This August Igor and I added underwater mechanics. This does not mean you will be able to swim underwater, but you might find secrets there. Igor also finished our webbing system - now you can interract with webs as you pass through them. Finally he added ladder climbing animatio
This August Igor and I added underwater mechanics. This does not mean you will be able to swim underwater, but you might find secrets there. Igor also finished our webbing system - now you can interract with webs as you pass through them. Finally he added ladder climbing animation and Flip animation. Andrii worked on network room management and game optimizations. Our artists vastly improved the details of our Sewers level, especially the supermarket area and the new designited diesel generator area. And, as always, they created a number of new models.
This July was quite busy. Andrii improved our networking code drastically. Now 4 players can play cooperatively and have 120 zombies fighting them in a busy scene. Igor added a bunch of features, including better jumping for rats, nerf for the jump height of the main character, g
This July was quite busy.
Andrii improved our networking code drastically. Now 4 players can play cooperatively and have 120 zombies fighting them in a busy scene.
Igor added a bunch of features, including better jumping for rats, nerf for the jump height of the main character, grouping items in the inventory, flashlight parameters zones, and hunter choking when inside an area full of gas.
Vitalii added quite a number of zones for our Sewers level - mostly secret areas. Now our level has enough secrets not to be boring. And the areas look amazing!
I worked on various effects including blood puddle, gas effect, inventory icons and better wall fading logic.
And, as usual, our artists created a bunch of amazing models. View game page
This June we went to Funcon. It's always a pleasure to see people playing your darling) This time we brought two PCs, so that for the first time people were able to play the game in co-op mode. Yes, there were a few bugs, but overall the playtest went much better than I expected.
This June we went to Funcon. It's always a pleasure to see people playing your darling) This time we brought two PCs, so that for the first time people were able to play the game in co-op mode. Yes, there were a few bugs, but overall the playtest went much better than I expected. Especially given that we had 120 zombies in the supermarket area.
This April Andrii and Igor worked on the multiplayer. We almost finished with it, but need to clean up a few more bugs. We plan on having our fist public co-op play tests in June on Funcon (on the 6th and 7th in Kyiv) - come see us there! Vitalii added two new areas: supermarket
This April Andrii and Igor worked on the multiplayer. We almost finished with it, but need to clean up a few more bugs. We plan on having our fist public co-op play tests in June on Funcon (on the 6th and 7th in Kyiv) - come see us there!
Vitalii added two new areas: supermarket and mosnter's lair (AKA metro depo) to our Sewers level. This month I saw the glimps of the future of our level design: at some point we will have so many models in our game, that making levels will happen at least 3 to 5 times faster.
I added GPU Instancer PRO to our project and wrote a custom code and shader that renders grass with a variety of parameters. Once I'm done, we will render all our grass with a single draw pass and instanced on the GPU, which is the most efficient way to do so.
Finally, as usual, our art team added a bunch of new models.
This March we are mostly working on multiplayer, fixing small issues in the game and bringing Vitalii, our new level artist, up to speed. Andrii worked on multiplayer and tested Photon Fusion. Sadly it won't work for us as it is designed for games like DOTA, where you don't direc
This March we are mostly working on multiplayer, fixing small issues in the game and bringing Vitalii, our new level artist, up to speed. Andrii worked on multiplayer and tested Photon Fusion. Sadly it won't work for us as it is designed for games like DOTA, where you don't directly control your character and where ping is usually very small. Igor fixed a bunch of small issues in the game, added zone fading logic (now entities can smoothly fade when they enter a faded area), worked on our zombie mutant moster and joined Andrii towards the end of the month to work on multiplayer. I worked with Vitalii to bring him up to speed as fast as possible and create a few new models together with our artist team. Vitalii made a bunch of new models and the rough sketch of the supermarket area. View game page
As we had many complains about the game's performance, in February I remade the glass system to make it more performant. I managed to do it superfast (working on GPU now) and without quality loss. We continue working on our multiplayer functionality. Andrii changed zombie code to
As we had many complains about the game's performance, in February I remade the glass system to make it more performant. I managed to do it superfast (working on GPU now) and without quality loss.
We continue working on our multiplayer functionality. Andrii changed zombie code to include multipleyer, moved to main characters code and fixed various issues we found during tests.
Igor added folders into our invetory. This is our idea on improving inventory management. For instance all food will only take a single cell, but you will be able to see every single item if you go into that cell. He also improved flies that appear around dead zombies, introduced blood clipping system, to prevent blood sprites flying through walls and worked on our Monstro animation and logic.
We lost Egor this months, so there would be no level building updates. He said he is now looking for something less demanding. Luckly we were able to hire an awesome artist Vitaly Lulchak - see his works in our video log - he is extremely talented.
In January we took part in game round testing and received 100 reviews of our game from real players. The general feedback is that there are a lot of performance issues. luckily this is not difficult to fix. The main performance issue come from two points. When there are a lot of
In January we took part in game round testing and received 100 reviews of our game from real players. The general feedback is that there are a lot of performance issues. luckily this is not difficult to fix. The main performance issue come from two points. When there are a lot of zombies on the screen and when the player is shooting glass because my glass shattering effect is an optimized. Optimizing zombies will take some time. We planted to do it for quite a while, but we wanted to first see real problems before actually optimizing, because this is the wise approach to development. With glass shattering effect we will just change it for a Wii FX graph the collisions will be worse but the performance will be much better.
Egor worked on supermarket area that will be located on top of our undeground warehouse in our Sewers level. Igor continued working on our zombie monster. We want to make it behave like alien and attack from the shadows. I worked on blood effects and on optimizing glass shattering.
Our modelling team started working on supermarket assets and made quite a few of them. Finally Andrii started a massive rewor of our multiplayer code. It was inefficient due to poor choices I made 8 years ago. Messages could not reach players as there were too many of them. But we now know how to send messages efficiently and Andrii is rebuilding our multiplayer messaging system to make it fast and reliable.View game page
In December we worked on fixing bugs that were found when showcasing our game at Games Gathering, improved bandits AI and added a few quality of life features. Andrii and Igor improved our bandits: they now attack like sharks, whenever they see you or hear your shots. Even if the
In December we worked on fixing bugs that were found when showcasing our game at Games Gathering, improved bandits AI and added a few quality of life features.
Andrii and Igor improved our bandits: they now attack like sharks, whenever they see you or hear your shots. Even if there is no clear line of sight, they will send a volley of fire towards you.
Andrii also added a "magnetic doors" system, that "sucks you in" when you are entering any door. This way, you don't need to see the door to enter it. This is useful, as due to our camera you quite often don't see where the door is exactly and hit a wall when you walk. He also fixed issues with guns falling through the floor when you pick them up or when they are dropped by enemies.
Igor reworked how our lights flicker in the Flooded Room in Sewers, fixed issues with rats and added a prone retreat behaviour for bandits.
Egor worked on visual issues in Sewers, added mountain rocks near the Warehouse entrance, improved the way cut walls look and worked on sewer river currents. He also started working on new crouched walking animation for our main character.
I'm sorry that we could not deliver a new update before the end of the year, but we will always prioritize quality over quantity. Thank you for believing in us and have a great 2026 year!
This November we worked hard to make our Sewers level playable for the Games Gathering conference. The Conference took place on the 29th/30th November in Kiev and it was a huge success. Over 200 people played our game and we got a lot of useful feedback. Players loved our lightin
This November we worked hard to make our Sewers level playable for the Games Gathering conference. The Conference took place on the 29th/30th November in Kiev and it was a huge success. Over 200 people played our game and we got a lot of useful feedback.
Players loved our lighting, which is a special pleasure to me, because I am responsible for it and I believe lighting is my weakest skill.
Bandits debute was also a success. People enjoyed playing cat-and-mouse with them in our Warehouse section of the Sewer level.
The main negative feedback was that it was difficult to aim. I believe this is mostly because our level was way too cramped with stuff. There is nobody to learn from when building our levels, that is why we can only rely on ourselves. This time our attempt to add details into our level backfired. Moving forward our levels would be much more spacious as lots of space and minimal cover poits fits our aiming system much better.
Sadly we were unable to test our co-op multiplayer, because there was a 3 second delay when people tried to play together. This is most likely due to my architectural mistake from many years ago.
Overall, we are on the right track, we now have another level and many more to come. Sadly there will be no release this year, as we want to make our current Sewer level complete so that the next release is actually impactful. I estimate it will take us another 6 months to do so.
We are planning to attend Games Gathering conference at the end of November, that is why this October we focused on preparing our Sewers level for playtests and making our bandits as smart as possible, as they will be stars of our show. View game page Our bandits can now hide beh
We are planning to attend Games Gathering conference at the end of November, that is why this October we focused on preparing our Sewers level for playtests and making our bandits as smart as possible, as they will be stars of our show. View game pageOur bandits can now hide behind obstacles when you engage with them. They can also cover their buddy with supressing fire, while he is repositioning. Bandits can also patrol a large space and search for threats.
Sewers level now features a number of tunnels and can be played from start to finish. It is still a temporary level, as we plan on removing/updating large chunks of it after the conference.
In September we added a number of effects, improved cockroaches and rats, started working on new systems and enemiens and trained our bandits. Andrii worked on bandits. We are creating a complex behaviour system for them: every behaviour of a bandit will be able to fight with eve
In September we added a number of effects, improved cockroaches and rats, started working on new systems and enemiens and trained our bandits.
Andrii worked on bandits. We are creating a complex behaviour system for them: every behaviour of a bandit will be able to fight with every other one for control of the bandit. Jut like it happens with emotions in small children.
Igor improved our rats. Rats will interact with your character in a unique way. You can always kill them with bullets, but they jump on you and bite. The more rats are on top of your character right now, the fewer movement options you have. First you loose your ability to run, then to even walk, and then to shot - you character starts throwing rats off of him. If you get enough rats off of your character - the movement will return. This way you will be able to pass rat-infested zones with some strategy and creativity.
Igor also started working on our ultimate zombie: the mutant. In Zombie Hunter inc, zombies that ate enough human flesh turn into mutants. They are incredibly fast, can climb on walls and kill in the matter of seconds. We plan on making them almost unbeatable, designed to avoid, not to fight head-on.
Egor added new scenes, animations and started working on assembling our scenes into a coherent Sewers level.
I created 3d decals, flood effect and a bunch of new models, alongside our artists.
This August we worked on improving our levels, implementing multiplayer and save system and added a few visual effects. Igor worked on fly visual effect and splases. Me and Egor improved scenes from Sewers and Andrii worked on multiplayer. I also worked on headshot blood and our
This August we worked on improving our levels, implementing multiplayer and save system and added a few visual effects.
Igor worked on fly visual effect and splases. Me and Egor improved scenes from Sewers and Andrii worked on multiplayer. I also worked on headshot blood and our artists create a bunch of new models.
Version 1.05 has now been released. In it, you will find fixes for bugs we found listening to you and watching you play the game on conferences. We also improved graphics, especially in the Streets level, which you can no access right from the main menu. And last but not least, w
Version 1.05 has now been released. In it, you will find fixes for bugs we found listening to you and watching you play the game on conferences. We also improved graphics, especially in the Streets level, which you can no access right from the main menu. And last but not least, we added quality of life features, like dialogues which now air while you are playing the game, instead of forcing you to listen to them.
At the same time, this July we started adding back multiplayer code into the game. Co-op mode was always planned to be a major part of Zombie Hunter inc, and the netcode was being added right from the first day of its development. However, recently we stopped updating it to bring you zombies faster. In July Andrii has already brought back the netcode for the main player character and now he and Igor are working on adding it to zombies.
We switched to using terrain grass instead of the grass made with Visual Effect Graph. I found a large library of Unity shaders in ShaderGraph samples package. I reworked the grass shader from that library by adding random offset, ability to read Global Illumination from the terrain’s GI map, texture sampling to make grass has texture and not just uniformly look like a thin plane. I also changed the way the mesh is rendered from cylindrical billboard (that only rotates to face the camera around a pole) to standard billboard (that rotates full mesh), as this approach look better in our top-down game. A the same time my grass was growing into buildings, due to the angle of the billboard. To fix that I added a z-offset to my shader.
View game page I also finished the Normal Blending shader, now we can completely rewrite normals on our objects with decals, instead of just adding the new normals on top.
Igor worked on the web system. We want spiderwebs to appear in our level, which can rip and attach to the player, when he goes through them.
Sound Room system is finally done - now, when you are in an appartment building, you will hear zombie sounds muffled, when they come from behind close doors, and those sounds will change gradually as you open the door.
And, as always, our modelers have create a number of beautiful assets.
This June we attended Funcon in Kiev, fixed a number of bugs, progressed in our new level and welcomed two new members into our team. On 6-7th of June we attended Funcon in Kiev and showed our game to hundreds of people. Afterwards our coders spent some time fixing bugs, that pla
This June we attended Funcon in Kiev, fixed a number of bugs, progressed in our new level and welcomed two new members into our team.
On 6-7th of June we attended Funcon in Kiev and showed our game to hundreds of people. Afterwards our coders spent some time fixing bugs, that players found during said conference.
Ihor, c# Unity developer and Anastasia, 3d modeler, joined our team this month. The development speed will now increase)
Egor, our lead artist, continued working on our new level "Sewers", focusing on the supermarket underground storage. He also created a cutscene, where zombies break windows in the restaurant, when you pick up a gun from a crate.
Our artists created a number of new models.
I am still struggling to create a normal blending system, that will alow us to overwrite existing normals and create beautiful puddles.
View game pageWe plan to release an update roughly 1 month from now, that would fix all the bugs we found ourselves as well as the bugs players found in two conferences that we attended. It will also include new realistic lighting for the big Streets level and a Ray Tracing preset. Stay tuned!
This May we were still working on improving core functionality of the game, in preparation for the Funcon festival, that takes place one week from now. Andrii expanded zombie functionality, now they climb walls better, fall down from heights and jump the hero, when he is too clos
This May we were still working on improving core functionality of the game, in preparation for the Funcon festival, that takes place one week from now.
Andrii expanded zombie functionality, now they climb walls better, fall down from heights and jump the hero, when he is too close.
Egor added special zombies, that try to catch our hero in the first level, when he runs up the stairs, worked on new cutscens and improved hero walk animation.
I worked on improving the shader that blends normals.
Finally our artists added a bunch of new models as usual.
https://youtu.be/SI1aMTJZE4Q
Come play the current build at Funcon in Kiev next weekend!
This April we were quite busy. We attended Games Gathering conference in Lviv, showed our game to hundreds of people and won an award for best graphics, drastically improved lighting in our levels and significantly improved all aspects of our zombies. At the start of the month, w
This April we were quite busy. We attended Games Gathering conference in Lviv, showed our game to hundreds of people and won an award for best graphics, drastically improved lighting in our levels and significantly improved all aspects of our zombies.
At the start of the month, we attended Games Gathering conference in Lviv. Zombie Hunter inc won an award for the best art and we gathered a tone of bugs glitches and requests from over 60 people that played the game over two days. That is why we spent the rest of the months addressing the issues that surfaced.
Andrii worked on improving zombies. He added various death animations for zombies and merged them with our ragdoll system, to make every death pose unique. He also improved ragdoll, so that zombies no longer fly through geometry when you kill them with a powerful gun. At the same time, now our zombies have a vision system, made out of several zones: forward white – spotting player using rays, peripheral gray – spotting player with rays but slower, close yellow – instant spotting and orange – spotting via non-visual cues from the back. We plan on using this feature extensively once we start working on bandits and other gun-wielding enemies.
Egor fixed visual bugs and researched Unity water. We now know how to control the waterflow using special textures. He also experimented with foam effects and created a cool effect that we will use when water is flowing around an object. At the same time, he is finally working on sewers. We now have a clear understanding how the level should look: every tunnel, every corner must be designed to satisfy two conditions: to look man-made and to facilitate waterflow. So, no cave-like tunnels, no sharp corners and no square rooms.
In April I discovered a Black State gameplay video and was quite surprised and intrigued how they managed to achieve this level of visual fidelity. There were a number of games released recently, notable for their realistic graphics: Bodycam, Cyberpunk 2077 with mods and now Black State. At first, I dismissed them by thinking “we would never be able to achieve something like this”, “this is only possible in Unreal” and “it’s raytracing, once Unity improves its raytracing support, we will have it by default”. But after the Black State video Andrii told me: “We have all these extremely detailed assets, yet our graphics looks dated” and that really bugged me. So, I spent a whole day arguing with ChatGPT, trying to understand how these Turkish Arcviz guys managed to make their game look this good. And here is what I learned: - They use only cloudy weather outside. - Their shadows are very blurred, almost non-existant. - What we perceive as shadows in their videos is actually high quality reflections of objects from puddles, achieved with raytracing. Which is a brilliant trick, as it grounds the objects in an environment, where there are no shadows.
This led me to create a plan: - Make a high quality static ambient light baking instead of Enlighten realtime light, which is very blurred. - Use Angular diameter for all lights, but especially the sun, to make shadows very blurry. - Add puddles and raytracing to make everything look grounded. - Turn on Raytracing for high quality Ambient Occlusion (better darkening) and reflections.
Catch us at GG Conference in Lviv! This is your chance to see what we are working on, play the latest build of the game and ask us anything! The event will take place in Premier Hotel Dnister in Lviv on the weekend of 5th and 6th of March 2025.
Catch us at GG Conference in Lviv! This is your chance to see what we are working on, play the latest build of the game and ask us anything! The event will take place in Premier Hotel Dnister in Lviv on the weekend of 5th and 6th of March 2025.
In March we finilized improvements to Timeline, reworked our inventory, added new models, effects and a new cool post-process. Egor worked with timeline. Now you can speed up cutscenes by holding space. Andrii helped Egor with timeline and improved the helicopter scene on the roo
In March we finilized improvements to Timeline, reworked our inventory, added new models, effects and a new cool post-process.
Egor worked with timeline. Now you can speed up cutscenes by holding space. Andrii helped Egor with timeline and improved the helicopter scene on the roof. Now if the player is hit while opening the final crate, he is immediately killed. Also, now if the player is wandering and does not know what to do – a timer would start right after he climbs to the very top. In 30 seconds, the final scene with zombies flooding would start automatically.
The Katchur family added a new batch of models. We are slowly finishing with Sewer models and moving towards Supermarket’s basement storage models.
I added a sewer underwater pipe burst effect and finally finished a dream of mine from many years ago: Light Color Grading. Now our lights can apply color grading effects. But only where they actually illuminate the area.
Color grading is a post process effect that changes the color of every pixel of the final image according to a certain 3d texture map, called “look up texture” or “LUT”. They are also called “Instagram filters” sometimes, because Instagram popularized this technology in their app.
The problem with color grading is that there can only be one LUT at a time. When developers want to change the LUT the standard practice is to just smoothly blend the current one with the next one. It barely works in First Person games – the change is usually jarring, or hidden by a loading screen or cutscene. For our top-down game I wanted to create a system that would have multiple LUTs on the screen that would blend smoothly. Here lies the problem: how do you make these LUTs blend beautifully and coherently? My solution was – attaching a single LUT to a single lightsource. That way as lights smoothly blend between different areas, so will my LUTS. This is where the largest challenge was: creating a black and white mask of everything that a single lightsource illuminates. Unity lights are extremely complex and when they are computed, they are directly rendered into the final screen texture. If an object in the scene is black, you won’t get any lighting on it, or you will get a specular dot, which is not what I need. My only hope of making my mask was to write a shader, that mimics the scene (assumes the scene’s depth and normals onto itself) and render a white quad lit which will be simply lit by Unity. And that took me 5 years to figure out… Recently Unity added a node that I thought would help me and I jumped into shaders again. Sadly my knowledge of shaders is very limited, so even with this tool I would constantly make shaders that failed to work, when you moved the camera around.
In February our main focus was on improving our last build. Andrii and Egor finished moving our cutscenes to Timeline, now we will be able to create them faster. Andrii also worked on optimizing and fixing our inventory system, while Egor created idle animations for zombies, impr
In February our main focus was on improving our last build. Andrii and Egor finished moving our cutscenes to Timeline, now we will be able to create them faster. Andrii also worked on optimizing and fixing our inventory system, while Egor created idle animations for zombies, improved Rooftops level and created missing wind animation for a few models.
