Devlog - November 14th 2021

Hit Reactions & More Zombie Improvements

This week I spent most of the time extending & improving the zombies. I added the idle behaviour to make zombies much more stationary than in the previous week. Occasionally they will wander but for the most part they don’t do much unless there is some kind incentive for them to do anything. This allows for more stealth gameplay and enables players to decide between confrontation and avoidance. Zombies now also have a variety of sound effects [1] and animations for most of their existing behaviours. Hitting zombies is now also possible and they dynamically react to where they were hit from [1]. Besides the zombies I also did research, testing a bit of work on extending the spawning system.

Notable tasks this week:

• Added zombie idle behaviour
• Added many new zombie animations
• Added zombie damage system and hit reactions. (Video available on discord)
• Refactored old audio system
• Added many sound effects to zombies
• Tested & prepared various other assets for implementation in the coming week(s) such as decals and volumetric blood effects. 
• Created a new spawner module to allow Bolt (Unity’s visual scripting system) flow graph invocation directly from spawners. Since my spawner system is built on a linear flow, branching would require new modules to be programmed for specific use cases. By using Bolt users will instead be able to create very specific logic with visual scripts and directly integrate them with the spawning system.
• More Zombie performance optimizations

Wishlist the game on Steam

Join the offical Discord

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.