The guy who writes the Thursday blogs is having a fun time with a screaming baby, a wife with bad toothache and another child intent on destroying things – but the good news is that there’s some cool stuff to show you today, and a sudden brief window in which to write about them. And so, onward…

There’s a lot of general smoothening of rough edges happening on the build at the moment, and to give you an idea of what sort of items these are then currently on the internal ‘Top Three Issues!’ Sasha Shit List are: jolting walking animations on initial start-up, inconsistency with the directions of melee attacks and the way that timed actions (farming, pouring, building etc) have to play out before you can defend yourself from roaming zeds.

In amongst this necessary fixes, though there’s also some fun stuff being added to the internal playable test build. Primarily discoveries that will make it a more varied and interesting experience when exploring your surroundings.

BODIES EVERYWHERE

In the next build we will be adapting the lore slightly (hopefully forgivably) by making it so that the zed impulse to bite someone who’s unturned isn’t entirely removed after their death. Idle zeds will be slightly attracted to human corpses, and will crouch to feed – meaning you can sneak by or attack without them noticing you as easily. This can be seen in the vid below:

Meanwhile the same event can be added to our growing roster of interesting scenes we can spawn in random houses, which can be seen in the below screenshot– which is also a good example of how neatly ChrisW’s cutaway system will be improving the game.

In the current build the discovery of survivor bodies can be quite crude, with bleach or alcohol bottles scattered around willy-nilly for example. With our new systems we can also quite easily add in bodies that tell a clearer and neater story. Even if it’s as simple, and tragic, as someone who died from self-inflicted gun wounds.

[PLEASE NOTE THIS IMAGE IS WIP, AND CLEARLY DEBUG – POSES ETC WILL BE MORE VARIED AND IMPROVED]

OTHER NEWLY IMPLEMENTED ANIMATIONS

Here’s a quick vid that shows off the ability to pour out liquid from a container, the ability to sit on the ground to have a rest, and an idle that shows the survivors warming themselves in front of a heat source.

Crikey, this game’s quite dark isn’t it?

MODDING POTENTIAL

We will be releasing our new AnimZed dev tools to the community when we release this version (perhaps even when we are still in IWBUMS testing if the documentation is ready) and just wanted to touch on the sort of thing that could be done quite easily with them once they’re available.

For example, a while ago Martin made us some skeleton models. These are primarily intended for use when exposing bone under character flesh when mortal body damage occurs. Likewise, bodies that have been feasted on may have exposed limb bones where the flesh has been picked clean – and on top of that there’s always the opportunity for crawlers to be dragging skeletal bloody legs across the floor and for more damaged zeds to be appearing in Six Months Later and beyond.

All that’s still to come though, and as a quick mod experiment on his birthday (when he should have been having a day off) RJ decided to have a look what they’d look like if used in-game in their entirety.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS AN EXAMPLE, AND NOT A REAL GAME FEATURE

The results are a bit rough still, but we’re sure you’ll agree: Boom, there’s the beginnings of a Harryhausen or fantasy mod. Good times to come hopefully.

This week’s fast food order from Lazy Joe. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Also OMG have you seeeen Xonic’s Mall map? It’s super-good. Please check it out.