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Tone and Inspiration

Tone and Inspiration

“Dad, why didn’t we help her?” Elisa asked.

Her father, Michael kept his eyes on the road, only averting his eyes to check his speedometer. He was focused on keeping his car rolling at a solid forty miles an hour until he hit exit 12.

“Dad?”

After exit 12, he could navigate some quieter side streets until he got to Ray’s gas station. Ray’s would still have everything they need. Michael had the keys to the place and knew how to work the pumps from inside the store. He could fill his tank and take a couple of gallons for the road.

“Dad!”

“What?” Michael shouted back at her.

“That girl needed help, why didn’t we stop? She wasn’t… sick or anything, she just looked-”

“Elisa, no.”

“Why?”
“Because I fucking said so!”

Michael hated cursing at his little girl and he hated yelling at her even more. But that didn’t matter now. How was he supposed to explain to his 13 year old girl that they couldn’t risk it? How was he supposed to tell her that everything he taught her about helping people who needed help didn’t apply any more? After September 4th, it was every man for himself and if you weren’t looking out for you and yours, then you were as dead as the corpses walking the streets.

The sun had set and thankfully there were no cars around the dingy gas station. Michael sighed involuntarily.

“Are you going to rob John’s store?”

Michael slammed his fist on the steering wheel. “Yes I am, Elisa. We’re going to have to do things we don’t want to now. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

Michael slammed the door and started to the store in a blind anger but slowed his pace, seeing that the glass door had been shattered and left wide open. Michael stepped carefully into the building, one hand on his pistol, scanning the store for any signs of life. The store was silent except for the popping of broken glass beneath his heavy boots.

Ray’s Gas and Snacks had been destroyed by looters. John Carver had never done a good job of keeping his father’s business looking clean and tidy, but seeing it in this condition gave Michael an aura of guilt. He remembered the couple of days he worked at John’s store, thinking of ways John could improve his business if he wasn’t such a hopelessly depressed man.

‘Fuck it,’ Michael thought. ‘If John really cared about his business, he would’ve boarded this place up and take his product with him to wherever he fucked off to’.

There was nothing of use still on the shelves, so Michael made his way to the pump controls and almost immediately vomited. On the floor was the corpse of the man he had known his entire life, John Carver, lying in a shallow pool of dark red. Michael could see what happened to the poor man almost immediately. Whoever had come to loot the place before him left a bullet in John’s neck and let the man bleed to death… alone…

Michael took a deep breath and studied it like a man. There were sure to be more horrors like this along the way. He looked at the man and scanned him, getting used to the idea… Michael thought he was sufficiently prepared until he saw what the dead man was holding onto.

The corpse now in rigor mortis, clutched onto a small 4 by 6 wooden frame. It was the photo John kept of his father. The father John was never able to please. As much of a loser John Carver was, Michael couldn’t turn off his emotions to sadness of pathetic death. He knew John deserved better than to die alone, clutching a photo of a father he knew hated him.

Michael grabbed a pink cleaning rag off of the counter and tossed it over John’s face before turning his gas pump on. That was the most he could afford to do, he was going to make sure him and his daughter survived no matter what.


The Blog

Hey, it’s your friendly neighborhood writerman Infr4mer, also known as Jeremy Ferretti in some circles. Today we’ll be talking about the tone and inspiration for the coming sequel and what this ultimately means for the game.

The first No More Room in Hell had a bit of mixed messages to it, with characters like Jive running around with Wally in what seemed to be a serious zombie apocalypse. This kind of mixed direction was in part due to the super massive number of people who contributed to the first game. When you have a small army working on a project, sometimes it’s hard to get everybody on the same page.

All things considered, NMRiH1 eventually seems to have settled on a kind of classic 60s Romero vibe to it that really works for it. It’s got a bit of camp to it, but can still manage to get the blood flowing. Not only does it visually match the tonality of the earlier Romero movies, but the take-no-shit survival style gameplay is very reminiscent as to how characters in Romero movies can die on a whim.

Asking the team leader Maxx for a list of inspirations was one of the first things I did upon accepting my position. Luckily, Maxx already had a clear cut vision for NMRiH2 and knew exactly what he wanted the team to look at in case we were ever struggling to fit the tone. The picture below was what Maxx showed me. I’m gonna focus on the ones that really stood out to me during the creation process and had the most influence to me.

 

World War Z was an obvious choice to learn from. You might be able to tell that our character art was heavily inspired by the zombie behavior in this movie. The book provided self-contained stories from all across the world from all different social and economic places while the movie depicted a city in the Northeastern US during a zombie invasion. I was a little bit worried that because of our similarities, my world’s story/timeline might end up derivative of WWZ, but with a few minor adjustments, I believe it stands on its own quite well.

Contagion was a film that stood out to me and really helped me craft a realistic timeline for our outbreak. At this point in 2017 we haven’t truly battled a virus that’s affected the entire world, so while I did gain some good knowledge following the real-life Ebola outbreaks in 1976 and 2014, it was hard to imagine how world governments would respond to an even larger outbreak. 2011’s Contagion painted a serious outlook on how human beings in all walks of life would respond to a lethal, world-wide epidemic.

Next I want to talk about the importance of Godzilla and Cloverfield, two choices that might have you scratching your head. They weren’t too much of an influence on my side of the NMRiH2 work, but I think the reasons they were included are quite telling of what we’re going for. Both of these movies are about regular, normal people trying to react and survive in a situation that is far beyond their comprehension. NMRiH1 did a great job of making you feel like a survivor, not a zombie grinder. That’s something we really wish emulate in the second one. In addition, these movies also look spectacular, being something the team is actively looking towards for inspiration on environment art and post fx.

Resident Evil is one of my favorite game series’, but NMRiH2 is not the type of game that’s going to have different zombie types or boulder punching mini-games. The Left 4 Dead series has you play a character with a very fleshed out personality while in NMRiH2 you are going to create and customize your own character. Day Z has evolved to have little emphasis on zombies and instead become the kind of game where you kidnap people and force feed them detergent. We want NMRiH to be about zombies. While we definitely plan to incorporate elements of a world gone mad, we’re making zombies the main focus of this world gone mad. The zombies are the danger, they are the reason this world has gone mad and we don’t plan to stray far from that.

If I had to make a comparison, NMRiH1 is to Dawn of the Dead as NMRiH2 is to World War Z. Understanding the material we’re looking at and taking inspiration from will help you understand what to expect from this game. But, just for clarification, these inspirations will not affect the gameplay. We want our gameplay to be a smoother version of NMRiH1. So, until next time, peace out dudes.

Jeremy “infr4mer” Ferretti also publishes his web comic Exits – A Paranormal Comedy (among others) at his website aberrantink.com

                                             

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25 Comments

  • Carl
    September 22, 2017 at 9:39 pm

    The Walking Dead its the best inspiration for NMRIH 2 i think

    • Jeremy "Infr4mer" Ferretti
      November 4, 2017 at 4:18 pm

      The Walking Dead is a huge inspiration of course! The human drama of the show and comic is such an important thing to keep in mind while dressing the set of the levels and creating a narrative

  • LEN,YU-LIANG
    September 23, 2017 at 2:40 am

    IS A GOOD GAME.I started looking forward

  • LEN,YU-LIANG
    September 23, 2017 at 2:41 am

    GOOD GAME

  • RankedNoob
    September 23, 2017 at 3:42 am

    Keep up the Good work Guys!

  • Sting
    September 23, 2017 at 6:41 am

    Man, I really wish I could see the backstory. I would love to write parts of the story

    • Jeremy "Infr4mer" Ferretti
      November 4, 2017 at 4:20 pm

      I’m still deciding how much I want to put out there of the general world narrative. I’m worried that releasing too information might dilute the experience for some players. We’ll see though.

  • GUMBALL
    September 23, 2017 at 1:45 pm

    hurry up we cant hold on any more we are super thrilled to play 😀

    • Jeremy "Infr4mer" Ferretti
      November 4, 2017 at 4:21 pm

      Ha ha, we appreciate your enthusiasm, but we gotta make sure the game is great before we release it.

  • Splinter
    September 27, 2017 at 6:33 pm

    “NMRiH1 is to Dawn of the Dead as NMRiH2 is to World War Z”

    Just lost all interest in this sequel.

    • Splinter
      September 27, 2017 at 7:50 pm

      “But, just for clarification, these inspirations will not affect the gameplay. We want our gameplay to be a smoother version of NMRiH1. So, until next time, peace out dudes.”

      Never mind, i’m an idiot.

  • Jake E
    October 3, 2017 at 1:13 am

    You guys have your sights aligned to something cool. I look forward to playing this

  • Jasohavents
    October 11, 2017 at 4:54 pm

    All of them are really good inspirations for what this should be like.

    But I’m kinda disapointed that world war Z the movie is on there, you might as well move left for dead up.

    Hell, I think left for dead had a better environment than world war Z. Zombies just climbed up everything and over-ran people. In left for dead there was at least a government attempt to keep things civil and alive that really goes well with how it would in real life.
    Goes back to my previous dislike of your whole ‘runners can climb’ thing. I know I’ll like what you put out but I kinda always like this game for being romero esque, not like left for dead, world war z, and 28 days later. (Even though I think the themes from that movie were very accurate as to a long term survival aspect. SPOILERS!: Such as being on the constant move for resources or having to be locked up somewhere high and secure. And the military remnants not exactly holding discipline because they know everything is f***ed beyond any recover. ENDSPOILER)

    Either way. It’s great you want to keep us posted. Also with your newest steam update have you considered just giving NMRIH(source) a workshop. The community could sustain itself almost indefinitely with that kinda thing.
    The lovely community… Made up mostly of Mexicans and Brazilians. Seriously they love this damn game, why? Did fear the walking dead do this or something?

    • Jasohavents
      October 11, 2017 at 4:58 pm

      Seriously I don’t mean to offend anything with the Mexican and Brazilian comment (All are welcome), I’ve just noticed they’re taken a serious liking to it. Maybe because its free? Its just weird because they seem to play on alot of the East coast servers. Wouldn’t some southern based ones be better, their ping is always outrageous.

    • Jeremy "Infr4mer" Ferretti
      November 4, 2017 at 4:28 pm

      We’re using WWZ as narrative, not in terms of gameplay or runners or zombie types. We’re looking at WWZ how it dealt with the infection, the places, and how it portrayed a realistic zombie invasion scenario.

    • Ravager
      July 19, 2018 at 12:50 pm

      As a former player of the original game, a hardcore fan of Romero’esque zombies, and last but not least, a Brazilian, I should tell you that we’re in just for the fun and challenge – have you ever tried to play any game with outrageous ping? Or do miracles on ancient hardware (my case afaict, since my gaming rig is 10 years old already, and the reason I don’t play anymore)?
      It was never because it was a free game, but it was really neat to call friends over and smash brainZ for fun and survival.
      And yeah, I do agree that a localized server would do wonders to help us down south have a better gaming experience. But I can also see that as another “wall”, as plenty of other games out there are doing.
      I hope the Team never do such a thing to it, since it’s a game that we all really cherish.
      Cheers!

  • shiro!
    October 11, 2017 at 5:06 pm

    hi dev team!
    i loove so much the game! and is so much fun to playing it. im waiting for the next game.
    i have some ideas,( its not ideas is stuff i see in other games)
    but i think can be useful and interesting to be added.

    pd:
    sorry for my writing, im argrtinian. i dont hace so much skill with inglish language. :c

  • ALEKSANDROS
    November 4, 2017 at 7:04 pm

    why the “black hawk down” and “generation kill” is in the list? :O

  • SeeArt
    December 3, 2018 at 2:18 pm

    Think of the technology to assassinate zombies with knife weapons.

    Like that game. ” walking dead survival instinct ”

    I am looking forward to it. nmr2~!

  • oel
    November 6, 2020 at 8:06 am

    Reading this in 2020 and boi did this catch me off guard, “ Contagion was a film that stood out to me and really helped me craft a realistic timeline for our outbreak. At this point in 2017 we haven’t truly battled a virus that’s affected the entire world, so while I did gain some good knowledge following the real-life Ebola outbreaks in 1976 and 2014, it was hard to imagine how world governments would respond to an even larger outbreak.”

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