Another week, another live-streaming adventure into the world of zombies, eggs, procedurally-generated levels, and unexpected bugs! But never fear – a few hiccups couldn’t stop Sarah and the LearnToMod Content Crew (AKA the #ContentCrew) from fighting off zombies, running through mazes, quashing bugs like nobody’s business, exploring around floating dungeons, and stepping on lots and lots of pressure plates! We all had a blast – make sure to join in on the fun next Thursday at 5PM PST on our Twitch stream! Besides, next week’s stream is going to be extra-special!
Look at that maze!
What’s going to be so extra-special, you ask? Exciting news: we’re running a contest! On the stream we explore an epic and engaging maze designed by #ContentCrew team member and chest-spawning specialist Mr. Sonny, and off the stream we’re looking for your best maze designs to show off for next week’s stream! So put on your thinking-caps, take out your pens and pencils, go watch this Inception scene a few times, and head over to our awesome schematics designer to make the magic happen! Once you’ve got it looking juuuuuuuuuust right, make sure to submit it over at our submission page and we’ll test it out! The best five we will show off for the whole world to see on next week’s stream, so get ready to be famous!
Here is my own deeply terrible maze – I know you can beat that!
Other than building super-awesome-crazy-hard-never-ending mazes, the #ContentCrew brought their A-game to the stream, showing off cool improvements to the Zombie Apocalypse mod they unleashed upon the world last week. But before we jump into what’s new, let’s recap. We’re building a procedurally-generated zombie apocalypse mod, with each member of the #ContentCrew working on a different part. Last week, Sonny worked on making randomly-generating chests drop all types of awesome loot; Carlos made terrifying Zombies that could only be killed with the unimaginable power of the egg; and your’s truly, Erik, created the randomly-generated levels that our intrepid zombie-hunters would run through. This week, everything changed; for the better.
Zombies doing what zombies do best.
This week we turned everything up a notch (no, not that type of Notch). We came up with a goal: get to the end of four increasingly-hard levels of dungeon-generating, zombie-spawning madness and then face off against your friends in a final maze/Hunger Games map at the end to see who comes out on top. we had to devise a way to make the mod track how many levels had been completed as well as increase the difficulty for each one; to do this, Sonny created what we like to call the “Break Brick Block Blocks Break Bricks” system (do we actually call it that? No one will ever know…). This system tracks which level you’re on and gates the exit to the next level around a different group of unbreakable materials – dirt, brick, gold, iron, and finally diamond – depend on the difficulty. Then, the player must run around the level and break two corresponding bricks of that material type to open the final room and proceed to the next level. This way, each level is more challenging than the last. Cool, huh?
Break brick blocks break bricks!
I worked on the next iteration of our dungeon-generating code, making sure that any additions either Sonny or Carlos made would be able to work smoothly as our mod gets bigger and bigger. I added a few new features, such as the ability to make rooms at any size as well as to spawn things – blocks, zombies, chests – at each room’s center, as well as nipped and tucked all the bogus code from last time. The absolutely coolest thing that changed was door generation: each of the rooms has at least one doorway leading to a different room in the dungeon! Imagine that – you can actually walk through the entire dungeon now! Oh, the everlasting wonders of technology!
LOOK AT THESE DOORS!
Carlos worked on a new scoring system as well as a new AI system, so that each player could keep track of how many kills they got as smarter and deadlier zombies tracked them through the dark dungeon halls. He even gave each player a different random color, so that when the scores started flying each of us would know at a glance who we were! All of it was awesome, and all of it made the game that much better.
No escape!
Aaaaaand that’s all for this week! Want to give our new code a spin? Try importing “Notch-zombie_rush_oct_01” if you want what we played on the stream or “Notch-room_gen” if you want to build your own randomly-generated dungeons; “Mr_Sonny-The_Maze” for the awesome maze we played and “Mr_Sonny-block_spawner” if you want to create your own gated levels; and “carlosiscool-zombieai_2” for the whole new-AI-and-scoring-system package. Make sure to show us what you make with these in the comments!
Until next week,
-The #ContentCrew (trending worldwide!)