Day Z or finally inspired to work on my zombie miniature game again....

Over the past two weeks or so, I have been playing the Day Z Mod for Arma II and I have to say....HOLY CRAP IT IS AMAZING. If you haven't played yet, let me give you a heads up...this is nothing like a Modern Warfare Zombie mission...nor is it like Left 4 Dead. Actually, it isn't really a game as it is more like a simulator for what it would be like if "shit really went down".This game is almost like if Romero's "Diary of the Dead" banged "The Road" and produced some sort of mutant offspring. 

The zombies themselves are formidable opponents as they are fast and aggressive...and once you pull one of them, you may end up having to put down several of them. I have had many instances of just running my ass off with 14 of them right behind me and all I could do was look for a building with a ladder of some sort so I could get away and log off. Sometimes my strategy works, other times I am beaten down....legs broken, blood gushing from countless wounds, and all I can do is just wait for the inevitable "You're Dead" screen. And while you are beaten senseless and torn limb from limb, all you hear is the shrieks of the zombies and the wind blowing through the bushes.

Making the game an even more depressing experiment in human behavior is the other survivors. If you hate griefers and all around douche bags, avoid this game like the plague. The other survivors are worse than the zombies themselves. There are roving groups of players who do nothing but hunt down other players for their supplies and have even managed to secure helicopters to do so. I was actually on a server where they had two helicopters circling over both Cherno and Elektro. On most games, this would be enough to chase me off but it just adds to the tension in this game. This is why I don't travel in the open and I stick to the treeline like a hobo sticks to the dumpster at Popeye's.

This is what a survival horror game needs to be. Not some sort of interactive movie with a half ass twist ending. I want to feel the same "fuck my life" feeling I got when I saw the ending to Dawn of the Dead...and Day Z delivers it...you just have to ignore the horrible controls and the movement.

Okay, so "where am I going with this"? Long ago, I started working on a miniature rule set for playing out tactical scenarios ala Rainbow Six or Counter Strike. Originally, I was going to do it 54mm with various plastic kits from Dragon, Tamiya, and similar companies. However, I ran into a big problem....no real adversary models not to mention the terrain models would be enormous. So, I've opted to scale things down to 28mm so that I can use the multitude of models produced by Foundry, Reaper, Mantic, etc.

But with the proliferation of non fantasy zombies came another problem. There are now a metric ton of zombie apocalypse games out there. When I started working on my game in 2004, the zombie craze really hadn't kicked in yet...apparently all the kids loved pirates or something else just as stupid. I had actually pitched it to White Wolf back in 2005, but we'd just hit some serious financial hard times and the cost to produce and market a brand new type of product was just too high...even with me putting in all my time after hours for free.

What do I do now? I still want to do a "tactical roleplaying zombie apocalypse game"...although now things are a bit more complicated than they were even a year ago. My skill set lies within the production end of things...painting and photographing the minis, designing and laying out the book, and all the stuff that is done after the writing is done. And while my writing skills aren't total ass (I was an English major at one time), writing "fluff" and writing systems are two entirely different beasts....and the one system I do know well, I can't really use anymore.

So that is where I'm stuck. I can make the most awesome looking zombie game ever but it will read like utter donkey crap and probably play just as bad.