Since making Dice of the Living Dead I've wanted to make another simple solo dice game. I've spent some time working on an Arkham Horror inspired game with a less linear story than Dice and The Expedition which inspired it, but for some reason the flesh eating living dead keep calling me.
So I'm looking at another dice game about zombies. This time it's about holding out in a large building until help arrives, and I hope to give it more of a siege feel. Some of the elements I'm trying to implement are:
- The house has several locations that can be activated for a bonus. However, activating a location will usually require you to forfeit a die on your next turn.
- the zombies shamble relentlessly towards the house. They start beyond the fence, move through the courtyard and finally end up at or in the house where they will gradually overwhelm you. A key part of the game is to kill the zombies or to keep them at bay.
- Morale. Rather than killing off survivors, the zombies affect your morale which is basically your hitpoints. The thought behind is that the good zombie flicks are always more about the living than the living dead. So when morale hits bottom, the group falls apart and you lose the game.
- Fighting the zombies must be - just as in Dice of the Living Dead - something perilous. I'm thinking that fighting has a chance of spawning zombies and/or moving them closer. Also, range comes into play. The farther out, the harder they are to kill, but on the other hand letting them come close is more dangerous for your morale.
Well, that's part of it, and just writing it down in blog form shows me new ways of looking at the material. But my major hurdle right now is how to handle the different things the player gets to do with the dice. I'm thinking that you - depending on the roll - can use your dice to fight, to search for stuff (ammo, mostly), to boost morale, to barricade yourselves, and to place on the different locations in the house. But the thing is that fighting and barricading basically do the same: keep the zombies away. So I have to find a way of making the two strategies different. Here's what I'm considering:
Fighting is the permanent solution, but one that can spawn and attract new zombies. Fighting also has the benefit of working on all three distances. Barricading on the other hand will only work for so long, so my feeling is that it has to be more effective. And of course barricading will not really work when the zombies are inside the house, but it has to have another downside, I think. Perhaps barricading has a risk of freezing one of your dice and thus keeping you from putting it to use on your next turn.
Normally when I try to make a game, I start by writing something resembling rules as soon as possible. Writing down the goals, the possible actions, and so on is, I think, a great way of looking at your basic game engine. But it's not always the best way to actually think about new stuff, so that's what I'll occasionally be using this blog for. Also I got great input here for my other dice game, so please chime in if you're still with me.