The poor gits over at The Indie Stone haven’t really caught any big breaks lately, but despite an almost cartoonish level of bad luck compounded by quite stunning hostility from their own audience, they’re still kicking. Or at least shambling grimly forward, as any self-respecting brainmuncher would. While a new public alpha version of their horror-survival RPG sandbox Project Zomboid isn’t available quite yet, the team have put up a couple of videos detailing the finer points of survivor AI and their upcoming conversation system – it’s really clever stuff. We’ve seen a lot of zombie games this year, but nothing like this.

As any zombie movie buff will tell you, hell is other people. Zombies (at least the traditional sort) are slow, dumb and predictable. They’re easy to avoid and manage – a rising tide or a crushing storm poses a similar threat. The story in any zombie horror scenario really revolves around interactions between the survivors, and that’s something that PZ had been lacking up until now. In the first builds they appeared in, NPC survivors were singleminded killing machines that slaughtered zombies and other players/survivors until they dropped. Now? Well, in a video released almost two weeks ago, we can see some definite improvements.

White dots are survivors, red dots are zombies. It’s fairly obvious what’s going on – survivors will cluster and defend each other, secure houses, clear rooms out and then go scavenge for resources. Things will naturally go wrong – a survivor will try to take on too many zombies at once, or get cornered in a building without a rear exit, but that’s the nature of a good zombie horror story, and these stories can (and will) play out even if no human player is there to see them, although you can witness the aftermath for yourself later on. In a slightly more recent video, we get to take a look at NPC behavior up-close.

A band of NPC survivors set out to secure, defend and supply a house, then expand their goals to clearing out the zombies in the immediate vicinity. You can see that NPCs now try to replicate human behavior to an impressive degree, down to conversing about plans, and using resources to fortify whatever house they’ve decided to settle down in. There’s not a single human player involved here, so it should be very interesting to see how well these characters interact with the player later on. On that note…

Well, I guess it’s possible for interactions to go incredibly badly wrong. It would seem that there’s a whole psychology/mood aspect to character interactions. While you can freely chat with any character you encounter via a nice contextual conversation menu, a character in a sour mood, or particularly stressed is more likely to say something in anger, thus worsening the mood of whoever they’re talking to. A string of failed conversation attempts can even end in the two parties agreeing to settle their differences through the time-honored art of murder.

This is all really quite interesting to see. I can’t think of many games – RPG or otherwise – that really allow their NPCs to behave as truly autonomous units, able to decide for themselves who to trust, who to help and who to fight. You can read more about active development on the PZ blog, and while the current alpha version doesn’t have any of this fancy NPC malarkey going on yet, you can still preorder the game from Desura for access now. There’s already an impressive range of mods, adding new content and features to the game too. For all the problems that the project has had so far, it looks to have a bright future ahead of it.

[Project Zomboid]

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