ZedTermination is a top-perspective shooter game for PC where the player fights against the endless hordes of zombies.

I know that last two times I posted I promised a gameplay video showing all the new features, but I’m going to have to break that promise one more time. I’ve spent a lot of time fixing major and minor things and implementing new features, so this post will cover those changes and I’ll make a separate gameplay post in the next few days.

This week I made a build of the game and gave it to my friends for closed testing. It was nice to discover that at this time most of the required changes are related to gameplay and balance. The first round of feedback provided me with valuable things that I’ve missed or known about ZedTermination but forgotten / ignored until now.

One of the crucial problems I knew but ignored until now was the darkness. For the default game mode I want the levels to be dark, with a central area being properly lit, while the edges of the play area are pitch dark. While it looks and feels nice, the player character can get totally invisible in the dark, and that just doesn’t feel right. I feel that the player character should be visible at all times, and the zombies will surprise you way too easily in complete darkness. So now I’ve added a light that keeps the immediate surroundings of the player lit just enough to notice and to react to nearby zombies.

In addition to the surrounding light I’ve adjusted the flashlight’s cone of light to be a bit shorter and wider to cover bigger area of the map. I also added a new powerup, The Flare, to make some light-based gameplay variations. It’s an emergency torch that will be dropped from the sky to the point the player chooses, and it lights the surroundings for a limited time. This way the player can leave the well-lit central area and move around at the edges of the level more safely. I’m thinking about adding a lure ability to the flare as well, it might turn out fun.

I want to keep the game simple and true to the genre, where the levels are quite small and cramped. It also increases the game performance: The bigger the area, the easier it gets to avoid enemies, and the more enemies must be spawned to keep the gameplay challenging, so it’s much easier to design the levels closed. Having a completely flat level is quite used in top-down shooter genre, but I want to have just a bit of geometry and details to make it feel more real and interesting. And it’s so much easier to have some environmental storytelling if the level’s not completely flat.

I also added a possibility to stun the riot zombie by shooting at its shield enough times. I felt that it was way too hard to deal with before, but now it feels more balanced – If the player wants to sacrifice some ammo, the riot zombie can now be killed from a distance.

Rest of the stuff I’ve worked is just fixing things and making everything work as intended, I will go into more detail about all that in the next post, along with the gameplay video. Making everything work as intended takes most of the time, and adding new content is usually quite fast. It’s not the shiny and nice game development content that gets displayed in GIFs and videos, but it is nevertheless really important. A good game just can’t have broken mechanics and big bugs, so it must be done. And I’ve learned to kind of like fixing things – It feels nice when everything works as intended and there’s no bugs (well, at least you don’t know about them…. yet! :D)

That’s it for this time, I’ll make a gameplay video in a few days, can’t wait to show all the new things!