonmobs (So they can grab things/etc) there would need to be some extra coder/spriter work put out.

I'm quite happy to see a lil event of mine spinning out such a wide-span desire for something, at that, but I'll be staying out of any discussion about it due to my inherent bias for it, and I will most likely not be hosting this event (or any) in the near future due to issues.

However I'm happy to see this (and other) suggestions/requests coming from something I put some work into.

Thanks Eric!

Glad you take interest on this and also sad that there will be no more such events. I'll be interested in those files when I start coding for sure.

To anyone else reading, your input is also welcome!

Edited October 27, 2022 by Nazsgull
Grammar and I forgot a thing.

[Eric6426]

2 hours ago, Nazsgull said:

Glad you take interest on this and also sad that there will be no more such events. I'll be interested in those files when I start coding for sure.

I meant for a while :p I might do them later on! Life is just life so I'm sitting on the sideline.

I would however suggest, if you're truly looking for a big oppinion of this, possibly poking some of the dev team or a maintainer or somesuch, since they may be able to provide insight I cannot.

[Charliminator]

I feel like the virus stage of this needs to be carefully designed in order to make it not feel awful to play against. 

 

It would suck to have you round uprooted by rolling the dice and getting fucked over. I'm not sure what the best way to handle this is.

[Nazsgull]

On 11/3/2022 at 11:12 AM, Charliminator said:

I feel like the virus stage of this needs to be carefully designed in order to make it not feel awful to play against. 

 

It would suck to have you round uprooted by rolling the dice and getting fucked over. I'm not sure what the best way to handle this is.

Would it be too sudden for people to straight up fall unconscious some time upon being infected and when they wake up again they have turned? I was going to suggest twelve seconds, but I think that's too little time. One minute? Two?

Alternatively people could have shivering in the first phase, then seizures at the second and lastly fall unconscious in the third phase, being turning the fourth. Shivering could act as a warning and then the seizures could be used by non infected crewmembers to isolate the ones that are.

About being randomly infected: yes it is not okay, I am removing it. The only way to be infected would be to:

• Be a ghost and be prompted for it or
• Getting too close to a zombie and getting bitten/attacked

Edited November 10, 2022 by Nazsgull
Forgot to remove random infection