Welcome back or greetings for those joining us for the first time! First piece of big news! We have finalized our new name. After many suggestions from our wonderful community here and elsewhere the company finalized our decision to update the name to Zpocalypse: Survival. This is a great fit as it continues the Zpocalypse name for brand recognition as well as capture the essence of the game which is: When a post-nuclear zombie apocalypse is your world, will your survivors see another day? As such we will be updating the IndieDB page to reflect this, I’ll make the switch on Wednesday so just be aware if you have our page bookmarked or anything you will need to update your bookmark after Wednesday.
Friday was the end of Sprint 2 for us meaning we are halfway through our PAX Rush project to get all of you a pre-alpha demo to check out. The great news is even with adding some extra tasks for Sprint 3 we have completed over 60% of our tasks! I think we are in a really great place to get everyone a solid early demo so you can see where we are going with the project and hopefully allow you to feel comfortable in our ability to deliver on our plans.
We have finalized the details with our other partner and are excited to announce that we will be working with Ironbelly Studios to get things ready for PAX and supplement our team moving forward! Ironbelly Studios has been around since 2009 acting as a one-stop shop for other studios, large and small, wishing to increase their creative and technical capacity without incurring the usual costs or risks needed to expand their teams in-house. They have a highly experienced team of designers, developers and artists who have worked on such titles as: Final Rush, Arena of Heroes, Jeklynn Heights, ReRave Plus, Running Quest, Civil War 2: 1862 and many more. You can check them out at Ironbellystudios.com
Our design docs are coming along but still not finished up. We are at almost 60 pages of design work and we should finish off the core stuff next week. Of course, these are living documents so we will add to and change them as we progress but it’s very important to have a solid vision to start with.
The last piece of general news is the great folks over at Unity 3D have been kind enough to give our team a set of Unity Pro trial licenses so we can really make the demo great and utilize some of the advanced features we wouldn’t have with Unity Basic.
So with our new name selection thanks for providing your feedback! It is our goal that as the community continues to grow to keep you involved and engaged in decisions we are making or questions we might have.
As such for our next community question we want to get your input on a marketing question. As I mentioned before we are beginning prep for our Kickstarter campaign and pushing out info for marketing purposes. We’ve already got a good list of gaming news sites, youtubers and reddit threads that we will be reaching out to. However, we want to know “Where would you like to see more news about our game?” or more to the point “What are your suggestions for news sites, youtubers, etc that we should contact?”
In the programming department we have the initial combat system built in and I am excited for our next internal review to get everyone’s feedback on a more meaningful combat system. Additionally, we have the database setup for character classes and progression which is the base for the overall character creation system. Chris is also continuing to implement music and SFX and we are looking at a few options for audio management tools to really add some versatility to our soundscape.
We have finalized our UI Design Doc and are getting started on design and soon after implementation. This is going to be great not only for having a nice, functional UI but also because a number of the current systems are waiting to tie into the UI and add additional functionality that we just can’t achieve without a solid UI.
Over the coming weeks Chris is going to also begin work on our day/night cycles as well as our Fog of War implementation both of which are going to add a lot more atmosphere and immersion to the game.
As you saw from our overall screenshot there were a few areas that while in the game needed some updating to bring them up to par with the other areas. Our awesome level designer Ryan spent some time this week updating the warehouse not only with the decal system but also with new models!
Additionally, Kieran is continuing to work on great new characters and we have an early preview of our next survivor in our updated art style. By next update I should have the finished model to show off! In the meantime here is the concept that some of you may have seen.
Rob, one of our hard surface modelers, is continuing to do great work with our weapons.
As always we look forward to your comments, especially now as we need your input!
