We are making great progress on Sprint 3! We are extremely happy to be using Unity Pro as it allows us to really start adding in some great functionality! While the rest of the team hammers away at new art and code I am working my way through preparing for the Kickstarter campaign. We haven’t set a definite date for launching the Kickstarter as of yet since we are hard at work getting everything finished up and we definitely don’t want to launch until we feel everything is ready. With that in mind we are planning for the Kickstarter sometime within the next 6 weeks! Thanks to your feedback, other developers suggestions and our internal discussions we have decided to launch our Greenlight campaign the same time we go up on Kickstarter.
Before the Kickstarter I plan to do a lot of marketing so you will start seeing a lot more news all over the internet as early as three weeks from now. Again, thanks to suggestions here and other places we have accumulated over 60 news sites, youtubers, reddit channels and other places to work on marketing. Luckily all of this doesn’t cost us money, just time. After our Kickstarter is over and we have had the chance to get development going smoothly full time I plan to write some articles about all that we have been doing pre-Kickstarter to help other indie developers out there try and pursue their dreams as well!
Our design documents are finally finished!! Well, as finished as a living document can be. At least for what we are working on for our pre-alpha demo we have gotten things pretty clearly defined and have a base for all of our systems from a design standpoint. The general info side of things is a little light this time around but that is because we have some great things in our coding and art sections!
Chris has been doing some great work this week and has implemented a feature to the game which has probably been one of the biggest jumps in making it feel like a more polished game and that is our Fog of War (FoW) and Line of Sight (LoS) system. With this in the game it really adds to the survival feeling and makes the game that much more difficult as now you can’t scroll around the map to see where the zombies are, instead there is only darkness… This one was so exciting to us we decided to put up a video for you to see how it works as screenshots just don’t do it justice!
We have also been working on a new audio manager to implement our sounds and allow for a deep and diverse soundscape. We are extremely pleased with the work from Serial Labs Studios as they have been giving us some amazing SFX and early music!
Now on the art side we have had some really great progress as well! Two things in particular have had a big impact this week. First off our awesome level designer, Ryan has gone over the existing map and started to liven up the streets. For those of you who have seen our previous in-game screenshots the streets are pretty blank aside from decals. We have added a lot more flavor to the streets and they look great! Especially now with the inclusion of FoW/LoS the streets being full add a great deal of atmosphere to the game.
The other great news is in our character department. Initially we were building out characters as a single mesh. We have moved away from this and now are building our characters in multiple meshes. This allows us to easily swap out clothing, hair, and various textures. I have mentioned before we are working with dDo which allows you to quickly and easily swap out textures between different models. Kieran has spent some time and got a very solid skin texture built for our models which is great news because now we can really mass produce and vary our models on a much larger scale. This means much more character variability not only for when you create your character but for the other survivors you find out in the world. Additionally, this will significantly cut down on our costs because we won’t have to do nearly as much modeling each time and can focus on more variation as well as cutting down on our rigging and animation costs.
Last but not least Mitul has been working hard on more concepts for other buildings in the world. While not the biggest or most in depth building it may very well be one of the most important ones to date. So this week I leave you with the Gas Station concept!
Awesome! Game is looking really nice!
Thanks! We plan to continue to make it even better.
Thanks for the support momomo!
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