Zombie Hunter, Inc. News

[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]

[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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