Devlog - November 7th 2021

Zombies, Zombies & More Zombies

This week I spent almost all of my time working on the zombie implementation. Since the world is fully procedural the zombie navigation implementation is more difficult compared to a static world. I have done a lot of testing and improvements and got to a great result by the end of the week. I’ve started the AI implementation from the ground up with all the new information in mind I got from prior testing. This is to ensure that a large amount of zombies (or any other AI) can be in a close vicinity around the player without impacting performance too much. With the foundation for that built I can fully focus on actual zombie behaviour implementations next week. I already managed to implement basic zombie wandering, chasing and attacking this week. Next week I will improve those behaviours’ internal functionality, add zombie idling and try to implement as much as possible of the planned zombie functionality. Once the zombies are nicely integrated the game will have a nice base on which new features can be added very quickly as it is one of the last bigger feature implementations and potential areas of risk for the game’s performance requirements. Luckily this week’s tests showed great performance so I’m confident that I will not run into roadblocks in the future.

Notable tasks this week:

• Improved existing AI navigation framework to ensure great runtime performance
• Implemented zombie AI foundation to enable large amounts of AI in the game
• Implemented basic zombie behaviours (Video can be seen in the discord devlog)
• Lots of testing and performance improvements

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That’s all I got this week. I hope you are all doing well.

Stay safe out there and I’ll see you next week.