Welcome back to another Early Development Update! This week has pretty much been all about Kickstarter prep, marketing, and polishing the demo. As such this is a bit of a shorter update than usual as there aren’t a lot of big changes.
We are in full gear getting the pre-alpha demo ready for its PAX East premier while at the same time getting everything ready to launch our Kickstarter in the next two weeks. The page is planned out and all the text is written it is just a matter of getting the rest of the supporting artwork and finalizing the Kickstarter video.
Speaking of Kickstarter I will do a short plug for our newest board game that the other side of the company has been working on at the end of this update.
As noted we will be at PAX East and we have our very own booth. Once we are there and set up I will post an update in case any of you plan to come and check us out.
We have a wonderful new track available from our friends over at Serial Lab Studios! This time it is our current daytime ambient track with various musical layers.
I’ve got another another screenshot from the Ironbelly Studio team. This time our very early look at the base building/management UI. This will be expanded a lot as we delve further into the base building/management aspects of the game but we wanted to make sure that we at least had the very basics in for the demo, related to the temporary system we have in place.
Chris has been working hard this week and has the temporary base building system in place which is great! This should provide a good feeling for how vital fortifying the base is in the overall game. Along with this he has been working very hard on getting all of the UI implemented that Ironbelly Studios have been working on. This is coming along great and it is amazing to see this in game and working! He also worked on getting all the music and sound effects we currently have into the game and playing dynamically based on what is going on around the player.
The other big things Chris has been working on optimizing the AI and making it smarter. The old AI was very sluggish and easy to outmaneuver but the new AI moves with you. It is still a work in progress but once zombies lock on to the survivor they become a real threat now. Day zombies are still slow moving but if you want to complete objectives or scavenge you can no longer skip passed them. The night zombies are absolutely brutal now and will chase you down if you are out on the street. Previously it was pretty tough to die but now as a single survivor fighting more than a couple night zombies is almost certain death early in the game.
Since Chris doesn’t usually get a lot of screenshots in his section I thought I would add one this week that he sent my way. This is a perfect example why you want to get other survivors and not be caught outside at night alone…
Over the next week we will continue polishing the AI, finish implementing the UI and continue work on general optimization and polish.
As noted above things have been busy, busy, busy getting everything together for the Kickstarter and PAX as such a lot of the art we have is still very WIP. As such I thought I would take an opportunity to show you a little more about how we are working on character customization for the future. Below are a few shots that show how we can easily allow for color variations between different aspects of the character and this is being expanded to include easily swapping out the relevant textures as well to allow for some detailed character customization.
Here are some of the other places you can see us this week:
Unity Forums
Reddit
Twitter
Facebook
Heavy Steam is a steampunk themed strategy and resource management game that uses mechs called steam titans in miniature based combat! If you are interested you can check out the Kickstarter here:
Gotta love those night zombies. How many players would it take to take out the pack in the screenshot?
We are still balancing things but currently for unskilled, underprepared survivors, two of the night zombies can easily take out one survivor by ganging up on him.
On my next test I'll have to throw a group against the horde and let the AI takes it's course and see how the battle plays out :)