Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Mods My Mod - Zombie Time

A Working Version of this mod is available on STEAM. It's called "Zombie Time". Original name, right?

Check it out! It started as an experiment in scripting and turned into a full, hour or so long, corny game. 2 Players recommended!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0mtgtajg4613okq/zombie_time_7a490c18-c2ed-4bf5-bf28-67f37ba6a1bc.pak?dl=0

Features:
-Hunger system: Eat or starve to death. Scavenge for food or hunt deer!
-Time cycle (Wasn't able to make a visible day/night cycle, but time passes in this game)
-Roaming / Respawning / Random monsters
-Random placement of quest items for replay value.
-An epic ending so bad you'll probably never play again.

Enjoy!

A rather challenging, though promising mod. I really enjoyed the survival theme and the creative scripts you created to bring this zombie apocalypse to life. It freaked me out when things started popping out of the ground while I was already locked in combat. Oddly, I haven't bumped into any zombies yet but maybe that happens when/if I ever locate the lighthouse.

As for feedback, I feel that the time progression would work better if you cycled through four very distinct lighting settings rather than having a message inform the player overhead, which breaks immersion. Similarly, instead of having an overhead message saying "You're Hungry" you could make the player talk a line of overhead dialogue like "I could use something to eat" then "Ung.. I feel so hungry..." then "If I don't find something to eat soon I'm going to starve to death".

The lighting inside the starting cottage served to mislead and disorient the player since it seemed bright as day in there, then you take one step outside and get enveloped in darkness. I'm also not sure why there were several books and journals scattered around the house to explain the backstory as simply having one journal would be simpler and take up less inventory space.

The game could have been a little more intuitive to navigate and survive (at least at the beginning). For example, the world was very open and sparsely populated, so it was difficult to get a sense of where I was at any given point, or where I was supposed to go. Adding some landmarks, people, or signs might help. I tried following what looked like a cobblestone path but it only led me to an impassible cluster of trees. I climbed a hill behind the cottage only to find a powerful wolf standing there, seemingly guarding a campsite. That looked promising. I managed to skirt around him and locate a tent, but that was deserted, and ... okay this is the worst bit... there was an empty chest. How sadistic! So basically in three playthroughs I ran in completely different directions and was still unable to locate any food or the treebranch to make a bow with.

Even though the mod was just a test maybe some of the feedback will be useful to you. I'll post more when I make more progress on the mod. Keep up the good work!

Awesome info, thank you!

I updated the game and included a lot of your suggestions.

Funny enough - I named it "Zombie Time" originally not knowing what to name it. Turns out - changing names of a mod once started is harder than I thought. I tried renaming it to "The Survivors" and when I did none of my scripts were included in the final .pak file. I changed it back because I couldn't fix the issue. The zombies and their poison blood were just too deadly for this game, so I took them out.

It was meant to be challenging, but it was hard for me to gauge the level of challenge because I knew all the answers.

To a few of your points:

I tried and tried and TRIED to make the engine change the lighting from day to night to day again, I tried tons of ways. The basic issue I ran into is the script command to change an Atmosphere Trigger's atmospheric settings ended up just corrupting the trigger and crashing the game. Maybe I didn't do it right, but I couldn't get it to go after hours of tests.

The lighthouse key spawns randomly in one of those empty chests. Just because it was empty that time, doesn't mean next play through it will still be.

The books in the cottage were 1000% an afterthought and they're really poorly done. I do need to re-do those.

As for intuitive - I wanted it to be something that two people play together and learn how to survive together.

Here are some hints if you do care to try it again:

-Branches are scattered throughout on the ground. Hold ALT to locate them, there are 5-6 in the mod.

-Getting custom sounds to work is beyond me at this point, the text and sound effect were the best I could come up with. I did this mod in about two weeks - and about 1.5 weeks of that was sorting out the scripting. It was really just a quick "I wonder if I can make this work" type of thing that I figured I'd share.

-Fish wash up on shore periodically. Anywhere you see water, you'll have a chance to find fish. They appear randomly, so if the random number generator is feeling greedy, you're in trouble. There are 16 possible spawn locations, each has a 1/10 chance to spawn each morning.

-Pumpkins grow in two spots near two different houses. They also respawn randomly.

It has gained more popularity on steam than I expected though, so I'll probably update it and revamp it a bit again.

So far I've found the key of the Lighthouse and 2 abandoned houses. I've make now 2 bows and 1 branch with Nine Inch Nails combined as back-up weapon because for now I use the bow ;-)

Hehe, it's funny to read you have tried to change "Zombie Time" into "The Survivors" because I've named my save game "The Survivors" !!

I also hope I can find somewhere a "Repair hammer" ?
As a Survivor I like the idea to find all the ingridients to make my own gear, so if a trader (one or more) is IN your mod I hope they don't sell gear, but only crafting items
I really love the crafting in D:OS ...

Good Luck with updating your Mod kind Burgee !

Glad to hear you're enjoying it!

There is actually no repair hammer, the game is beatable by only fighting a few things and shooting the bow maybe 20 times max. Combat is meant to be avoided, but if you find that you break your bows and are unable to make enough to complete the game - let me know and I'll make a change.

There are no traders at all in the game, you're the only living guy in the area.

Sadly no repair hammer ... but good to know that !!


Puuhhh ... that makes this Zombie Time more difficult ... yeah ... my Survivors WILL DIE .. I'm afraid & I'm sure ... taadaaa !! GAME OVER !!

I hope to find that Lighthouse soon enough !

Did you ever make progress on this? I had this same issue and seemingly fixed it by NOT making the atmosphere trigger global.

This is counter intuitive to everything normally done in the story editor but it seems to work.

I still can't find a solution for the issue of idle characters though. When you aren't moving for long enough the atmosphere wont change.

Use CharacterSetOnStage or whatever it is on a player. Set it to 0 and then set it back to 1 in the next line of code. It's unnoticable by the player, and seems to activate the trigger.

Well my player seems to flicker when I do this
It's also not activating the trigger.

That's strange, it seemed to work for me and I definitely had no flickering.

Honestly, while it's a potential bug it can probably be worked around because how often is the player going to be just standing still? You can pause any timers while the player is in dialog to prevent the switch from happening then, and it should go largely unnoticed.

Yeah it's more about finding the solution than practical necessity.

It seems to work about 6-7 times then stops. I can tell the timers are still firing since my translated string key debug method is still showing up.


I fixed the flickering though. The calls for on/off stage were too far apart creating a slight delay.