Zombie Hunter, Inc. News

[p]This August we worked on improving our levels, implementing multiplayer and save system and added a few visual effects.

Igor worked on fly visual effect and splases. Me and Egor improved scenes from Sewers and Andrii worked on multiplayer. I also worked on headshot blood and our artists create a bunch of new models.

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[p]Version 1.05 has now been released. In it, you will find fixes for bugs we found listening to you and watching you play the game on conferences. We also improved graphics, especially in the Streets level, which you can no access right from the main menu. And last but not least, we added quality of life features, like dialogues which now air while you are playing the game, instead of forcing you to listen to them.

At the same time, this July we started adding back multiplayer code into the game. Co-op mode was always planned to be a major part of Zombie Hunter inc, and the netcode was being added right from the first day of its development. However, recently we stopped updating it to bring you zombies faster. In July Andrii has already brought back the netcode for the main player character and now he and Igor are working on adding it to zombies.

We switched to using terrain grass instead of the grass made with Visual Effect Graph. I found a large library of Unity shaders in ShaderGraph samples package. I reworked the grass shader from that library by adding random offset, ability to read Global Illumination from the terrain’s GI map, texture sampling to make grass has texture and not just uniformly look like a thin plane. I also changed the way the mesh is rendered from cylindrical billboard (that only rotates to face the camera around a pole) to standard billboard (that rotates full mesh), as this approach look better in our top-down game. A the same time my grass was growing into buildings, due to the angle of the billboard. To fix that I added a z-offset to my shader.[/p][p][/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink]
I also finished the Normal Blending shader, now we can completely rewrite normals on our objects with decals, instead of just adding the new normals on top.

Igor worked on the web system. We want spiderwebs to appear in our level, which can rip and attach to the player, when he goes through them.

Sound Room system is finally done - now, when you are in an appartment building, you will hear zombie sounds muffled, when they come from behind close doors, and those sounds will change gradually as you open the door.[/p][p][/p][p]And, as always, our modelers have create a number of beautiful assets.[/p][p] [/p][p][/p]

[p]This June we attended Funcon in Kiev, fixed a number of bugs, progressed in our new level and welcomed two new members into our team.[/p][p]On 6-7th of June we attended Funcon in Kiev and showed our game to hundreds of people. Afterwards our coders spent some time fixing bugs, that players found during said conference.[/p][p]Ihor, c# Unity developer and Anastasia, 3d modeler, joined our team this month. The development speed will now increase)[/p][p]Egor, our lead artist, continued working on our new level "Sewers", focusing on the supermarket underground storage. He also created a cutscene, where zombies break windows in the restaurant, when you pick up a gun from a crate.[/p][p]Our artists created a number of new models.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]I am still struggling to create a normal blending system, that will alow us to overwrite existing normals and create beautiful puddles.[/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink]We plan to release an update roughly 1 month from now, that would fix all the bugs we found ourselves as well as the bugs players found in two conferences that we attended. It will also include new realistic lighting for the big Streets level and a Ray Tracing preset. Stay tuned![/p]

This May we were still working on improving core functionality of the game, in preparation for the Funcon festival, that takes place one week from now.

Andrii expanded zombie functionality, now they climb walls better, fall down from heights and jump the hero, when he is too close.

Egor added special zombies, that try to catch our hero in the first level, when he runs up the stairs, worked on new cutscens and improved hero walk animation.

I worked on improving the shader that blends normals.

Finally our artists added a bunch of new models as usual.

https://youtu.be/SI1aMTJZE4Q

Come play the current build at Funcon in Kiev next weekend!

This April we were quite busy. We attended Games Gathering conference in Lviv, showed our game to hundreds of people and won an award for best graphics, drastically improved lighting in our levels and significantly improved all aspects of our zombies.



At the start of the month, we attended Games Gathering conference in Lviv. Zombie Hunter inc won an award for the best art and we gathered a tone of bugs glitches and requests from over 60 people that played the game over two days. That is why we spent the rest of the months addressing the issues that surfaced.

Andrii worked on improving zombies. He added various death animations for zombies and merged them with our ragdoll system, to make every death pose unique. He also improved ragdoll, so that zombies no longer fly through geometry when you kill them with a powerful gun. At the same time, now our zombies have a vision system, made out of several zones: forward white – spotting player using rays, peripheral gray – spotting player with rays but slower, close yellow – instant spotting and orange – spotting via non-visual cues from the back. We plan on using this feature extensively once we start working on bandits and other gun-wielding enemies.

Egor fixed visual bugs and researched Unity water. We now know how to control the waterflow using special textures. He also experimented with foam effects and created a cool effect that we will use when water is flowing around an object. At the same time, he is finally working on sewers. We now have a clear understanding how the level should look: every tunnel, every corner must be designed to satisfy two conditions: to look man-made and to facilitate waterflow. So, no cave-like tunnels, no sharp corners and no square rooms.

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In April I discovered a Black State gameplay video and was quite surprised and intrigued how they managed to achieve this level of visual fidelity. There were a number of games released recently, notable for their realistic graphics: Bodycam, Cyberpunk 2077 with mods and now Black State. At first, I dismissed them by thinking “we would never be able to achieve something like this”, “this is only possible in Unreal” and “it’s raytracing, once Unity improves its raytracing support, we will have it by default”. But after the Black State video Andrii told me: “We have all these extremely detailed assets, yet our graphics looks dated” and that really bugged me. So, I spent a whole day arguing with ChatGPT, trying to understand how these Turkish Arcviz guys managed to make their game look this good. And here is what I learned:
- They use only cloudy weather outside.
- Their shadows are very blurred, almost non-existant.
- What we perceive as shadows in their videos is actually high quality reflections of objects from puddles, achieved with raytracing. Which is a brilliant trick, as it grounds the objects in an environment, where there are no shadows.

This led me to create a plan:
- Make a high quality static ambient light baking instead of Enlighten realtime light, which is very blurred.
- Use Angular diameter for all lights, but especially the sun, to make shadows very blurry.
- Add puddles and raytracing to make everything look grounded.
- Turn on Raytracing for high quality Ambient Occlusion (better darkening) and reflections.

And let me tell you, this plan paid off big time:


See you next month.