z-day: A slightly different perspective on slaughtering zombies

I have a couple more roguelikes on my list, which will probably carry us right up to the end of the month. This is z-day, which I include mostly because it’s written in python, and because suggests a few changes to the tired old roguelike interface.

By any yardstick, z-day is a bit primitive. It lacks a lot of the features you might expect — or want — from a roguelike, but I’m willing to overlook most of those because the home page hints that the game was never really finished. That’s fair.

Most of the reason to include it (aside from the copious amounts of color 😉 ) is the inventory-only approach. Almost every key corresponds to some sort of item in your inventory, and pressing the appropriate key triggers its use.

That’s the case with almost everything except ranged items, which will require you to use the “z” key to fire. Other than that, arrow keys will move you and “a” and “u” are dedicated to equipping or using.

So there don’t seem to be any provisions for character abilities or background, no proficiencies to master or improve.

z-day breaks down your physical state into two categories, wounds and stamina. Wounds, as you might imagine, reflect how much damage you’ve taken, but stamina suggests how much more you can take. You might suffer a blow from a zombie while your stamina is high and shrug it off, but the same impact while your stamina is low might kill you.

That too is a different approach to the classical 1978-bound “hit point” model, and therefore worth mention. z-day also is stretchable to almost any terminal size. And it has a few other nifty tricks, but nothing huge that you won’t overlook on your own, if you try it.

In the category of downsides, z-day has some mapping issues that cause the screen to map and remap as you get close to the edges, which can be irritating. And there’s the question of whether the “a” key is somehow dedicated to inventory, or if an item in the “a” slot will be activated when you press it. Same for a few other letters.

I’m also a little distressed that throwing away an item destroys it irrevocably, supposedly because it’s “lost” in the mess. I’ve seen this in big-name top-tier games too, and in this day and age it strikes me as a huge cop-out. Much smaller, much less resource-hungry games are capable of managing loose scattered items on a map, so I see that as a considerable disappointment.

Other than that z-day strikes me as functional, and possibly the beginnings of a decent game. I don’t see it in either Debian or AUR, but the source file ran fine for me with just python2 zday.py.