A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux

Grave Wave began as a remake of the 2013 "Generic Zombie Shooter", which was my first game. It's a top-down zombie shooter with a dark vaporwave theme.

The game began as Generic Zombie Shooter - Redux, but as the vision for the game has changed, and has quickly moved away from just being a remake, a name change felt necessary. The game is currently undergoing a visual overhaul, after which sound and music will be worked on before making the finishing touches to release on Steam!

All feedback and suggestions for improvement are appreciated!

Controls

Action	Key
Fire Weapon	Left Mouse Button
Melee Weapon	Right Mouse Button
Move Up	W
Move Left	A
Move Down	S
Move Right	D
Reload	R
Space	Interact
Select Previous Weapon	Q
Select Next Weapon	E
Next Wave	N
Pause Game	P
Open Training Screen	T
Open Shop	B
Open Console	~

More information

Status	In development
Platforms	Windows, macOS, Linux
Rating	Rated 4.0 out of 5 stars (1 total ratings)
Author	packetpirate
Genre	Shooter
Tags	Synthwave, Zombies

Download

GZSR_v1.4.zip 62 MB

Install instructions

Simply extract the ZIP file and run either the JAR file, or if that doesn't work, the BAT file. Requires Java 8 to play.

Development log

Generic Zombie Shooter - Redux v1.4
Apr 12, 2019
Generic Zombie Shooter - Redux v1.3.1
Jan 18, 2019
Generic Zombie Shooter - Redux v1.3
Nov 13, 2018
Generic Zombie Shooter - Redux v1.2.1
Aug 15, 2018
Generic Zombie Shooter - Redux v1.2
Aug 13, 2018
Generic Zombie Shooter - Redux v1.1.3
Jul 17, 2018

Comments

Meneer Guus6 years ago

It’s a pretty decent timekiller and it plays smoothly. While it’s still a bit too generic right now, it has a good base for more content. I’m not sure if you aim to keep it generic, but I’d suggest more variation to skills, as well as a reason to use other weapons since every enemy just rushes you straight-on. While there are quite a few enemy variations, most of them die in 1-2 shots from the handgun.

Couple of other suggestion;

The shotgun’s damage output is surprisingly low
The minibosses(?) have too much health, I had to max out grenade launcher ammo around 4 times to get through one
I like the variety of power-ups, but you get them way too much. Around wave 32 I just ran around from medbag to medbag
While entering the shop from any point in the game to restock in ammo is quite handy, it pauses the game and makes the waiting for the next wave pretty pointless. You never have to worry about ammo since you practically earn more than you shoot and you can restock at any moment; leaving an opportunity to get more strategy and planning behind

So as far as the title of your name goes, it’s a pretty generic but a nice solid demo

packetpirate6 years ago

Hey, thanks for the feedback!

I definitely have a direction I'm taking it and I will probably change the title once it's no longer "generic". I'm planning to get rid of the "training" screen as it is right now and replace it with a perk / talent tree type system where you can upgrade effectiveness of specific weapons according to probably three different paths.

The Shotgun and Flamethrower seem to be the two most disappointing weapons from the feedback I've gotten so far. The shotgun is meant to do lower damage in favor of high knockback, but I'm currently doing a rewrite of the entire damage / health system for weapons and enemies to make it d20-based, so hopefully that can balance things out.

Grenade launcher is not the best weapon to take on bosses. In fact, the AK-47 is the best weapon pretty much overall in terms of overall ammo to damage output. I made a stupid change to the grenade launcher not long ago so the damage done to the enemy was according to their proximity to the center of the blast, but I didn't increase the overall damage of the explosion, so it ended up nerfing the hell out of it. Now that I'm redoing the damage system, I'm going to remove that.

The powerups have been a consistent problem. The thing is, I drastically reduced the drop rate of powerups in this release, and yet it still seems to be a problem. But I think the problem is because each enemy has their own drop rates for specific items, and every single enemy has a chance to drop SOMETHING, so at wave 32, there would be 165 zombies. The average drop rate of medkits is around 20%, so you can expect that roughly 33 enemies will drop a medkit.

I've gotten the suggestion multiple times to make the shop inaccessible during waves, and I think that's a good idea, but I would have to either add melee weapons or drastically increase ammo crate drop rates or you would end up out of ammo with no way to get more if I left things the way they are.