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DEMO
In this prototype, you can explore a procedurally generated city, populated by hostile "raiders" (represented by Doom 3 zombies). You have several weapons at your disposal to engage the enemy in a form of turn-based combat called "step-based," which is broken into individual actions.
Press "Q" to toggle step-based mode on at any time. When not visible to hostile characters, or when you are far enough away, you may press it again to return to real-time. In step-based, characters may only move and shoot on their turn. Each action is assigned an action point cost, so characters must wait longer to act again after more "expensive" actions. When every character's action points have been depleted, a new turn begins and AP are replenished.
WHAT THIS PROTOTYPE IS
The main purpose of this release is to demonstrate our ability to generate a game environment with no pre-compile, based on variable inputs.As a basic example in this release, you can set the average height and number of buildings to spawn, how much damage has been inflicted on the city, and the strength of hostile forces (which is expressed through the number of enemies and their personal skill level). A dynamic pathnode system is used by the computer controlled characters for long-range navigation, which can be generated and altered on the fly. In the future, this system will be used to represent the growth and development of settlements over time, and to randomly generate levels for the wasteland that separates them. Towns will rise in population and technology level, rebuild the ruins of pre-war civilization, and evolve in cultural style as each of the three gameworld's factions gain influence. Our first step toward this goal is to allow the player to navigate on a world map between several cities like the one in this prototype, which develop and interact with each other in a simple Civilization-style game.
WHAT THIS IS NOT, KNOWN MAJOR ISSUES
Performance is greatly improved over our last release, but we are continuing to research methods for increasing framerate and reducing the number of hiccups. Load times are currently VERY long, so be patient! This does not graphically represent our artistic vision for the gameworld in any way. All models and textures are placeholders and have a great number of glitches. The squarish, grid-like appearance of damaged buildings will go away with proper art assets. Characters, weapons, and environmental props will all recieve a complete facelift at some point. The pathfinding system is a first draft and obviously needs a lot of work. For now, we "simply" needed to make sure that the AI could navigate across a randomly generated city and make its way up a 10 story building to the player. There are numerous glitches in small-scale navigation, and characters will appear to be floating in the air at times. The finished game will be violent and combat heavy, but it will not be the main focus of gameplay necessarily. In future releases we will be working intensely on actual role-playing aspects. All of the skills listed on the character sheet will be more or less equally useful, or cut.
INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS:
Download here!
Unzip the groundzero.bat, Ground Zero shortcut, and "groundzero" folder into your Doom 3 directory. If the shortcut does not work be sure to check that it is pointing to your Doom 3 install path