Zombie Hunter, Inc. News

[p]As we had many complains about the game's performance, in February I remade the glass system to make it more performant. I managed to do it superfast (working on GPU now) and without quality loss.

We continue working on our multiplayer functionality. Andrii changed zombie code to include multipleyer, moved to main characters code and fixed various issues we found during tests.

Igor added folders into our invetory. This is our idea on improving inventory management. For instance all food will only take a single cell, but you will be able to see every single item if you go into that cell. He also improved flies that appear around dead zombies, introduced blood clipping system, to prevent blood sprites flying through walls and worked on our Monstro animation and logic.

We lost Egor this months, so there would be no level building updates. He said he is now looking for something less demanding. Luckly we were able to hire an awesome artist Vitaly Lulchak - see his works in our video log - he is extremely talented.[/p][p]
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[p]In January we took part in game round testing and received 100 reviews of our game from real players. The general feedback is that there are a lot of performance issues. luckily this is not difficult to fix. The main performance issue come from two points. When there are a lot of zombies on the screen and when the player is shooting glass because my glass shattering effect is an optimized. Optimizing zombies will take some time. We planted to do it for quite a while, but we wanted to first see real problems before actually optimizing, because this is the wise approach to development. With glass shattering effect we will just change it for a Wii FX graph the collisions will be worse but the performance will be much better.

Egor worked on supermarket area that will be located on top of our undeground warehouse in our Sewers level.
Igor continued working on our zombie monster. We want to make it behave like alien and attack from the shadows.
I worked on blood effects and on optimizing glass shattering.

Our modelling team started working on supermarket assets and made quite a few of them.
Finally Andrii started a massive rewor of our multiplayer code. It was inefficient due to poor choices I made 8 years ago. Messages could not reach players as there were too many of them. But we now know how to send messages efficiently and Andrii is rebuilding our multiplayer messaging system to make it fast and reliable.[dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p]

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In December we worked on fixing bugs that were found when showcasing our game at Games Gathering, improved bandits AI and added a few quality of life features.

Andrii and Igor improved our bandits: they now attack like sharks, whenever they see you or hear your shots. Even if there is no clear line of sight, they will send a volley of fire towards you.

Andrii also added a "magnetic doors" system, that "sucks you in" when you are entering any door. This way, you don't need to see the door to enter it. This is useful, as due to our camera you quite often don't see where the door is exactly and hit a wall when you walk. He also fixed issues with guns falling through the floor when you pick them up or when they are dropped by enemies.

Igor reworked how our lights flicker in the Flooded Room in Sewers, fixed issues with rats and added a prone retreat behaviour for bandits.

Egor worked on visual issues in Sewers, added mountain rocks near the Warehouse entrance, improved the way cut walls look and worked on sewer river currents. He also started working on new crouched walking animation for our main character.

I'm sorry that we could not deliver a new update before the end of the year, but we will always prioritize quality over quantity. Thank you for believing in us and have a great 2026 year!

The Maya Gameworks team
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[p]This November we worked hard to make our Sewers level playable for the Games Gathering conference. The Conference took place on the 29th/30th November in Kiev and it was a huge success. Over 200 people played our game and we got a lot of useful feedback.[/p][p]Players loved our lighting, which is a special pleasure to me, because I am responsible for it and I believe lighting is my weakest skill.[/p][p]Bandits debute was also a success. People enjoyed playing cat-and-mouse with them in our Warehouse section of the Sewer level.[/p][p]The main negative feedback was that it was difficult to aim. I believe this is mostly because our level was way too cramped with stuff. There is nobody to learn from when building our levels, that is why we can only rely on ourselves. This time our attempt to add details into our level backfired. Moving forward our levels would be much more spacious as lots of space and minimal cover poits fits our aiming system much better.[/p][p]Sadly we were unable to test our co-op multiplayer, because there was a 3 second delay when people tried to play together. This is most likely due to my architectural mistake from many years ago.[/p][p]Overall, we are on the right track, we now have another level and many more to come. Sadly there will be no release this year, as we want to make our current Sewer level complete so that the next release is actually impactful. I estimate it will take us another 6 months to do so.[/p][p]See you next month![/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p]

[p]We are planning to attend Games Gathering conference at the end of November, that is why this October we focused on preparing our Sewers level for playtests and making our bandits as smart as possible, as they will be stars of our show.
[dynamiclink][/dynamiclink]Our bandits can now hide behind obstacles when you engage with them. They can also cover their buddy with supressing fire, while he is repositioning. Bandits can also patrol a large space and search for threats.[/p][p]Sewers level now features a number of tunnels and can be played from start to finish. It is still a temporary level, as we plan on removing/updating large chunks of it after the conference.[/p][p] [/p][p][/p]