(1 of 3) The Turned [mega-post] – Prologue, bestiary, and lore

Warning! Due to its length and comprehensiveness, this is a multi-topic discussion.Read the “Prologue” before entering the thick of the post, and take breaks between each of the three posts. I suggest listening to real music while reading, in order to keep stimulated.
I highly recommend reading all of the parts to The Turned, in order, from top-to-bottom.

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I’ve an idea for a boss.

The Construct

“An attempt by humanity to turn the Turned against themselves, the Consruct is a horribly disfigured amalgamation of flesh and technology. It prowls the underground tunnels of the research center it was created in, eviscerating human and Turned alike.”

Basically it’s fast. Really fast. Its implants calculate trajectories and sightlines in such a way that it can intercept grenades and other thrown weapons using mechanical limbs and tentacles and toss them back. Similarly, it can dodge shots from precision weapons such as sniper rifles.

Visually, it’s humanoid, with a hunched back and roughly 40% of its body composed of machinery. It’s also relatively intellegient, and sets up ambushes within the confined passageways for unsuspecting victims. As it is both cybernetic and biological, it is weak to both EMPs as well as temperature extremes.

When half of it is destroyed (either the cybernetic or the biological half), the surviving part will lash out with either electrified mechanical limbs or spore-releasing tentacles.

Something a bit like this:

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lmao imagine an admin who gives himself 255 of every skill and his zombie comes to fight you

thankyou molt, very cool!

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I am sorry for the length. Part 1 is the longest of the 3, and really most of it just serves like a fan-fic more than anything which is unfortunate.

On the plus side, I learned some formatting tools and writing tricks that helped to reduce the other parts to a third of the length, and in the future there’s some other stuff I want to try when making longer posts (that is to say, micro-suggestions work better in many cases).

I had an idea for the “Story” linear single-player game mode that basically just put the “final boss” of the story as an insane human who can control Fastigium.

But then I just thought of Plague Tale.

Really, a lot of the Anomalies could be turned into mini-bosses with areas or quests too, and for official manually-created maps there’s quite a few ways hazards could be designed for a better experience.

Don’t give them ideas. :wink:

But let’s say it’s an actual issue:

  • Make prime zombies give most of a player’s experience “points” back, if such a system is still in use.
  • Set a cap on how amazing a Prime Zombie could be.
  • I didn’t envision a lot of ways for them to possibly occur from, so hopefully it shouldn’t end up wrecking new players as much as high-end players if it was somehow a zombie god.
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I feel like the Construct or a similar boss would be appropriate in a story mode where the player needs to retrieve data on the Apex from a lab where they did alter-dimensional research.

Then again, that goes into the whole question of whether or not this is an enemy humanity can even defeat in the first place. Regardless, it could be a good story mechanic where the player fights and defeats what he believes to be the Apex, only for its true form to be revealed, making this something more akin to Lovecraftian horror.

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(DISCLAIMER: I have yet to read the remaining two posts, but I have some thoughts based on part one.)

Half-Life + STALKER + Fallout + Metro threats? Amazing!

I completely agree with you that UII should take on a more horror oriented direction.
Now, some of my suggestions are:

The greenish colour palette for the Turned should be dropped imho. A pinkish, flesh-like design feels far more natural and organic, and far more terrifying. Also, alternatively black as the main colour could work.

More deformed/Non humanoid enemies:
Arachnoid, ameboid, insectoid horrors that crawl around could really spice things up from both gameplay and horror perspectives. For example Spider like creatures that are affected by the sickness, although not influenced by the Hivemind, that have underground dens.

A great emphasis on sounds and Turned vocalizations can greatly increase the horror factor, and when we are at that, neutral turned could have a wide array of vocalizations, such as weeping, attempting to speak, but failing and similar activities that display the remains of their former selves.

Sorry for terrible formating, mobile is not very user friendly :confused:

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All the ideas presented in this part of the topic are amazing!
It could already be the way it would be perfect.

My favorite was The Desolate, I believe that, as you said yourself, are small details like an unattacked “Turned” that makes the game beautiful, maybe it can have features like trying to hide with your hands when you hear too much shot. near him, or try to contact him when the player attacks him, begging him with a disfigured voice to stop him or asking for help with a disfigured voice.
This “turned” would have an effect on the player (not the player’s character), but on the real player, who could have a heavy conscience by killing a creature that begged for help.

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Or rather, to haunt the player more, the Desolate can come clawing after the player, begging for help or to end their suffering.

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The original draft made them tan-ish beige, with spores being a dull orange, but keeping the green for zombies.

When I had been discussing enemy designs in Prey with Nelson, we mentioned the “scary black monster” aesthetic, and I think that’s kinda reflected in the Ethereal conceptualization.

Green works pretty well small-scale, but for larger enemies it’s hard to know (which is why I’ve created and manipulated various images to try and reflect some of that green on a larger scale, although the images reflect models that’d be higher-poly than implemented).

It might be easiest if some enemies have texture (material maps) like buildings and such have in some early Devlogs. Potentially even using normal maps to add depth and such. That way, larger-scale usage of the green could still look “decent”.

Full inspiration was: 7 Days to Die, DayZ Standalone, Days Gone, Dead Frontier, Dead Space, Dying Light, Generation Zero, Half-Life, Halo, Left 4 Dead, Lovecraft mythos (Cthulu Mythos), Metro Exodus, Mist Survival, Prey (2017), Project: Zomboid, Rainbow Six Siege: Outbreak (event), Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Rust, Stalker, StarCraft, The Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, The Forest, Unturned, Warframe, World War Z

I added the Desolate when I was showing off some of the early drafts to @Pork or someone else, and they mentioned content from the “Neutral Turned” thread.

I don’t think it’s worth adding a bunch of such passive Turned, but they’re interesting. If there was a “sanity” mechanic, it’d be interesting to have it tie into neutral Turned like The Desolate more heavily than into the hostile enemies.

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I recognised all of these

I recognised the inspirations from those… But that’s all.

Edit: such as the hive mind/biomass, a… Few others… I dunno.

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Oh side note: for the ghost-like ones here’s a few ideas

  • they show up near portals

  • some of them have a more human shape, while others are just a vague cloud

  • the ones with human shapes are slightly less aggressive, and take longer for them to become hostile from you being in their view.

  • zombies that look like they are sorta turning to these types (black mist around them, and perhaps more passive)

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This part serves more to guide readers to a certain answer than it does to clarify what is being asked.

What?

You meant “do” not “due” right?

How about, we make it completely stun resistant during charges, but make it extra vulnerable to stunning during specific parts of other animations?

I think you meant all, not both, unless I was supposed to understand that some of those quotes weren’t to be achieved, or that all of those quotes are the same thing. If they are supposed to be perceived as one thing, (and the preceding paragraph as the other thing,) then the paragraph with the quotes probably should end with a sentence that sums up and ties together the paragraph as a whole.

Horror is all about building suspense, not about having flashy ranged attacks flying around. I’d say a better form of attack for something as scary as the anomaly would be to have greater audio and visual disruption and greater health loss the further into the Aether Medium one goes. The health loss could be in the form of constant damage, but I think having a delay between the damage (similar to the damage you get in Don’t Starve/Don’t Starve Together for being in darkness) to create a sense of suspense between hits and a sense of panic when trying to get away from the center of the Aether before the next hit.

Did you mean explored or explained, or did you intentionally use the word exploded in a nonstandard way.

Yep. I can’t say I ever want to read it again.

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Maybe it is just one condition, like if a player’s imunity is low enough he will turn uppon death but to make it so that if you are fighting a player with low imunity you wont have to always deal with this maybe if you shoot the head they wont turn or maybe they will turn after a few minutes allowing you to take the loot .

Shouldn’t have been since I can see the negative in that part, but I can see where people would lean into one answer more than the other. (fixed)

What?

You meant

Did you mean

also fixed

It probably used to only have the first two quoted sections, or perhaps it was referring to “both” as the sentences (2) rather than the actual quotes (4). Fixed.

More like animation cancelling than, like interrupting attacks and whatnot?

I think the mega should be able to pathfind through fences and small walls. Like the farm fences in Russia, you can easily break them and I think the mega should be able to walk straight through, allowing other zombies to follow it’s path. I think the mega should have a small stun ability when doing the groundpound.
I think with all these new monsters, servers should have all power to remove or add these monsters and get the amount of horror or survival that they desire. I think letting the electric zombie control sentries would be OP, unless the turret gets less accurate. Imagine the zombie getting lured to your base and taking control of you sentries inside for instance. I don’t agree with your opinion of making one fire zombie. I think smaller fire zombies and larger, harder fire zombies would be more fun. Maybe the ethereals should be bulletproof like the ghost zombie in U3. I like the way that they can discourage people having negative rep, assuming the rep system gets more balanced. The spores sound really awesome, but I think they should only exist in really hard deadzones or in special maps. I’d also like to know how you think spores and hiveminds would have to be implemented in U2’s style. Because the blocky and simple style is hard to combine with spores and hiveminds.

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To add details to the lore. Maybe Scorpion-7 is a Scientific research corporation that was developing inter-dimensional travel in one project and fulfilling a bioweapon contract at the same time. Scorpion-7 discovers the Excursion dimension, they find a watered down Turned disease which could be a virus, fungi, prion, or even a disease type that was previously unknown to humanity. They would conduct experiments with this disease. At first it would affect the wildlife of what was the Excursion dimension and eventually make the jump to humans.

There would be more expeditions into the Excursion to get more samples of the disease under the Scorpion-7 project called “Project Charon”, named for the ferryman of Hades in Ancient Greek mythology. The inter-dimensional travel project would intersect with the bioweapon project once they brought back the disease of interest. The Scorpion-7 Employees working on Project Charon would eventually get their hands on some samples of this disease. They’d test it on animals from the Excursion and with the constant meddling of Scorpion-7 in the Excursion, the dimension gets corrupted and leads to the creation of the Apex.

The disease eventually mutates and makes the jump to humans in a Scorpion-7 facility. This unexpected mutation leads to the creation of what we know to be the Turned. There’s no explanation for how the spores came to be at this moment so I’d most likely scrap the spores and would probably put in something else. Remember, we’re dealing with another dimension here and the laws of physics in the Excursion would most likely be very different than our own universe, so we can be creative here. At first, the outbreak is contained but a series of mutations allows the disease to spread quicker. This disease would most likely not be fungal but rather would require a whole new disease category of it’s own due to the ability to effect to mutate an individual’s genetic code at an accelerated rate.

Just for some thought on the origins of the disease. Scorpion-7 can of course be replaced by another name such as the Apex Corporation for example.

Btw if nelson makes this much enemies, I think he has to make sure he gets a good core foundations for enemies. Like he has to make it easy to add new enemies with new mechanics without having to write tons of new code or decrease performance. I don’t know much about coding so you shouldn’t take this serious but I just wanted to say this.

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It isn’t actually.

Also, those one zombies don’t follow you afar as I can tell, they just attack you with nearby electronics if you run into them.

Also I’m pretty sure they won’t be able to control player made stuff.

And they definitely won’t make it easier to raid a base, as they’ll probably despawn, or just attack the people who lured it to the base with the sentries.

I was just warning for a possible problem, no need to defend it right? Just wanted to make sure Nelson doesn’t make broken enemies which he could have avoided.

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