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It's been almost 3 years now since the last, cadaverous update to Zombie Master was released to an unsuspecting and largely uncaring world, so it seems like a good time to dig up the still-twitching corpse and put it on the slab, where I can cut it open, weigh the lungs and poke around in all the purple, wobbly tubes.
What is Zombie Master?
In a nutshell, Zombie Master was a mod for Half-Life 2, pitting a team of human survivors against merciless zombie hordes, summoned and controlled by another player - the Zombie Master.
It was remarkably popular at the time - it had more simultaneous players than any other Half-Life 2 mod at the time. In fact, it's still relatively popular even today. There's almost 20 active servers running the mod, maps are still being made, hours are being logged.
Zombie Master had an interesting, and somewhat difficult gestation, which I will go into in more detail later on. Suffice it to say for now that we didn't really follow the traditional path that mod teams tend to take. We didn't attempt to pass ourselves off as a game studio, set up a flashy website, or start posting crappy concept art, untextured weapon renders and help wanted ads.
Angry Lawyer, theGreenBunny (TGB) and myself all knew each other from a couple of forums we frequented. Angry Lawyer had come up with the Zombie Master concept and put together a rough first build, which he invited several people to help him test. It was remarkably fun to play, especially given the roughness - there was one map, modified from one of Half-Life 2's Ravenholm maps. The Zombie Master himself was not an ethereal, bodiless being - he was a human in the default spreadeagle pose, floating in the air, but none of that mattered, because it worked. The Zombie Master could summon zombies into being, and control where they shambled. The human survivors had no objectives other than to continue attempting to survive, but it was fun.
After playing, TGB offered his assistance with the coding, and I said that I would make some custom maps. Thus was the Zombie Master team born.
[box="left"]
The MinerInconvenience map.
[/box]What went right?
Plenty of things went right, especially at first. While the enthusiasm level is high, ideas are plentiful, problems all seem eminently surmountable and everything seems to just flow. That's not something unique to Zombie Master, though. Probably the biggest point in our favour was that the concept worked really well. Despite being asymmetric, the game as it was when we started out was remarkably well balanced, and fun to play. Fighting off near-endless zombie hordes was far more rewarding and enjoyable simply because they were being controlled by someone else. For the person playing as the Zombie Master, there was massive satisfaction in killing the survivors. Essentially, we had a group of people playing a survival horror first-person shooter, and one person playing a real-time strategy game, and it worked.
We also made great initial progress. Having two programmers seemed a definite boon. Features were implemented and refined quickly, broken things were fixed. For my part, I already had an existing map that I had made for Valve's Half-Life 2 Deathmatch contest, which I modified to be the first official Zombie Master map. I implemented a horribly complex system of logic to allow for objectives - in this case, the survivors had to collect the parts for a truck that were scattered around the map (in semi-random locations) and the Zombie Master had to prevent them. Again, it worked well. Playing with the small group of testers, I was able to update and modify the map when necessary.
In addition, we had other contributors in terms of concept art for new zombie units and weapons, audio, models. TGB modified a lot of the existing Half-Life 2 models for the zombies and survivors, and made new weapon models. Angry Lawyer put another map together. It was progress!
It wasn't long until we had what we considered to be a workable beta, one that we could release to the public. So we did. We asked Valve nicely, and they mentioned our release in a Steam news update. We had a basic website up with a forum (www.zombiemaster.org) and we were off!
The reception was, frankly, overwhelming. We had thousands of downloads, other sites mirrored the files, Zombie Master was spreading. We carefully watched the Steam server statistics, and Zombie Master climbed steadily upwards, overtaking many other mods and eventually ending up as the most-played Half-Life 2 mod - a position that it then occupied for a long time afterwards. Spurred on by this unexpected popularity, we continued to update Zombie Master. We released patches with bugfixes, new zombie units, new maps, new weapons.
[box=right]
We had always adopted the approach that the only weapons we would use would be ones that survivors would realistically find in a zombie apocalypse. We eventually relented and added a Mac-10, after a playtest on our server where we enabled cheats and gave everyone machine guns. However, we made it possibly the most horrible gun ever. Utterly inaccurate, and went through ammo like it was going out of fashion. So guess which gun everyone ran to grab at the start of a game?[/box]
We did interviews for websites, Zombie Master appeared in PC Zone magazine (we even had a Wikipedia entry!) Probably the biggest indicator of having "made it" however, was when you join a server running your game. We had hardcoded our Steam IDs into the game, so that our names would appear in the scoreboard as a different colour to normal players. So joining a server and having to spend most of your time fielding questions as to why your name was purple, could I have a purple name please? No, wait, I want gold! No way, you're not one of the developers. I know the developers personally, so you must be a hacker. Dude, your maps suck! Such are the rewards of internet success!
What was truly gratifying is that people really seemed to "get" Zombie Master. In a lot of cases, it would be very easy for a ruthless player to annihilate the human players, and certainly to prevent them from completing their objectives. However, most players tended to play the Zombie Master role as more of a Dungeon Master - playing in such a way as to make the game challenging and entertaining for the human survivors. It would be nice to say that we always intended Zombie Master to play in that way, but it was an unintended consequence, albeit a very pleasant one.
By this time, we had more people involved in Zombie Master's development, although it was still a very small team, and I apologise in advance for not crediting everyone individually by name. However, the core of the team was still TGB, Angry Lawyer and myself. Looking back on Zombie Master in those terms, it was a massive success, certainly far exceeding what little expectations we had for it.
What went wrong?
In a word, apathy. And disillusionment. Okay, that's two words, and there were others, too.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly when Zombie Master started to die, in terms of development. I know that I was having major issues with motivating myself to create more content for it. One factor that I failed to take into account is that there are so many griefers in online play. So, so many. Zombie Master relies on a degree of co-operation between the human players in order to complete their objectives. Yet there are so many players out there who exist purely to prevent that from happening, even to the extent that they will co-operate with each other to actively stop the other players. In my maps, this mostly consisted of finding ways to remove or hide the collectable items. So, to counteract this, I had to constantly make revisions to my maps to block off whatever exploits cropped up. This became enormously time-consuming, and the time I would have spent working on new maps was instead spent fixing player-caused issues.
It's extremely difficult to maintain your motivation under those circumstances. Yes, I know, first-world problems and all that, but in the context of Zombie Master's development, it had consequences. There were, I believe, similar feelings of ennui for the other team members. We were putting hard work into just maintaining, rather than creating anything new. Planned new units, new weapons weren't getting implemented. Enthusiasm and morale were practically non-existent. Things were definitely going downhill.
Part of this may be due to the fact that we were only a small team. While we didn't have the problems that large teams have (specifically where you have lots of satellite staff and no oversight, so often little work gets done) and in fact, we were proud of the fact that we weren't like most development teams. We had no hierarchy, and also no plan. Zombie Master was entirely, one hundred percent, made up as we went along, and that was starting to gnaw, undead-like, at our backsides. While we had other people helping us, we were still lacking in some departments. Most notably, we were still using the Half-Life 2 content modified by TGB and, while it was adequate for our needs initially, it was something we had always planned to replace, but we didn't have anyone who could do it. We had some great concept art for the zombie units, but no way to use it.
[box="right"]
The PC Zone article.
[/box]
At around this time, we were hit by a psychological blow - Valve's own Left 4 Dead had what we could only call remarkable similarities. A team of human survivors, pitted against Valve's zombie-controlling AI director, have to complete objectives to continue surviving. Even some of the zombie units were uncannily similar. Left 4 Dead's Hunter was similar to Zombie Master's Banshee. Their Tank similar to our Hulk. I want to be very clear at this point - I am not accusing Valve of plagiarism. What I'm trying to say is that a similar game, made by Valve, was obviously going to blow us out of the water. There's no way that we could compete, and as we were sharing the same playerbase, people would be playing Left 4 Dead instead of Zombie Master.
A second blow came when Valve started allowing mods to publish directly via Steam, rather than merely linking to their sites on a pseudo-store page. This was by invite only, and Zombie Master was not invited to be one of them. When other mods with far, far lower player numbers than ours were being asked to publish on Steam, it was pretty much the final psychological nail in the coffin. We pushed out one final patch for Zombie Master, by sheer coincidence on Hallowe'en , and that was The End.
The Ugly?
Custom maps. Ugh. I really have a love/hate relationship with them. Most of them are awful. Truly, truly awful. Some are good. A few are excellent. I did my best to help - I released the source to the map I used for testing my logic systems. The object collecting, random spawning, timers, counters, all there to be repurposed. Yet most maps were horrible, clunky affairs with the only objective being "don't die." Some even abandoned aesthetics entirely, releasing blocked-out, development-textured environments that were just eye-gougingly horrible to behold.
"Upgrade" servers. Even more ugh. These were servers using plugins to modify the gameplay of Zombie Master. Human players could earn points, increase their health, speed etc. Even heal themselves, which was completely and utterly against the core gameplay.
The source release. A year or so after Zombie Master's demise, we released the source code so that other teams could build on and modify it. In retrospect, and in my opinion, this was a mistake. Not many people actually used it. Half a dozen teams popped up, wanting to continue with Zombie Master, but none really did anything. Some took the code and made an utter travesty of the original, putting in multitudes of near-identical and pointless weapons.
The future...
Zombie Master is undergoing a resurrection of sorts. A small team has come together and has started work on remaking Zombie Master for the newer version of the Source engine. They've fixed a lot of the bugs, added some useful new features, units and weapons and are generally doing well with it. More importantly, they've got the blessing of the original development team to use the Zombie Master name, so look out for Zombie Master 2 in the not-so-distant future.
As a brief addendum, I'd like to thank everyone that was involved in the creation and support of Zombie Master. The core developers, those who came and went, the testers, the players, the forum communities and even Valve themselves. Interestingly, not a single person ever complained about the awful puns in my map names. On the other hand, not a single person ever found the easter egg in the MinerInconvenience map either.
[box="left"]
The MinerInconvenience easter egg - all the currently-living players have to stand between the graves for 30 seconds, and a shaft of light will descend and give everyone full health. Good luck actually doing it, however...[/box]
Angry Lawyer's comments:
The idea of Zombie Master was born out of an earlier concept. The very first pieces of code were from a project called Conquest: City 17, which was supposed to have been an RTS using the Half Life 2 setting. At the time, the Half Life 2 SDK hadn't been released for long, and a lot of concepts for zombie-themed mods had appeared, all with very similar goals and playstyles (I think most of them ended up stillborn). I was contemplating what would actually bring something new to the genre, and a flash of inspiration struck me: RTS zombies, versus first person survivors. I took what code I had written for CC17, slapped some zombies in it, and made a quick prototype, and it was an instant hit amongst those who I could gather up for a playtest. I think that was one of the keys to our success - rapid prototyping.
Zombie Master couldn't have happened without the support of the rest of the team - I got to work with some fantastic people on it. At the time, I was pretty new to writing C++ on that scale - without TGB and qckbeam shoring up my memory leaks, and figuring out how to actually get the thing to compile on Linux, the game would probably have never been released. My attempts at mapping were dire - the one map that I did - Warehouse - was awful, until it got a much-needed overhaul by Pi. Pi's maps were fantastic - when he showed us them, I suddenly realised that Zombie Master wasn't just a hacked-together toy, but a proper game.
I'm still pleased that, considering we were such a tiny team, we were one of the only zombie-themed mods to actually ship, beating those with high production values and pages upon pages of press release and concept art.
I think what killed a lot of the passion for me was the less savoury parts of the community. There were those who would constantly grief and exploit, and when we fixed bugs like wall-running giving you infinite acceleration, they would kick and scream on the forums. Yet more just didn't understand the idea, and clamoured for high-end military hardware to be added, and the Zombie Master player to be replaced with an AI - they didn't want to play Zombie Master, they wanted to play one of the many never-to-be-released slaughter-all-the-zombies mods, and as they couldn't, they wanted ours to be like them. It breaks you down, eventually.
It's been several years since its heyday, and I still wake up sometimes, itching to write some code for the game. The thing I miss the most is working with such a great team - I've not worked with a group as talented, or a group that I've gelled so well with, since.
[box="right"]
Angry Lawyer's Warehouse map.
[/box]
One of the most surreal parts of development was the run up to release. Most mods were very self-aggrandising with their pre-rendered environments and pretty trailers and the like - instead, we recorded a series of cringeworthy in-character voice logs and put them on the placeholder website. It actually went down really well.
TGB's comments:
I quit twice in the four years I worked on Zombie Master. Here's a contrary opinion: the ZM team was too small. Sure, Pi took care of the maps, and at one point we even had three active programmers. Three! Many an enterprising mod founder grows jealous at the thought. But, as it turns out, there's a lot more to do. And someone has to do it. That was me. Next to the big lump of programming I was doing, there were some models, some textures, the website, the forums, the bugtracker, the SVN repository, the Linux server version, packaging releases, (not) answering email... I juggled pretty much all of it. I was wearing a ridiculous number of hats before Team Fortress 2's drop system was a glint in Robin Walker's evil, beady eyes.
If you ever find yourself making a mod, get yourself a guy who will deal with all this stuff. Someone who isn't also a programmer or artist or mapper, who can step up and take care of all the random things that need doing. An unholy mixture of a community manager and a sysadmin. Maybe they exist. All I know is, ZM didn't have one, and all those hats could weigh rather heavily. Sometimes even your hobby can start feeling like a responsibility.
There's something more important you can learn from ZM though: don't use Source. Just don't. Step away from the SDK. You will regret it. If back in 2005 I had had the experience to recognise what an atrocious mess the Source SDK is, I would not be writing a mod retrospective today. Horrible mess of a codebase, far too little documentation, terrible tools. Valve's lauded fantastic support of the mod community? It does not exist.
More than anything else, it was Source that drained me of motivation in the end. Always the mysterious issues that would crop up, always the difficulty in working out how to bend the spaghetti of Source to do what we needed it to do (the engine was never made for RTS gameplay).
[box="left"]
The unreleased (but almost complete) Streets map.
[/box]
I quite simply burned out on ZM once in '06 after a gruelling time of merging in a massive code update Valve had dropped on the mod community, where it took us literally months of work to merge in the update and fix the resulting mess (which was in part our own fault, product of our inexperience). Angry Lawyer soldiered on and released the first version of ZM not long after, and people actually enjoyed it! Clearly things weren't as bad as I thought, and I was motivated again. A testament to releasing as early as possible.
Still, nearing the end of '07 everyone on the team had, essentially, seen enough. Two or three years is a long time to spend bags of free time on a single project that was a mix of fun and frustration. Things dragged on until we released what was intended to be the final version, but not before I managed to fix some long-standing issues I'd wanted to fix for a long time. Now I felt I was truly done, though I stuck around to fix some of the post-release bugs and released the very last update at the start of 2009. And that was the end of it.
I swore I'd never make anything on the Source engine again. Then a few months later started working on Trouble in Terrorist Town. In Garry's Mod. On Source. But let's not dwell on that.
ZM was four years of work, highly educational and somehow fun, but often a slog. All for a game few people even know about, now only played by weird people who enjoy crappy gimmicky maps with gameplay-destroying server plugins. There's your final take-away! If you only want to make a mod for the fame, the praise, and the end result: don't even start.
If, however, you just enjoy making things that you enjoy playing, and perhaps you found some friends with a similar attitude, well, who knows what will happen. Perhaps you'll make a mod. Perhaps a zombie game, but different. Say, what if you have a team of survivors in a zombie apocalypse, but the zombies are controlled by a player, RTS-style... Nah, that's never going to work.
What is Zombie Master?
In a nutshell, Zombie Master was a mod for Half-Life 2, pitting a team of human survivors against merciless zombie hordes, summoned and controlled by another player - the Zombie Master.
It was remarkably popular at the time - it had more simultaneous players than any other Half-Life 2 mod at the time. In fact, it's still relatively popular even today. There's almost 20 active servers running the mod, maps are still being made, hours are being logged.
Zombie Master had an interesting, and somewhat difficult gestation, which I will go into in more detail later on. Suffice it to say for now that we didn't really follow the traditional path that mod teams tend to take. We didn't attempt to pass ourselves off as a game studio, set up a flashy website, or start posting crappy concept art, untextured weapon renders and help wanted ads.
Angry Lawyer, theGreenBunny (TGB) and myself all knew each other from a couple of forums we frequented. Angry Lawyer had come up with the Zombie Master concept and put together a rough first build, which he invited several people to help him test. It was remarkably fun to play, especially given the roughness - there was one map, modified from one of Half-Life 2's Ravenholm maps. The Zombie Master himself was not an ethereal, bodiless being - he was a human in the default spreadeagle pose, floating in the air, but none of that mattered, because it worked. The Zombie Master could summon zombies into being, and control where they shambled. The human survivors had no objectives other than to continue attempting to survive, but it was fun.
After playing, TGB offered his assistance with the coding, and I said that I would make some custom maps. Thus was the Zombie Master team born.
[box="left"]
The MinerInconvenience map.
[/box]What went right?
Plenty of things went right, especially at first. While the enthusiasm level is high, ideas are plentiful, problems all seem eminently surmountable and everything seems to just flow. That's not something unique to Zombie Master, though. Probably the biggest point in our favour was that the concept worked really well. Despite being asymmetric, the game as it was when we started out was remarkably well balanced, and fun to play. Fighting off near-endless zombie hordes was far more rewarding and enjoyable simply because they were being controlled by someone else. For the person playing as the Zombie Master, there was massive satisfaction in killing the survivors. Essentially, we had a group of people playing a survival horror first-person shooter, and one person playing a real-time strategy game, and it worked.
We also made great initial progress. Having two programmers seemed a definite boon. Features were implemented and refined quickly, broken things were fixed. For my part, I already had an existing map that I had made for Valve's Half-Life 2 Deathmatch contest, which I modified to be the first official Zombie Master map. I implemented a horribly complex system of logic to allow for objectives - in this case, the survivors had to collect the parts for a truck that were scattered around the map (in semi-random locations) and the Zombie Master had to prevent them. Again, it worked well. Playing with the small group of testers, I was able to update and modify the map when necessary.
In addition, we had other contributors in terms of concept art for new zombie units and weapons, audio, models. TGB modified a lot of the existing Half-Life 2 models for the zombies and survivors, and made new weapon models. Angry Lawyer put another map together. It was progress!
It wasn't long until we had what we considered to be a workable beta, one that we could release to the public. So we did. We asked Valve nicely, and they mentioned our release in a Steam news update. We had a basic website up with a forum (www.zombiemaster.org) and we were off!
The reception was, frankly, overwhelming. We had thousands of downloads, other sites mirrored the files, Zombie Master was spreading. We carefully watched the Steam server statistics, and Zombie Master climbed steadily upwards, overtaking many other mods and eventually ending up as the most-played Half-Life 2 mod - a position that it then occupied for a long time afterwards. Spurred on by this unexpected popularity, we continued to update Zombie Master. We released patches with bugfixes, new zombie units, new maps, new weapons.
[box=right]
We had always adopted the approach that the only weapons we would use would be ones that survivors would realistically find in a zombie apocalypse. We eventually relented and added a Mac-10, after a playtest on our server where we enabled cheats and gave everyone machine guns. However, we made it possibly the most horrible gun ever. Utterly inaccurate, and went through ammo like it was going out of fashion. So guess which gun everyone ran to grab at the start of a game?[/box]
We did interviews for websites, Zombie Master appeared in PC Zone magazine (we even had a Wikipedia entry!) Probably the biggest indicator of having "made it" however, was when you join a server running your game. We had hardcoded our Steam IDs into the game, so that our names would appear in the scoreboard as a different colour to normal players. So joining a server and having to spend most of your time fielding questions as to why your name was purple, could I have a purple name please? No, wait, I want gold! No way, you're not one of the developers. I know the developers personally, so you must be a hacker. Dude, your maps suck! Such are the rewards of internet success!
What was truly gratifying is that people really seemed to "get" Zombie Master. In a lot of cases, it would be very easy for a ruthless player to annihilate the human players, and certainly to prevent them from completing their objectives. However, most players tended to play the Zombie Master role as more of a Dungeon Master - playing in such a way as to make the game challenging and entertaining for the human survivors. It would be nice to say that we always intended Zombie Master to play in that way, but it was an unintended consequence, albeit a very pleasant one.
By this time, we had more people involved in Zombie Master's development, although it was still a very small team, and I apologise in advance for not crediting everyone individually by name. However, the core of the team was still TGB, Angry Lawyer and myself. Looking back on Zombie Master in those terms, it was a massive success, certainly far exceeding what little expectations we had for it.
What went wrong?
In a word, apathy. And disillusionment. Okay, that's two words, and there were others, too.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly when Zombie Master started to die, in terms of development. I know that I was having major issues with motivating myself to create more content for it. One factor that I failed to take into account is that there are so many griefers in online play. So, so many. Zombie Master relies on a degree of co-operation between the human players in order to complete their objectives. Yet there are so many players out there who exist purely to prevent that from happening, even to the extent that they will co-operate with each other to actively stop the other players. In my maps, this mostly consisted of finding ways to remove or hide the collectable items. So, to counteract this, I had to constantly make revisions to my maps to block off whatever exploits cropped up. This became enormously time-consuming, and the time I would have spent working on new maps was instead spent fixing player-caused issues.
It's extremely difficult to maintain your motivation under those circumstances. Yes, I know, first-world problems and all that, but in the context of Zombie Master's development, it had consequences. There were, I believe, similar feelings of ennui for the other team members. We were putting hard work into just maintaining, rather than creating anything new. Planned new units, new weapons weren't getting implemented. Enthusiasm and morale were practically non-existent. Things were definitely going downhill.
Part of this may be due to the fact that we were only a small team. While we didn't have the problems that large teams have (specifically where you have lots of satellite staff and no oversight, so often little work gets done) and in fact, we were proud of the fact that we weren't like most development teams. We had no hierarchy, and also no plan. Zombie Master was entirely, one hundred percent, made up as we went along, and that was starting to gnaw, undead-like, at our backsides. While we had other people helping us, we were still lacking in some departments. Most notably, we were still using the Half-Life 2 content modified by TGB and, while it was adequate for our needs initially, it was something we had always planned to replace, but we didn't have anyone who could do it. We had some great concept art for the zombie units, but no way to use it.
[box="right"]
The PC Zone article.
[/box]
At around this time, we were hit by a psychological blow - Valve's own Left 4 Dead had what we could only call remarkable similarities. A team of human survivors, pitted against Valve's zombie-controlling AI director, have to complete objectives to continue surviving. Even some of the zombie units were uncannily similar. Left 4 Dead's Hunter was similar to Zombie Master's Banshee. Their Tank similar to our Hulk. I want to be very clear at this point - I am not accusing Valve of plagiarism. What I'm trying to say is that a similar game, made by Valve, was obviously going to blow us out of the water. There's no way that we could compete, and as we were sharing the same playerbase, people would be playing Left 4 Dead instead of Zombie Master.
A second blow came when Valve started allowing mods to publish directly via Steam, rather than merely linking to their sites on a pseudo-store page. This was by invite only, and Zombie Master was not invited to be one of them. When other mods with far, far lower player numbers than ours were being asked to publish on Steam, it was pretty much the final psychological nail in the coffin. We pushed out one final patch for Zombie Master, by sheer coincidence on Hallowe'en , and that was The End.
The Ugly?
Custom maps. Ugh. I really have a love/hate relationship with them. Most of them are awful. Truly, truly awful. Some are good. A few are excellent. I did my best to help - I released the source to the map I used for testing my logic systems. The object collecting, random spawning, timers, counters, all there to be repurposed. Yet most maps were horrible, clunky affairs with the only objective being "don't die." Some even abandoned aesthetics entirely, releasing blocked-out, development-textured environments that were just eye-gougingly horrible to behold.
"Upgrade" servers. Even more ugh. These were servers using plugins to modify the gameplay of Zombie Master. Human players could earn points, increase their health, speed etc. Even heal themselves, which was completely and utterly against the core gameplay.
The source release. A year or so after Zombie Master's demise, we released the source code so that other teams could build on and modify it. In retrospect, and in my opinion, this was a mistake. Not many people actually used it. Half a dozen teams popped up, wanting to continue with Zombie Master, but none really did anything. Some took the code and made an utter travesty of the original, putting in multitudes of near-identical and pointless weapons.
The future...
Zombie Master is undergoing a resurrection of sorts. A small team has come together and has started work on remaking Zombie Master for the newer version of the Source engine. They've fixed a lot of the bugs, added some useful new features, units and weapons and are generally doing well with it. More importantly, they've got the blessing of the original development team to use the Zombie Master name, so look out for Zombie Master 2 in the not-so-distant future.
As a brief addendum, I'd like to thank everyone that was involved in the creation and support of Zombie Master. The core developers, those who came and went, the testers, the players, the forum communities and even Valve themselves. Interestingly, not a single person ever complained about the awful puns in my map names. On the other hand, not a single person ever found the easter egg in the MinerInconvenience map either.
[box="left"]
The MinerInconvenience easter egg - all the currently-living players have to stand between the graves for 30 seconds, and a shaft of light will descend and give everyone full health. Good luck actually doing it, however...[/box]
Angry Lawyer's comments:
The idea of Zombie Master was born out of an earlier concept. The very first pieces of code were from a project called Conquest: City 17, which was supposed to have been an RTS using the Half Life 2 setting. At the time, the Half Life 2 SDK hadn't been released for long, and a lot of concepts for zombie-themed mods had appeared, all with very similar goals and playstyles (I think most of them ended up stillborn). I was contemplating what would actually bring something new to the genre, and a flash of inspiration struck me: RTS zombies, versus first person survivors. I took what code I had written for CC17, slapped some zombies in it, and made a quick prototype, and it was an instant hit amongst those who I could gather up for a playtest. I think that was one of the keys to our success - rapid prototyping.
Zombie Master couldn't have happened without the support of the rest of the team - I got to work with some fantastic people on it. At the time, I was pretty new to writing C++ on that scale - without TGB and qckbeam shoring up my memory leaks, and figuring out how to actually get the thing to compile on Linux, the game would probably have never been released. My attempts at mapping were dire - the one map that I did - Warehouse - was awful, until it got a much-needed overhaul by Pi. Pi's maps were fantastic - when he showed us them, I suddenly realised that Zombie Master wasn't just a hacked-together toy, but a proper game.
I'm still pleased that, considering we were such a tiny team, we were one of the only zombie-themed mods to actually ship, beating those with high production values and pages upon pages of press release and concept art.
I think what killed a lot of the passion for me was the less savoury parts of the community. There were those who would constantly grief and exploit, and when we fixed bugs like wall-running giving you infinite acceleration, they would kick and scream on the forums. Yet more just didn't understand the idea, and clamoured for high-end military hardware to be added, and the Zombie Master player to be replaced with an AI - they didn't want to play Zombie Master, they wanted to play one of the many never-to-be-released slaughter-all-the-zombies mods, and as they couldn't, they wanted ours to be like them. It breaks you down, eventually.
It's been several years since its heyday, and I still wake up sometimes, itching to write some code for the game. The thing I miss the most is working with such a great team - I've not worked with a group as talented, or a group that I've gelled so well with, since.
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Angry Lawyer's Warehouse map.
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One of the most surreal parts of development was the run up to release. Most mods were very self-aggrandising with their pre-rendered environments and pretty trailers and the like - instead, we recorded a series of cringeworthy in-character voice logs and put them on the placeholder website. It actually went down really well.
TGB's comments:
I quit twice in the four years I worked on Zombie Master. Here's a contrary opinion: the ZM team was too small. Sure, Pi took care of the maps, and at one point we even had three active programmers. Three! Many an enterprising mod founder grows jealous at the thought. But, as it turns out, there's a lot more to do. And someone has to do it. That was me. Next to the big lump of programming I was doing, there were some models, some textures, the website, the forums, the bugtracker, the SVN repository, the Linux server version, packaging releases, (not) answering email... I juggled pretty much all of it. I was wearing a ridiculous number of hats before Team Fortress 2's drop system was a glint in Robin Walker's evil, beady eyes.
If you ever find yourself making a mod, get yourself a guy who will deal with all this stuff. Someone who isn't also a programmer or artist or mapper, who can step up and take care of all the random things that need doing. An unholy mixture of a community manager and a sysadmin. Maybe they exist. All I know is, ZM didn't have one, and all those hats could weigh rather heavily. Sometimes even your hobby can start feeling like a responsibility.
There's something more important you can learn from ZM though: don't use Source. Just don't. Step away from the SDK. You will regret it. If back in 2005 I had had the experience to recognise what an atrocious mess the Source SDK is, I would not be writing a mod retrospective today. Horrible mess of a codebase, far too little documentation, terrible tools. Valve's lauded fantastic support of the mod community? It does not exist.
More than anything else, it was Source that drained me of motivation in the end. Always the mysterious issues that would crop up, always the difficulty in working out how to bend the spaghetti of Source to do what we needed it to do (the engine was never made for RTS gameplay).
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The unreleased (but almost complete) Streets map.
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I quite simply burned out on ZM once in '06 after a gruelling time of merging in a massive code update Valve had dropped on the mod community, where it took us literally months of work to merge in the update and fix the resulting mess (which was in part our own fault, product of our inexperience). Angry Lawyer soldiered on and released the first version of ZM not long after, and people actually enjoyed it! Clearly things weren't as bad as I thought, and I was motivated again. A testament to releasing as early as possible.
Still, nearing the end of '07 everyone on the team had, essentially, seen enough. Two or three years is a long time to spend bags of free time on a single project that was a mix of fun and frustration. Things dragged on until we released what was intended to be the final version, but not before I managed to fix some long-standing issues I'd wanted to fix for a long time. Now I felt I was truly done, though I stuck around to fix some of the post-release bugs and released the very last update at the start of 2009. And that was the end of it.
I swore I'd never make anything on the Source engine again. Then a few months later started working on Trouble in Terrorist Town. In Garry's Mod. On Source. But let's not dwell on that.
ZM was four years of work, highly educational and somehow fun, but often a slog. All for a game few people even know about, now only played by weird people who enjoy crappy gimmicky maps with gameplay-destroying server plugins. There's your final take-away! If you only want to make a mod for the fame, the praise, and the end result: don't even start.
If, however, you just enjoy making things that you enjoy playing, and perhaps you found some friends with a similar attitude, well, who knows what will happen. Perhaps you'll make a mod. Perhaps a zombie game, but different. Say, what if you have a team of survivors in a zombie apocalypse, but the zombies are controlled by a player, RTS-style... Nah, that's never going to work.
