Hello everyone! Sprint 3 is more than halfway over and we are continuing to make some great progress. As I mentioned last week we completed nailing down a good majority of our design documents. There are still a few systems we need to definitively hash out but everything from the basics of the overall game to very in depth on the exploration experience have been detailed. As such I have started adding some features articles that you can find here under the Features section. Currently this includes an Overview feature and a What Makes Us Different feature. Both of which further define our vision and goals and outline some of the things that make us competitive with the plethora of other Zombie & Survival titles out there. We would love your questions and feedback! I’ve already found that details that are so common to me are things we need to outline to those learning about the game for the first time so those questions and comments are a huge help!
Additionally, we are slowly ramping up our marketing. The great thing about being the Project Manager, Team Lead, Producer or whatever other title might fit what I do is that I’m not 100% directly involved with the development of the game. This is extremely helpful as I can guide the rest of the team, keep up with schedules and planning, help with design, do budgeting and marketing without taking away time directly from development.
So with that in mind over the next several weeks aside from the project management aspects my main work is going to be marketing. As it stands we are reposting these updates on our companies Facebook pages, tweeting these updates, posting threads in a few forums about the game, and slowly starting to utilize Reddit to provide details. If you are members of any of these communities we would love your support there as well! I will be adding a news section to the end of these updates so you are all aware of other places you can help support us. Maybe we'll even throw together a feature on our marketing for easier reference.
Now since I generally don’t get to show any nifty pictures in my general news/admin section I am going to steal a little thunder from the coding side since the work is actually from our partner Ironbelly Studios rather than directly from our own programmer. You all are getting the very first look at our UI design! This is the UI for the exploration/scavenging portion of the game where you have your squad of survivors and go out into the brutal world. Hopefully next week we will have the Character & Inventory screen ready to show you as well.
(NOTE) This is still a WIP and changes are still being made.
No cool videos this week but we have some great news none the less. Chris has been spending his time polishing up some of the FoW/LoS as well as working on implementing the basics of our scavenging system. This is important for the demo as you will need to find gear and resources to build up your base and attempt to survive the night.
Speaking of the base this is the other major system that Chris is working on currently. We have a lot planned for the base building, management, and defense as we continue to develop the game. A lot of that functionality will not make it into the pre-alpha demo as we have spent the majority of our time building out the exploration side of things. As such we are stubbing in a basic system to demonstrate the importance of the base building. This will demonstrate the need to gather resources to build up your base, however unlike our planned free form base building for the final product you will be limited to only building in specific locations. We will still provide options for what you can build though to give you a feel how the different types of fortifications will affect gameplay.
The base building/management/defense will continue to get a lot of love to bring it to the state we want for alpha but we definitely want to make sure a small aspect is in the game so you can get a feel for its importance.
Finally, Chris has added in the day/night system so we have a moving sun and moon to dynamically illuminate the world. As mentioned above it will be important to keep track of the time of day so you can make sure not to get stuck too far from your base at night.
We are finalizing our demo level so we can spend the next several weeks polishing what we have. There is a good diversity of locations including a church, apartments, hotel, warehouse, small park, and individual home. As I’ve mentioned before this is only a small taste of the various environments you will come across in the game and while the demo level is static we are working on our design and code for randomizing the whole thing in order to create further diversity and provide for expanded re-playability. So without further ado here is the full level in its initial state.
As we move into Sprint 4 which is focusing on polish we will continue to tweak and enhance the appearance of the level.
Kieran has been working on an extra little side project in preparation for the Kickstarter and I don’t want to ruin the surprise, but maybe I’ll have a small teaser for you next week as that gets further along. In the meantime he has continued to work on our new survivor setup adding in additional options for scars and tattoos as well as starting to work on various hair layouts for the males.
Mitul continues to work on concepts for more areas of the world. While these (currently) aren’t planned to make it into the demo they will be the first additions as we further develop the demo after PAX and Kickstarter. So here we have the police station.
Here are some of the other places you can see us this week:
Unity Forums
GameDev.Net
Reddit: IndieGaming
Reddit: GameDev
Twitter
As always we appreciate your support and look forward to any questions or comments you have!
