Hi I'm Joe and here's what I'd do if someone at Valve put a gun to my head and told me to add a new type of Special Infected to the video game Left 4 Dead
First thing to think about is, as a goal, you need an issue you want to address. For me, in Left 4 Dead, that's players rushing. Whether it's co-op or or versus, players in L4D can pretty much just speedrun everything, if they want, and get away with it. I'm hostile to this. I don't like those players - they can only have a good time if everyone else has a bad time.
So, my Special Infected is the Lurker.
-The Lurker always spawns ahead of the survivors on the escape route (an L4D concept which is just "the path from map start to map end").
-It doesn't spawn very often, and only once per map.
-It looks and acts identically to an idle common infected (normal zombie), and does all the usual idle behaviours: leaning on walls, staggering around, vomiting.
-If any player gets too close, it erupts into a terrifying mess of bloody tentacles like The Thing and does low-damage minor-knockdown slashes within a several-meter radius, still staggering around. It doesn't incapacitate like other special infected, but it knocks you around.
-If it takes too much damage, it disengages and tries to escape by getting low and snaking off ahead. If it gets away, you might encounter it again, back in stealth mode.
-It doesn't do much damage, but it has a lot of health, so fighting it takes time, and draws some attention. It's also faster than a player, so you can't just run away.
-Pre-aggro, there's two ways to know it's not a common infected:
- Regardless of noise or damage, it never aggros unless you're close to it, it just keeps doing those idle zombie behaviours.
- If you shoot it in the head, it "dies" like a normal Z, but like 5-10 seconds later it gets up again.
This means you can't confidently detect a Lurker without drawing attention from other enemies by shooting (which matters a lot or a little, contextually), or by slowing down and taking a few seconds to be sure. You're disincentivised from rushing because the level of danger ahead is unclear, since every zombie is a little bit of a suspect, at least some of the time.
I think this could be a pretty good solution to how, for a certain type of player, a lot of the survival-horror tension goes away when you realise that instead of cooperating with the experience, you can just run fast.
In versus, as the Lurker, you get a third-person view, and play the The Ship type game of trying to look plausible as an NPC, while trying to get close to an area where the survivors will have to get close to you. For instance, playing as a Lurker, you might stagger into the path the survivors need to stealth along to avoid disturbing the Witch.
I wish L4D supported modding so I could actually give this a try!
Thanks for coming to my Zed Talk