Couldn't the first zombie faction be set up simply as
* faction specific weapon setup
* one weapon, which is of type melee (medikit of death) and primary, and has largely 0 voxels, and makes movement slow
* custom animation for acting with that weapon, some form of scratch like maneuver
* new skins
?
The biggest obvious gap would seem to be that they'd use the default running animation but still move slowly, which would
just look out of place but would play about right. If anyone requested it, would have been easy for me to add support for e.g. weapon specific run animation
Of course there would be lots to tweak from there, what's the intended gamemode but also in how the zombies behave. Character behavior can't be modified too far yet, but it will be. Faction specific AI and character parameters will be exposed, I'd expect soon after we're done with getting into Steam Early Access so that we can concentrate on other matters not strictly related to that, and in a way would be good for me to know what things can't be adjusted currently for a zombie mod.