Hello all. Since we’re all busy with trying to get 30 out the door, we’ll just list off a few of the more recent changes we’ve made in IWBUMS 30.7 which should be released around the time of this Mondoid (perhaps a bit after) – We’ve made the decision to bump up the ‘Kill You Before The End Game’ tweaks into build 30 instead of build 31, since a lot of the sandbox options marched us closer to that goal as it was.

Here are a few of the changes we’ve made in IWBUMS .7. Remember they are in IWBUMs for a reason, so since some of these changes are pretty significant, if you have a problem with any of the features please feel free to discuss on the forums as feedback is what we’re after.

Endurance Revamp

Endurance has been a bit annoying for a long time. While trying to simulate the player getting out of breath, instead it just acted as an arbitrary and occasional timer forcing the player to back up for 10 seconds before resuming combat, and did little to add to the fun of the game. As such we’ve redesigned endurance to model general physical exertion over the course of a day. It will increase as you run around, fight, chop down trees and all that other back breaking toil, but will increase at a much slower rate.

However once you’re exerted it will, instead of requiring 10 seconds of stand-still time, affect you for a much more prolonged period of time and require hours of rest, or sleep, to recuperate. The idea being that your endurance now becomes a day long commodity that you don’t want to spend frivolously, and to cap the amount of zombie fighting during a day you can expect to be able to engage in at low fitness skill levels. This is still being balanced so feedback on IWBUMs will be much appreciated.

Shader Changes

We’ve made some changes to the shaders on the game to make for a more moody atmosphere, more realistic saturation and moody contrast. We’ve tweaked light and dark levels and made various changes to make PZ look a bit more moody and atmospheric. Okay, perhaps we were slightly inspired by This War Of Mine, but we’ve tried to be subtle in our inspiration. There may be some who don’t like it, but we ask that you give it a fair chance (it took RJ playing for a while before he decided he preferred it to how it was).

Either way, for this IWBUMs we’ve left not choice in the matter, replacing the shaders on to the new shaders. But in future we’ll look to add different settings for those who prefer the previous more cartoony colouring, and perhaps add a few more visual styles (black and white, vignette etc) since they are really trivial and quick to add. The reason we tweaked this is we felt it was a cheap and quick way we could boost the visuals in the game, make the scene (2D tiles and 3D characters) gel together better, make the world more realistic visually, as well as perhaps reduce the amount of ‘urgh cartoony 2D game’ first impressions that have been one of the biggest barriers to attracting people to the game compared to 3D titles within the same genre.

It’s The Zombie Posse

This is a quite substantial change. Now zombies will clump together in ways you’ve never seen before. Instead of single zombies dotted about (though this will still happen to an extent) zombies will constantly be attracted to each other’s groans and movements, which means you’re much more likely to run into a pack of 5-6 zombies over 5-6 zombies dotted around the area. But unlike the old system of spawning the zombies in groups (which was never convincing) the new zombie clumping happens organically and naturally.

Joypad Auto Zoom

Another thing we’ve not quite got the options working for and might need a little adjusting to, we’d like to give the auto zoom a quick trial. Never fear, in future we’ll add options to disable or override this, but feel it important to joypad controls since at present zooming in and out is pretty cumbersome on joypad. The idea being that when you’re in interiors of buildings, the camera will zoom to maximum zoom. When outside, or when running, it will zoom out to provide the player a better view of their surrounding.

Also when in combat the camera will zoom in to provide the player the ability to see what’s happening. This will all require more tweaking, so feedback would be much appreciated. We’ll get options to switch this on and off in hopefully before the next IWBUMs release, and certainly before 30 goes out on the main branch.

Farming Tweaks

The problem with farming has been that, once you’ve got the necessary kit, it becomes pretty easy to be able to be self sufficient with food. On the other hand the amount of upkeep required for the crops means the player spends a lot of time dealing with them. As such we’ve made two changes to the farming system. First we’ve significantly increased the amount of time it takes to grow crops. Crops are now, as they should, a longer term solution and pushed much further into the late game as to when a player can expect to be able to live off grown vegetables.

Secondly, we’ve decreased the amount of maintenance the crops require, so a player still has time to do other stuff while their crops are growing. We hope these changes will mean that farming will remain an important feature of the game, but will not eat up all the player’s time and turn the game into a farming simulator, as well as mean farming won’t provide a player with food as early in the game.

Going North

We also thought we’d give you a little preview at the kind of building density you can look forward as you approach Louisville. We’re still in the outskirts, and haven’t even got to the city itself, but already the area is starting to get pretty dense.

This week’s blurry title PUPPPPPPYYYYY image is provided by Lemmy who is getting a new Whippet on Saturday! Weeee! Cally will be joined by little baby Chief. <3

And once again, we remind you to keep your eyes locked onto the TIS twitter for build updates and testing news, and if you can’t then why not subscribe to our newsletter so that you can have all the PZ goings on sent straight to your email?