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Author: Norman Chan
Date: 2007 - 08
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DELICIOUS DEVELOPER BRAINS

Details you didn't know about two staggering zombie shooters

Slaying hordes of the wicked undead is every geek's fantasy, so it's no coincidence that two of my most highly anticipated shooters of the year are zombie-themed. I spoke with the games' designers to uncover some little-known facts about Black Widow Games' They Hunger: Lost Souls and Valve's Left 4 Dead.

NEIL MANKE, GAME DESIGNER, THEY HUNGER: LOST SOULS

Lost Souls is not a sequel to the original They Hunger: "Although Lost Souls is completely independent from the classic series, it includes many tributes to it. Each reference is naturally integrated into the game, so people that never played the trilogy won't be scratching their heads or feeling like someone that didn't catch a joke."

Not all zombies are created equal: "Zombies behave in different ways according to each one's degree of decay...humans recently transformed into zombies keep part of their higher brain functions and almost the same physical agility, while reanimated rotten corpses move In a manner similar to [zombies in] classic zombie movies."

They get so close, you can smell their zombie breath: "In close quarters, you can swing a shovel to cut zombies in half, throw a meat cleaver to sever heads and arms, or even improvise Molotov cocktails to burn them all. Most of the action is focused on close-ranged combat. In order to increase the sense of danger and make you feel really immersed in the terrifying reality of the game, most of the zombie killing has to be bloody, dirty, close, and personal."

Zombies will flail their arms realistically: "We have developed an entirely new scripting system for the game, which pre-calculates physics for extremely complex scenes that would be impractical in real-time for most computers. We also put a lot of effort into creating the zombies themselves, using a combination of motion capture and custom animations to ensure each zombie moves and behaves differently according to its level of decay."

MICHAEL BOOTH, PROJECT LEAD, LEFT 4 DEAD

You're never alone in the zombie apocalypse: "The game has been designed as a cooperative experience from the ground up...the Survivor team can be played by one to four human players, with computer-controlled bots filling out the roster."

The game cheats to give you the most frightening survival experience: "In our early builds, the Infected population was controlled by sets of designer-placed triggers. However, good players quickly learned all of the possible trigger points and the matches became a game of covering the variables, with no real suspense or tension. That's what led us to develop the AI Director, which monitors the team's success rate and stress levels. The Director procedurally determines whether more or less action is needed, and then finds an interesting spot to add or remove Infected, to keep the experience challenging."

You'll be running away from zombies for miles: "The initial release of Left 4 Dead will include four sprawling campaigns. Each campaign is divided into five large interconnected maps, each on the scale of the largest Half-Life 2 maps. As a co-op game, the construction of these maps is a hybrid of single-player goal-oriented design and multiplayer design (dynamic combat spaces with loops and branch points). Each campaign is of the 'Let's get out of here' variety, with the Survivors challenged to reach a specified destination."

If you find time to take a breath, it's only because the game granted you a break: "If you were to plot the emotional states of a gamer as [he] played a great single-player game, you would end up with a chart showing semi-regular spikes and dips in stress, fun, and excitement—'drama.' The AI Director re-creates the exciting peaks of a multiplayer game while simultaneously scheduling them like an ideal single-player experience."