Comments - eatsleepindie

I usually prepare for the save/load system better and get it implemented early in development to save time in future but this being a personal project that I originally wasn't sure was ever going to become a game, I just kept delaying it. I'm glad it's done though, it's going to come in handy when playtesting for certain.

The radioactive vomit does disappear after a short while. It does a lot of damage and I don't want to permanently cut off exits or anything, I just want the hairs on the back of the player's neck to stand up a bit when they see one or more of these guys coming.

My pleasure, Leon. Thanks for the continued support, it really helps keep me focused and motivated.

Severed arms break apart after 3 blows, I figured that was the best way to include the feature without it making things too easy for the player. I really enjoy adding new stuff to the project but over the years the codebase has grown so massive that it is now a bit of a slow process; compilation every time I change something is time-consuming, but I am getting a lot closer to being able to focus on designing the campaign rather than programming features, so I keep on truckin'.

Thanks so much! I wanted the ability to repair armor and melee weapons because I also tend to get attached to specific items in a game and prefer to keep them over replacing them. The whole idea here is to give the player a lot to deal with (hunger, thirst, item repair, infection, finding a cure, surviving nighttime, etc.) and then put a ton of zombies in the way of them completing those tasks. With any luck the progression will make some tasks easier while others become more difficult, hopefully I can find that balance.

Thank you! Looking forward to implementing this into the gameplay soon, just got a few things to wrap up first. Not sure if it will glow or not; would look nice during the night for sure.

Thanks! After the day I had today, this is going to help motivate me for tomorrow

I've actually been considering it since posting this because it does make me laugh. The idea was that you pick up a limb off the ground and can use it as a weapon, but that makes other melee weapons kind of pointless. A few ideas I've had are to make it so the arm only last for a few hits before getting destroyed or possibly having the arm only knock the zombie back rather than kill it. I'll keep playing around with the idea but it's looking more and more likely that it will be in the final release.

Thank you!

Happy (belated) New Year! Sorry it took me so long to respond, I was incredibly sick for the first few months of 2023, this last week or so has been my first chance to catch up to online communications. Hope your year is going well!

I don't think it's just mine, I am unable to watch videos for any project I've tried, so I guess I'll just wait it out and hope they fix it eventually. I have a new article ready to go so hopefully it's sooner rather than later.

Thanks as always Leon! Just to clarify a bit, the slide doesn't trigger the slow-motion effect, I use the Happy Pills item (you can see the icon pop-up in the lower left of the screen) when I start the slide; that item slows down the game time for short while after it's consumed.

I could have pushed myself to get the Alpha ready this fall, but I was already flirting with burnout and didn't want to release just to have everyone dealing with a buggy game. I'm putting some time into my MMO demo at the moment (that project lands me a lot of freelance work), but once I'm done, I'll be back to work on RIZN and should have one more update before the end of year.

Happy holidays and thanks for the continued support and encouragement.

"Stave off" means to avert or delay something bad. Thanks for looking out for me though, I appreciate it.

Sorry to hear you're ill, hope you get better soon. There are several generic death animations for when the player dies due to starvation, basic zombie attacks, etc. Thanks for the kind words and heads-up on the broken link; I am neurotic about checking them, I am certain it worked when I posted this but maybe an edit after the fact didn't play nice.

Thank you! There are two types of attacks for rizn; the generic attacks which are just a quick melee that does a bit of damage to the player with each strike, and the grapple attack that will always kill the player unless they break out in time. I've been debating on whether only certain zombies should be capable of grapple attacks though, since even with a timer that ensures they only happen so often, it can get annoying to be grappled repeatedly and I'd rather it be more of a shock due to it happening infrequently. It could also add a bit fear to the player if they know that a footballer rizn grapples and is charging at them with head armor on; that recognition could really add to the experience, but only testing and playing around with ideas will help me figure out what's best. Funny thing is that I kept getting killed when recording my most recent video because even a handful of zombies around means you end up taking quite a bit of damage pretty quickly due to so many generic attacks, so there is definitely a lot of balancing to work out, especially when considering the reductions that player armor offers. Really excited to be nearly past the point of building all the mechanics and being able to focus on balance, though. The next few months are going to be a lot of fun.

Thank you! Glad that the new zombies are well-received, they definitely bring a new challenge and too many would get frustrating. At the moment, all zombie types have an equal chance to spawn at any given point in the map, but I won't be focusing on balancing that out until later. It's very much in-line with a lot of work I've done in the past as far as difficulty progression, and everything is scoped properly, so I don't expect any issues. Fine-tuning will take time, but I'll be leaning on the Alpha release for that as much as possible - feedback will help with setting appropriate starting values and appropriately increasing those values the further the player gets.

Hey there! Yeah, I took an extended break from all things social media and similar; felt like it would be a good idea before I start pushing hard for the upcoming alpha. I've got a bunch of new updates to share very soon, just finishing up writing my next article which should be ready for tomorrow.

Always great to hear from you, Leon, and thank you for the kind remarks both here and everything leading up to this.

Thanks so much! I'm covered in the audio department for now, I've recently implemented a lot more sound effects for both the game world and the UI. I'm drowning in music files at this point but for some reason always end up grabbing the same 3 songs for videos.

I can't imagine many people would watch a 30-minute gameplay video all the way through, that clip was more to show that this is all working in tandem and there's not editing required to hide anything (except the spawning of zombies in the second zone).

HP for barrels is easy to adjust, I like the high HP for the small propane tanks since you can really get them moving towards a crowd if need be. Barrels can probably come down a bit but I have been playing around with a second ammo for each weapon - a more high-powered alternative that the player can switch to which knocks helmets off quicker, blows up barrels quicker, etc. It may not make the cut though, I sometimes find it cumbersome, but you can see in the inventory screen that each has two types listed, I just didn't include them in loots yet. I'll focus more and more on balancing things out as I get closer to the demo release.

It's a concept at this point, I'll focus more on story mode after the demo, but I'm hoping I can keep what's featured in this video as a template to go by. The game is fast-paced, I don't want to bog it down with a lot of text. Fingers crossed I can pull it off somehow, but we'll see.

I'm actually really glad you left this comment. After recording the video I just posted, I had a moment where the character was standing next to a rather large pile of bodies and body parts, the ground was covered in blood - I couldn't help but wonder if I'd taken things a bit too far and the new max zombie count meant there'd be too much gore in the long run.

Optimization is important in any level design, and it has paid off in spades here. Performance is a bit nuts given how large the quarantine zones are and how many zombies are spawned at any given time. It's been an exciting two days for sure.

Cull means to skip the rendering process and is used to save on performance, preventing the rendering of objects that don't need to be rendered because they can't be seen by the camera.

Occlude means "in the way", so a building that is between the camera and the zombie occludes that zombie; the building is the occluder and the zombie is the occludee.

Even though a structure exists between the camera and that zombie, said zombie is still sent for rendering (by default). Since I have scenarios where there are hundreds of zombies on the other side of a wall, I am building occlusion culling (skipping the rendering process for zombies that are behind things) to save on performance.

Baking is the process of generating that data beforehand so that it does not need to be generated or calculated during gameplay, again saving unnecessary calculations.

So, I am baking the data needed to skip the rendering process for zombies that are hidden behind objects based on the player's current position and whether the camera can see them or not. This image is just a representation of that data, with green rays representing what can be seen from where, the red representing what cannot be seen from where.

Occlusion culling is built into Unity for static objects (objects that don't move, like buildings) but it does not work with moving objects (like zombies). So, I'm building my own solution and sharing the process :)

Hope this helps!

I have a short list of people who will be offered the demo before it releases to the public and you've been on it for a while now :) It'll help me knock out any big unforeseen issues (for those willing to file bug reports) and I have no issue with anyone streaming this game or sharing gameplay videos.

Her ballet was intended just for this video but I can try and find a way to include something similar in the game. I like the idea (I think it fits into the humor well) but I'll need to take some time to consider how to do it... she is meant to sprint and then detonate when in range, but I may be able to have her do a ballerina leap while she inflates (what a weird thing to type out haha).

I am all about performance and I work constantly to try and lower the bar of entry for this game. I worked all summer as a teenager to save up for my first computer (a 486 in the era of the first Pentiums) and I know not everyone can afford a gaming rig. The better it runs, the more systems it can run on and the greater the number of people who can try the demo.

She's not so much a boss as she is a special zombie type that sprints after the player and then explodes when within range. I haven't decided on whether I'll have a boss battle or not, but it's one of the first things I tested when starting this project so it's definitely a possibility. I may just have to revisit the boss battle scene soon; it's been well over a year since I first tested the concept.

Thanks so much for sharing your feedback and insights. In rereading my article, I can see that I may have failed to convey that the spawning system will be rebuilt regardless, it's just a matter of whether that happens before the demo or after; not sure if that was clear or not. Releasing the demo is going to give me a ton of information that I couldn't get otherwise and there's a chance that said information could change things quite a bit. Or a player could have a great suggestion that I didn't scope for at the time of the rebuild. I'm also anxious to get the demo out there and to start getting feedback from players who've spent time in the game; the information they can't give based on videos will be priceless, especially since I'm working solo and am the only one who's played it. There's enough working with the existing spawner for a demo, but it's all still up in the air for now.

They're too much fun to not be included! I've got a napalm version that sets the surrounding ground on fire, but the lighting still needs a lot of tweaking.

At least this one will be a easier to integrate into the city setting than the giant farm equipment.

I spent a good portion of my youth building maps for Duke Nukem 3D and Warcraft II then handing them out to friends at school on floppy disks, so that feeling you're describing is exactly why I do what I do now. It's the same thing just with a bit more freedom to play around with ideas. So many fond memories of building hiding places and secrets into my DN3D levels so I could whoop my friends. I can't think of another hobby or job in which the reward for a hard day's work is that you get to roam freely around a world that didn't exist before you started.

I always look forward to your feedback, Leon, thanks again for taking the time to respond. Last night I "played" the game for the first time in quite a while and man-oh-man, what a huge boost in spirits it was to load random levels after having used the same level every day for well over a year. The controls still felt familiar, but the environment felt foreign and unknown, which is exactly the result I was hoping for.