The first thing I built was a survivor on a grid. You see what’s around you, walls block the rest. Then I added the rule from the first entry: every action makes a noise, and that noise has a range. Anyone or anything inside that range hears it, even through a wall, even if they can’t see you. To test it I gave myself a shout button, a way to make a loud noise on purpose and see who reacts.
What a noise looks like
A noise arrives as two things. A ring around you lights up on the side it came from, bigger when it’s loud, and fades. The ring only shows while a sound arrives; the rest of the time there is no ring at all. And a line goes into a log: what kind of noise, roughly which way, and how loud. The log keeps the last six, newest first, and a zombie’s footsteps land in it as well as its groans. A faint noise only gets a rough direction, “somewhere east”. A loud one gets a sharper heading and you learn what it was.
When there’s almost nothing on the screen, a noise you can’t see is the thing you pay attention to. A line like “? NE” makes you stop and think about what it could be, which is the reaction I want from a player. Reading “groan E” and knowing there’s a wall between you and it does more than a drawn zombie would.
Then the zombies
The zombies came the same evening. They hear too. Make a noise and every zombie in range turns toward the place it came from. Not toward you, toward where the noise was. They’re slow, and they groan as they come, so once one has heard you, you hear it back. If you make a sound and then walk far enough away, you can watch them arrive at the spot you left, stand there for a while, and forget about it. That is already the game I described in the first entry, and it’s only a few days old.
The log in the screenshot is the doubt. A couple of zombies nearby already fill it with groans and noises it can’t name. A few lines is fine, I can read them. I don’t know what twenty sound like, and I don’t know yet whether the answer is a smarter log or a player who learns to stop reading it and listen to the ring.