I'm excited to be back working on my zombie shooter after having taken a short break to focus on updating some projects for my freelance portfolio. One of the few remaining large features left to implement is zombie attacks, so I decided to start there given that I'd already done a fair amount of testing ideas in this area in the past. The video below shows the progress that I made earlier this year:
This work was done back in February but, given that zombie attacks weren't a priority at the time, I set it aside once I had the concept tested enough to be confident it'd work the way I hoped. This week I began making this concept work with gameplay.
There's a grapple attacks for both from the front and from behind, and the correct animation set is chosen based on the zombie's position relative to the player. I've created a secondary camera for the attack sequence as well, which has its own custom canvas used as a prompt that instructs the player to hammer the F key to save their backside. I'm also leveraging the in-game desaturation shader to fade out the colors (except blood) in sync with the animation's progress for effect.
This all comes together as depicted in the video above, and while I feel there's quite a bit of room to add some polish and additional graphic novel elements, I'm pretty happy with how this turned out; especially considering this is the most complex of all the zombie attacks. I'll be spending time this week getting more generic attacks working as well and hope to have a more complete video to show by this weekend.
