EL405: Zombie Bowling

In class today, we continued experimenting with Hammer. While Puff and I had certainly enjoyed our zombie romp last time we worked with Hammer, this time around we wanted to do something with a little more structure, a little more linearity, if you will.

Originally the plan was to make a Half-Life 2 version of "Duck Hunt" (the Nintendo classic). We constructed a room, not really worrying about the textures of the walls or anything, and then figured out how to make a fence. The plan was to fill half the room with an assortment of birds, and have them confined by a fence. The player would be on the outside of that fence with a deadly arsenal--which consisted of weapons not exactly found in the original Duck Hunt. People would be able to shoot at the birds without them escaping the confined area... so it would be like Duck Hunt taking place in three-dimensional space. But, the first thing we needed was a fence.

Building a fence was a fairly simple task... you could choose from literally dozens of fences found in H-L2 and could just place them into the room. Making them actually act like a fence was another step entirely. You had to make sure that the properties of the fence were set correctly, otherwise it wouldn't show up in the game world. Once Dr. Jerz fixed that for us, we were ready to go.

The plan seemed ingenious... until we actually played it. The birds just stood there, sort of pecking around, like they were in a Florentine piazza. Puff was able to pick up one of the weapons scattered about the room and blow them to bits. The novelty of the situation wore off, and I started to get the feeling that we were deranged trespassers at a strange aviary.

We quickly abandoned the idea of the birds and the fence, and replaced them simply with zombies and citizens. The citizens were a key component of the game world, because they distracted the zombies long enough for us to grab a weapon and back far enough away to use it--plus it was fun to see the zombies and the citizens chase each other. Again, however, the novelty of the scenario wasn't going to last. We needed something that would produce different outcomes each time, something with speed, and something that would still involve massive amounts of zombies.

The solution was zombie bowling. We turned our room into a long, narrow hallway with a slope running about 3/4 its entire length. At the bottom of the slope were about twenty zombies... and at the top was a hovercraft and the player start position. You can probably see where this is going.

The player hops in the hovercraft, turns to the right, and floors it down the ramp. At the bottom, hopefully once the player has reached his/her maximum velocity, the craft plows into the zombies in a similar fashion to how the Untouchables break into hooch-houses. The first few times, results were mixed: either we would plow through the zombies, causing them to fly all over the place, or we would sputter to a stop, forcing us to sit there and be eaten alive. Adding to the fun is the random time limit imposed on the player by the withered IBM computer we're using. The system isn't too keen on rendering this stuff, and so you usually have between 30seconds and a minute before it freezes.

After some hilarious test runs, we decided to lengthen the ramp, allowing us to go faster. Unfortunately my carelessness in connecting the ramp to the floor of the game world led to a disappointing first run in front of the rest of the class. A second try, however, showed greatly improved results! We were able to fly down there, smash a few zombies, and still have time to hop out of the craft and run around before the game froze, or we were eaten.

Our time with Hammer has come to an end, and I will be left with fond memories of messin' up zombies. Any game that lets you create your own scenarios, filling a room with pointless bad guys and improbably situations, is okay in my book. It brings me back to my days of playing Tenchu 2 on the Playstation, and Timesplitters on the Gamecube. Like those games, however, I usually get more into messing around in the editor mode than I do with the actual game.

Posted by MikeRubino at December 5, 2006 4:27 PM | TrackBack