Zombies are not immortal or omnipotent. Their body is constantly feeding on their undead flesh and rotting away at a very slow pace. If they cannot find any undead flesh to eat, eventually they will rot away and die. It will start slowly, the extra fat upon their body consumed for energy much like normal humans who stuff their face into oblivion. Muscle will follow, then bone and skin. Limbs will start snapping off and falling onto the ground, soil retaking and consuming their bodies. In the end, Zombies have a very limited food source. Meat. Flesh. Once they run out of it, they don’t have much survivability left. Moreover, they don’t have the ability to reason and thus manage their resources and this adds to their problems.

Their population will start out small, experience a huge boom as humanity is overtaken and added to their numbers, and then they will gradually thin out as natural starvation takes its course and zombies simply run out of their own and others body material to burn through. I would be more in favor of a zombie game which simulated a crisis such as this where the zombie apocalypse started out small, hit its peak at the 6-24 month mark, and then gradually thinned itself out over the next 5 in-game years from game start until it filters out completely.

Then judging from the decisions you make in the game, you get one of an entire branch of endings. Yes it’s cliche, but the alternative is much worse. You’re playing through a story where you already know the ending. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, you and your wife are going to die. When in reality, a Zombie Apocalypse is very survivable event as long as you play your card smartly.

And that kind of cold fatalism is going to push away a lot of gamers, including me, away from your game. I disagree with it’s core concept and therefore, I shall not buy it.

(Theyll call it a comeback but I been here for years.)

I think the idea of different peoples sort of “Relics” of the past are good ideas (Like your character lived in an apartment so he starts with the keys to get inside?)

“You hear a noise. Go investigate it”
And when you do, you see a MASSIVE hoard of zombies coming to your base. SO you have about 2-5mins to Grab some stuff or set up defences and try and fight them off.

The beauty of releasing an online game is that you don’t really have to worry about ESRB to publish your game (thank god we can finally ignore those jerks) and can tell any ant-freedom-of-expression pigs to piss off. However, if it’s inevitable that the player will die, obviously there’s too much pressure to survive and making babies would be the last thing on anyone’s mind, so one could just assume that all the children have already been eaten and no one is interested in making more. If you manage to find it realistic to add non-invincible children, I think you should go ahead. It’s your right to do so and you shouldn’t let anyone telly you otherwise. You are sharing your vision, not someone else’s, and that should be the most important matter in any work of art, video game or otherwise.

(to go along with the above comment, many image links are broken. 🙁 I was sad I couldn’t see any pics to go along with the isometric development post.)

as you are dying your soul/essence/Spirt/lifeforce travels to another lifeline.

I believe that as you die you walk/float into the light, and that light you see as you are dying is a vagina opening to give birth to you again. some people die so suddenly they do not remember to wlk into the light and end up stuck on a level of death called limbo that can only be fixed with help from those in the living realm.