About as scary as the original Night of the Living Dead is today and without the humor of Shawn of the Dead, Dead Wake so far doesn’t have a lot going for it. Dead Wake is a new contender in the zombie survival game market and this time there is no EA Games or other publisher bring it to us. This game is all open source which means its a game by the people for the people. This game is put together by talking with community on Dead Wake’s forums and listening to what other gamers and zombie fans want in a game. The new Beta 4 just released and new versions of Dead Wake are released regularly. Compared to the idea of “Left for Dead” this is a community based project which works on little to no funds or support.
Since this is an open source game and its still in development there are some issues with game play. The AI of the characters [Zombies] seem to be a bit slow and have object problems. Playing on the first map did remind me of the original Resident Evil games.
The lighting is night time and thus makes it hard to see anything if you have a glare on your screen. When I started out it was difficult to understand the directions but after 3 or 4 deaths it all started to make sense.
At the beginning of the map you are asked to pick up a shotgun and a food barrels. The food barrels teaches you how to pick objects up and throw them down. The object of this was to gather 4 barrels which was pointless other than learning the controls. During this barrel movement is when I came across my first of my enemy’s. I wasn’t sure whether I needed to save bullets from the shotgun so I decided to go with the pistol. While trying to figure out the keyboard controls for Dead Wake, a raging zombie came after me and I hid in a corner about 30 video game feet and switched my weapon. I moved slowly and had no problem ditching these blood suckers. They are not the fastest bots by far.
As soon as I started getting cocky I had a crazy glitch that made the zombie appear right next to me and kill me before I knew what was going on. I wasn’t sure what had happened but new this was a developing game. Overall I was very impressed with how far a community has built a virtual game together. I’m considering asking if they were interested in any game designers, so wish me luck.
One thing I really dug on the website for Dead Wake is a timer counting down to the next version release which I thought was a cool way to keep fans in the loop.
Our Walk Though:
In Beta 4 we shall concentrate on 2 things:
- Mission objectives: Basically we aim to give you guys tools to create a brief “story” in the game. The mission can have different objectives (currently we’ve planned to have 2 objectives: “locate safe zone” and “carry supplies to the safe zone”). In the future there will be more objectives based on the “mission ideas”. Things like “find gas” or things like that. You can also write a storyline which will be displayed during the level.
- More town elements: We are getting props to be used in the game so that you guys can start building levels. Each level contains a “story of one survivor in the city”: it is up to users to create several maps that can have stories “linked together”.
We are not going to get FPS hands or spawn point fixes or things like that for Beta 4. There are couple of other things planned (such as bullet trails, but we’ll see if those make it to the next version). The main purpose of Beta 4 is to ensure that the project moves forward and that you guys can start building levels.
After Beta 4
After Beta 4, we’ll continue working on mission objectives (bringing more of them in the game) and addressing various bugs & features that were mentioned by you guys. Things like FPS hands are planned to be in the version after Beta 4.Basically instead of having only one Release version in June, we now shall have Beta 4 in May and then Release in June.
Original Source: http://www.deadwakegame.com/forums/showthread.php?t=161
