The Zombie

Tohm's Zombie is special because it was the very first bad guy ever created for the game, which made him a real milestone - unlike the training dummy, the zombie fought back! When zombies arrived, Tohm finally started looking more like a game than a fancy chat room, because players had a goal which they could attempt and potentially fail.

Behavior
We chose zombie for our first monster type because it was easy - we needed to get a very simple AI framework put together and tested, and only "zombie" and "robot" concepts seemed to fit the incredibly simplistic combat logic we put together. Since Tohm is fantasy-based, we went with zombie.

Our first attempt at the Tohm zombie is a creature which shambles about looking for fresh, tasty human flesh. He's tougher than a player (taking damage before being defeated) and can do more damage than a player (the zombie's bite is much stronger than a player's punch attack). Players are only able to defeat the zombies 1 on 1 because zombies are incredibly slow - they attack or move once per two turns. They don't try to get out of the way when attacked (they don't dodge), and they're also very predictable, because they always move toward and attack the closest player.