I haven’t updated my blog lately, and there’s a bunch of stuff I’ve done! I had a bit of hard time finding motivation lately, but I’ve still managed to grind and get stuff done. This week I found the motivation again when I started a complete redesign of the graphics and aesthetics of the game. Sometimes it’s important to just keep grinding no matter how lost you feel, but I think that shifting my focus to something that brings the whole project to a new level with “small” effort needed was the key for gaining motivation again.

I haven’t gotten far with the graphic changes, but they already make the game look much better and more atmospheric. A full list of changes I’ve done is at the end of this post.

Yesterday I went out to the streets of Kuopio to seek some original sources of texture photos, and I found a couple nice spots. So far I tested out only two of the pictures I took, and the other one turned out pretty good. I liked it so much that I decided to use it as a texture in “Zeds”!

Here’s a comparison. First, The old scene with daytime lighting….

… And next, the first test setup of the night scene with post-processing effects:

Quite neat, huh? I decided that I will probably ditch day scenes alltogether / for now to get more atmospheric scenes. The lights and fog just work so well and are relatively simple to set up, casting more shadows etc. And I’m not even started on volumetric lighting!

I made a development build and it seems to run quite smoothly even on my oldish mediocre PC setup (which is GTX 680 4GB, intel i5 3570k, 8GB RAM).

You can also see that I’ve added fog and other various post-processing effects to improve the visual quality. Next week I’ll start redesigning the default level, and once it’s in decent shape I’ll make a brand new video displaying all the new features I’ve worked on.

Full list of changes and additions:

Scripting: Fixed tag manager to function properly

Scripting: Added a parenting function to gore system to ensure neat hierarchy in project view.

Scripting: Started implementing critical hits for weapons. Gore system will work differently if a critical hit is achieved.

Scripting: Added weapon-dependent gore system impact force.

Scripting: Fixed critical hit calculations to function properly.

Game balance: Balanced weapon critical hit chances.

Scripting: Started updating deprecated scripts and removing “harmless” warnings (old: 31 warnings, new: couple of warnings from asset store stuff which I’m too afraid to touch at all)

Modelling: Started modifying the riot zombie’s model to support gore system.

Scripting: Fixed and cleaned weapon-specific gore system force

Scripting: Added force source functionality (grenades now knock body parts away from them, instead of away from the player)

Scripting: Added explosion knockback for existing body parts

Scene: Experimented with rain visual effects.

Textures: Corrected riot zombie textures

Modelling: Added “sever point” meshes to riot zombie model + finished gore system modeling changes

VFX: Adjusted blood burst material to look less shiny

Scripting: Started implementing a particle-system based weapon script for flamethrowers and the like. Core functionality reached. Smoke also added, need some corrections to slow down and start rising at the end.

UI & Scripting: Added functionality to scale weapon images upon selection. They now grow in size smoothly once selected.

Input & Scripting: changed all current key bindings to refer custom key input names, thus supporting customizing keybindings.

Scripting: Added a functionality to disable meshes in clothing manager (and corresponding piece of clothing in gore system to variate if a zombie has a certain piece of clothing or not, mainly meant for headwear)

Scripting: Fixed various things with clothing randomizer. Added 50% randomness for wearing headwear.

Lighting: Started improving scene lights to create more atmosphere.

Textures: Went around the city taking pictures for completely self-made textures. made the textures in GIMP + created normal, AO, specular etc maps.

Graphics & Aesthetics: Started to work on completely overthrowing the scene graphics and aesthetics.