A rogue-lite strategic survival game where you manage a group of survivors in a post-nuclear zombie apocalypse.

Post news Report RSS Early Development Update #1

Update on what has been happing this week with the project. Coding ~ Fixes to the pathing system. Art - New area in development, and new zombie work.

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Hello everyone! As promised here is our next update. The plan currently is to (trying my best) release an update every weekend for the next 11 weeks. You may ask “Why 11 weeks?” and that’s a good question. At this point we are working on getting a demo put together by April 11th, which is the start of PAX East where we will be unveiling the demo. Around that time frame we will also be launching our Kickstarter, maybe a little before or a little after but it should be within a week of PAX East.
So let’s get right in the trenches! This has been a busy week and we’ve seen a lot of good progress on things. On the admin side we are nailing down contracts with two other companies, one to help provide us some audio for the demo and another to help with some of the 3D asset creation so we can get a nice, big, beautiful demo area for people to play in. Additionally, we’ve nailed down our Sprints, associated milestones and tasks to keep our team on track. Finally, we are starting our small publicity push sending out a sneak preview to all of our social networks in order to start generating some interest in our existing fan base. As such, hopefully we’ll see some more followers and comments on the project over the coming weeks.



On the programming side we’ve been cleaning up some of our code and finishing some re-work on systems that have needed some updating due to our design changes. As noted in our last update, we made the decision to move from turn-based to real-time. As such we needed to re-work our pathfinding code. Originally we had the pathing tied directly to the 3x3 grid on each tile. We later enhanced this to subdivide the grid into a 9x9 grid on each tile for better precision and to allow for closer interactions between two actors, as well as actors and their environment. After we released our second internal build we realized that with the switch to real-time the pathing needed to be more fluid. As such we have moved away from basing the pathing solely on the grid to allowing the units to move in fluid space while referencing the grid for pathing around static objects. There are a few benefits we see from this which include; actors being able to get even closer to each other and the environment, much more fluid movement, and enhancements for level design.



Aside from getting the base systems into the game for PAX we are also working on getting a good size area that you can play in. Most of the screenshots we have up to this point are of the hotel, which was the original area we built out. Those of you familiar with the boardgame should be very familiar with these tiles. As we continue to grow the level we’ve added two varied apartment areas, which you can see a tiny bit of in the last picture of our previous update. We are putting some finishing touches on it and I’ll add a screenshot as soon as it is ready but to hold you over here is the concept.



Additionally, as we are building these new areas out we are starting to work on some of our early randomization aspects. As such while we are building these areas we are ensuring that they can be duplicated, manipulated and then used in our planned randomization system. This will allow us to have an expandable system for world generation, providing for a different experience on each playthrough and potentially allow for some great modding opportunities.

In addition to the progress with the environment our character artist is working on an updated zombie to bring us closer in line with the post-apocalyptic nature of the Zpocaylpse IP. Here we have an early concept of the new zombie and some early modeling work to see the progress we are making. The goal is to have him in the game by the first week of February then start work on a new survivor.


As always we love to hear from you and hope you look forward to our next update next weekend!

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Borzi
Borzi

Looks pretty sweet!

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Dakcenturi Author
Dakcenturi

Thanks!

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