Zombie Hunter, Inc. News

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.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

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.

Catch us at GG Conference in Lviv! This is your chance to see what we are working on, play the latest build of the game and ask us anything!
The event will take place in Premier Hotel Dnister in Lviv on the weekend of 5th and 6th of March 2025.

In March we finilized improvements to Timeline, reworked our inventory, added new models, effects and a new cool post-process.

Egor worked with timeline. Now you can speed up cutscenes by holding space.
Andrii helped Egor with timeline and improved the helicopter scene on the roof. Now if the player is hit while opening the final crate, he is immediately killed. Also, now if the player is wandering and does not know what to do – a timer would start right after he climbs to the very top. In 30 seconds, the final scene with zombies flooding would start automatically.

The Katchur family added a new batch of models. We are slowly finishing with Sewer models and moving towards Supermarket’s basement storage models.

I added a sewer underwater pipe burst effect and finally finished a dream of mine from many years ago: Light Color Grading. Now our lights can apply color grading effects. But only where they actually illuminate the area.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Color grading is a post process effect that changes the color of every pixel of the final image according to a certain 3d texture map, called “look up texture” or “LUT”. They are also called “Instagram filters” sometimes, because Instagram popularized this technology in their app.

The problem with color grading is that there can only be one LUT at a time. When developers want to change the LUT the standard practice is to just smoothly blend the current one with the next one. It barely works in First Person games – the change is usually jarring, or hidden by a loading screen or cutscene. For our top-down game I wanted to create a system that would have multiple LUTs on the screen that would blend smoothly. Here lies the problem: how do you make these LUTs blend beautifully and coherently? My solution was – attaching a single LUT to a single lightsource. That way as lights smoothly blend between different areas, so will my LUTS.
This is where the largest challenge was: creating a black and white mask of everything that a single lightsource illuminates. Unity lights are extremely complex and when they are computed, they are directly rendered into the final screen texture. If an object in the scene is black, you won’t get any lighting on it, or you will get a specular dot, which is not what I need. My only hope of making my mask was to write a shader, that mimics the scene (assumes the scene’s depth and normals onto itself) and render a white quad lit which will be simply lit by Unity. And that took me 5 years to figure out…
Recently Unity added a node that I thought would help me and I jumped into shaders again. Sadly my knowledge of shaders is very limited, so even with this tool I would constantly make shaders that failed to work, when you moved the camera around.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
In the end of the day, I was lucky enough to receive help from legendary Remy_Unity on Unity forums and finally created the shader that I needed.

In February our main focus was on improving our last build. Andrii and Egor finished moving our cutscenes to Timeline, now we will be able to create them faster. Andrii also worked on optimizing and fixing our inventory system, while Egor created idle animations for zombies, improved Rooftops level and created missing wind animation for a few models.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Finally the Katchur brothers created a bunch of awesome new models.

Next month we are moving on to working on our new level - The Sewers, so stay tuned!