Zombie Hunter, Inc. News

[p]In September we added a number of effects, improved cockroaches and rats, started working on new systems and enemiens and trained our bandits.[/p][p]
Andrii worked on bandits. We are creating a complex behaviour system for them: every behaviour of a bandit will be able to fight with every other one for control of the bandit. Jut like it happens with emotions in small children.[/p][p]
Igor improved our rats. Rats will interact with your character in a unique way. You can always kill them with bullets, but they jump on you and bite. The more rats are on top of your character right now, the fewer movement options you have. First you loose your ability to run, then to even walk, and then to shot - you character starts throwing rats off of him. If you get enough rats off of your character - the movement will return. This way you will be able to pass rat-infested zones with some strategy and creativity.
[/p][p]Igor also started working on our ultimate zombie: the mutant. In Zombie Hunter inc, zombies that ate enough human flesh turn into mutants. They are incredibly fast, can climb on walls and kill in the matter of seconds. We plan on making them almost unbeatable, designed to avoid, not to fight head-on.[/p][p][/p][p]Egor added new scenes, animations and started working on assembling our scenes into a coherent Sewers level.[/p][p][/p][p]I created 3d decals, flood effect and a bunch of new models, alongside our artists.
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[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!