Need some feedback for my health and revive system for my realistic zombie coop game

So my game will require teammates to survive, so i tried making some tweaks compared to some other ones to make the game more horrifying in close encounters and also to make players more careful of their soroundings.

First of all, the zombie AI will try to get as close to you as it can, so it can attempt to grab you. If the infected grabs you, you have a chance of either getting scratched or bitten. If you get scratched you either just get damage, or you get a bleed effect which can be patched up with bandages or a med kit.

The worst scenario when getting grabbed though will result in an infection. Getting infected will make you die slowlly with no way of curing it. That means you also put a weight to your team because they might get killed by your infected self. The infection lasts 1 minute before you die, and the more you progress the more blurry your screen gets. One way to extend your time before your inevitable death arrives is using vitamins (i use vitamins instead of pills due to roblox’s ToS) to extend their life period by 3 more minutes. They cannot stack the duration with many vitamins, but they can reuse them any time they want to reset back to 3 minutes. Once the player dies and they are infected,the AI is gonna take control over the player’s body and will act like a zombie, and will attempt to kill it’s human foes.

If a player gets hit enough times to get their health to zero, they will die. If the player is not overwhelmed by zombies and didn’t get fatal damage on the final blow, they will get knocked. While knocked they will lay down and wait for a teammate to revive them. If an infected gets close to the downed person it will eat the player, resulting in death. If the player has a 1 handed weapon like a hatchet or a pistol they can fight back. The players will have to do a 25 second revive animation to get the player up, but they can speed it up with a med kit to 8 seconds and also heal the player a bit. To make it fair for some players who are overwhelmed, players will be able to pick up knocked players on ther shoulders, but you will only be able to hold a 1 handed weapon while holding the player. After that, they can put them down anywhere they want to and revive them there

This is just the base idea of what we are working on right now and we plan on making it more fair for the players soon. Would love any kind of feedback related to what i wrote

This definitely belongs in #help-and-feedback:game-design-support and not here - you will get better feedback there since this isn’t a place for feedback


Anyways, your health system is very complicated. Something so vital should not be so complicated. In the heat of the moment, your player should never be “Oh at I going to die or get knocked? Are my vitamins enough?..”

You want core gameplay systems (such as health) to always be able to usable to a child. Even if it will never be used by a child, it is always best that it is that simple in a fast paced game.

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Yes i was thinking about that and you have many valid points. The thing is that most common infected are gonna be slow, and players have the ability to shove them back to run between groups of infected. The infection part is because i haven’t seen people get punished for being careless that much in roblox games, and plus i am trying to make the game be hardcore, only for people that want to play something that has a challenge. After that i am trying to find a solution for the “oh am i gonna die or get knocked” thing since it would be annoying for players. Also thanks for letting me know i should post it at help and feedback. I’l post it right there
Cheers!

I actually think this system is great, except for the infection system. If the numbers aren’t in somebody’s favor, then they’ll be really unhappy with your game.

I say that you can only have a chance of being infected after being scratched a certain amount of times, and then you start with a 10% chance, and every time you get bitten, if you are not infected, then your chance of getting infected rises a bit more.

Also, I think there should be a timer to how much time left you have before you are infected. If that timer reaches 0, you are infected, but if you survive long enough (2 min?), then you go back to your normal state.

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Love your idea! I will send it to the others to discuss about it. After that, we do not plan to have a UI for the game. Everything will be shown with visuals or with audio. For example if you are exsausted, you will heart a heartbeat, and will get louder the more tired you are. If you have less than a quarter of your stamina the player will play breathing sounds. Other players can hear the breathing sound

So kind of Uncharted 4 style? In that case, for the timer, like you said, have the player’s camera blue as their “timer”. Be sure to give a tutorial to teach players to recognize the sounds and what they mean.

i was thinking about the following: Veins will pop out of the sides of the player’s screen, and also the player’s skin tone will be slowlly getting more pale. The face expressions will make the player look tired

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also yes we plan on a tutorial for players to learn how to play the game. It will be available in the first releases of the game

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I really like this idea but personally i hate it when i’ve been infected or whatever and there’s no way to stop it. Since this is co-op the surviving teammate has basically lost when he looses his teammate. Perhaps, when you get infected you have 20 seconds until you turn into a zombie and each “vitamin” adds 10 to the timer and can stack a max of 2 or 3 times. When the game starts you have a set number of antidotes (the number would be very low) or if you do a certain challenge during it you gain an antidote, which would add more strategy and planning to the game. With the antidote, you can cure your teammate but your teammate is “incapacitated” for around 15 seconds. I think this would be much better for a co-op survival game

The infection mechanic will work like i planned so far, but i am considering making vitamins a bit less rare though, and would be commonly found in shops and kitchens, and it will be stacked to up 6 minutes., I just want to add a hard consequence if the players wont mind their soroundings, and will be motivated to stick with your teammates. After that, the bite will not always be a 100% chance. I changed and tweaked some stuff, and the player has like 10% chance to get an infection from the bite. The more they get bitten the higher the chance of being infected. It will reset on each match to make it more balanced. How does that sound?

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