Death went in this week, and it’s the version from the plan. Your survivor dies, and it stands straight back up as a zombie. It waits where you fell until a noise pulls it somewhere, like any of the others. It groans as it comes, and it takes more killing than an ordinary zombie. On the map you can tell which zombies used to be people: they’re a different colour from the rest, so a street with three of them on it reads differently from a street with thirty ordinary ones, even before anything is worth taking off them.
Why this one first
I did it early because it decides everything around it. If a corpse just disappeared, or dropped a bag on the ground, half the rules in the plan would go soft. With this one, every death in the city means one more zombie worth being careful of, and once there is gear, whoever finds your zombie has a reason to hunt it. That’s the Diana Morgan feeling from Zombie Days, with a reason to care that the zombie used to be someone.
The rule that goes with it is decided, even though there’s nothing to carry yet: what you wear stays on your zombie. When gear exists, the way to get it back will be to find the thing that used to be you and put it down. For now the zombie keeps nothing of yours but the spot where you fell and a colour that marks it as someone who used to be a survivor.
What dying feels like right now
Every bite before the end flashes the whole screen red for a moment. Dying puts you straight back on the street as a new survivor with nothing. A notice flashes up over the map, just above your new survivor, and fades, and that’s it. No pause, no choice. That is not how it should stay. Dying should feel like something happened, and right now it feels like a reset button. I don’t want a long punishment, I want a moment where you understand that survivor is gone. I haven’t found the shape of that moment yet, and I’d rather leave the reset in than build a death screen that says nothing.
The rest of the plan leans on this. Gear only matters if you can lose it, and being away only matters if your character can die while you’re gone. Neither exists yet, and this is the piece they hang on.