Hey all, Cameron here -

In keeping with efforts to be more communicative, here’s an update on what’s been happening over the past month or so…

In one exciting bit of news, Jef was out in LA at E3 last week, and says he spotted a few zombie related offerings, and he’ll hopefully do a round-up for us to share with you guys sometime soon.

There are two new missions headed your way in the next patch. Mission04 is nighttime in a ravaged small town - the undead are swarming, but the military has moved in and is heavily armed. Most recent progress, however, has been with Mission05, which actually started with a map that got built way back and was used in the game’s promo video.

Mission05 uses the same geometry and texture set that the current skirmish maps use, the Warehouse District set, but it was initially a lot smaller than the current missions. If you were with us from early on, you’ll remember that we went back, after our original alpha release, and doubled the size of the second and third missions. So we felt we needed to double down with Mission05, as well, and Jef stepped up to the plate on that front - expanding the street layout and props and lighting. We’ll be finalizing it this week, now that he’s back from E3, but fortunately he got it far enough along before heading to LA that a first pass at scripting is already under way.

Here’s a to-scale comparison between the current Mission02, the original Warehouse District map, and the new Mission05 - with the playable area of each outlined in red . . .

Map Comparison[i.imgur.com]

Martin has been continuing to refine the turret code, and it turns out there are a bunch of edge cases to be dealt with - especially for the manned version of the turret. When to operate the turret, when not to operate the turret, how to play nice with other humans who want to operate the turret . . . knowing to fight zombies in between you and the turret rather than just running into a mob of zombies while trying to get to the turret . . . a lot of situations to account for, and, more than likely, once we release this next patch, you guys will find even more edge cases that we’ve missed - but we’re getting close to having all the major ones covered.

Cameron (that’s me!) - well, I’ve mostly finished up the level scripting for m04, and I’m now working on a scripting pass for m05. That means laying in more hint nodes for the human AI, tweaking the navmesh, expanding the previous story pass, adding bonus goals, etc, etc.. Lately, I’ve also been working on the animation for humans to use the new machine gun turret, giving Martin testing and use case feedback on the turrets, and helping with tech review for the latest lighting passes.

Chris has been tracking down bugs and refactoring some of my hacked-in code so that it’s more useable and more robust. That’s something he (thankfully!) does fairly often. He’s also been providing code support for Gunnar’s audio efforts, and he’s gotten us ready to take advantage of some more of what Steam offers as a platform, as well - but the art team is lagging behind him on that front.

Chris has also started looking into migrating the project over to Unity5, which is something we’re all looking forward to (ooh! new toys!), but something that is going to take some doing. We’re hoping to make that transition for alpha1.17, and it looks fairly promising. Upgrading our Unity licenses required reinvesting some of the proceeds from Early Access sales so far, but we see that as a commitment to the game, and we’re looking forward to using the cool new tools available in Unity5 to make the game much better.

Gunnar has been working his audio wizardry, as always, and he has two more installments of his awesome radio play ready to go. He’s also put together two entirely new compositions for the background audio for missions 04 and 05, both of which are awesome. Oh, and did I mention the awesome level of awesomeness on display? Awesome! He’s also been working with Chris on improvements to the audio logic for the unit footsteps and gunfire.

Jameson has been adding more props to the Small Town maps, and has started to work on banging up the version of Small Town that gets used in m04. Eventually, we want that level to look like there’s been some apocalypse going down recently, with crushed walls and splattered remains and such.

Dave has been swamped with a lot of contract work recently (a good problem to have, it must be said), but we’re really looking forward to his upcoming work on concept art for trading card designs!

Cheers,

->Cameron