We’ve now fully implemented all core elements in Zafehouse: Diaries.
The most important feature we’ve added is the win condition. A rescue chopper will arrive in a few days or weeks and you need to scour the town to find out exactly where, when and how to contact the chopper. The radio and rescue frequency are the most important items: you can get lucky when the chopper arrives by being in the right place at the right time, but without the radio and frequency, it’ll just fly by.
Moving between locations is now more strategic: you can investigate, assault or just dive straight into a new location. If you’re uncertain about heading to the hospital, send out some investigators first. They’ll check out the surrounding area and peer through windows to see how many zombies are inside. Then you can send in some armed survivors to pick off zombies from a distance – and even take out zombies inside by shooting through windows.
And finally, relationships can now be manipulated. Relationships affect just about everything you do in the game. If your survivors aren’t getting along, they’ll split up during combat, argue, hurt each other, and generally perform poorly at anything they do; when the group is happy, everything ticks along smoothly – barricades are slightly stronger, traps don’t misfire as often, meals are prepared well and the group is generally better prepared for combat.
While you have some indirect control over relationships by creating situations where positive experiences might happen, we wanted to make it more strategic. This is where rumours come in.
Your survivors all start with a blank slate – you know a little bit about them, but their past is hidden. By creating a rumour about one of your survivors, you reveal something about them to the group. This can have a positive or negative effect on relationships, so you have to be careful that your rumour won’t backfire. You also don’t have unlimited rumours – you need to create the right rumour at the right time, making this one of the game’s most strategic elements.
The game is on the final stretch now. We’ll announce the release date soon.
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Being such a big fan of the original Zafehouse I’m so glad to see that this game isn’t dead. I originally had developed concern when the update feed for Zafehouse 2 had become dated back about a year. It was a good thing that I still had the determination to check regularly for updates or I would have never come across Diaries.
Well any way, with that monologue out of the way, a quick question about the game. Will Zafehouse: Diaries be using the combat system that was originally previewed for Zafehouse 2?
Thanks turkeyeyes. Zafehouse: Diaries’ combat system is brand new, though it borrows some concepts found in the old Zafehouse 2 prototypes. With regards to the interface, it’s handled in-engine – that top-down design you might have seen a few years ago isn’t part of Diaries.