Survivors,
It’s been a minute since we’ve talked about what’s been in development, hasn’t it?
With our heads buried deep in development, we only just realized we have a whole new demo ready for Gamescom, yet we have kept you in the dark about what we’ve been working on!
We’ll go over the major gameplay features that are new to the Gamescom demo soon, but today, let’s talk about something core to God Save Birmingham: bringing realness to the survival.
By now, you probably know our goal is to make a medieval zombie survival game grounded in realistic physics. Sure, “medieval” and “zombie” grab attention–but it’s “realistic” that’s the real beast.
Why? Because realism is expensive. Like, REALLY expensive.
It takes us a lot of time and resources to bring even the most mundane parts of survival to life–making them feel grounded, tactile, and true to real-world physics.
Let’s take the simple action of eating an apple. Imagine a small red apple just inches away from the character’s face–about to bite in, ready to restore hunger and thirst. That apple can’t look like it’s popped out of thin air and is magically levitating like some cursed fruit, it has to sit perfectly in the hand to feel real and just right.
Now, imagine doing that not just for an apple, but for cheese, potato, pork, ham, parsnips… You get the idea.
Tedious? You bet.
Necessary? Absolutely.
And that's just one type of interaction. There’s literally a whole world of character-object behaviors like picking things up, throwing them, dropping them, swinging them--all of which have to account for context. You wouldn’t swing an apple like you’d swing an axe, would you?
We’re deep in the thick of working all this out right now. It feels like we’ve been working on this for years, but really, it’s only been a few months--and there’s still a long way to go. The sheer number of items and interactions tied to them make for long, slow, retina-burning workdays.
And we’re constantly tweaking and refining our animation as we go, of course. Can you spot the subtle difference in our farmer’s throwing motion from a few months ago and what’s currently in the game?
Hopefully, all the tedious work will pay off by the time we launch into Early Access so that this kind of realism becomes invisible--the kind you don’t consciously notice but feel when it’s done right. Until then, you’ll likely run into some glaring collision and animation issues when we run demos and beta tests. But please know that we are working on them, one object at a time!
Speaking of throwing, falling objects are part of real physics so we’ve been working on that too. And yes, that means we’re working on how an object falls, one individual item at a time.
They look pretty cool when they’re all together raining down from the sky like this though, right?
Of course, making God Save Birmingham feel more realistic also means making it more faithful to the real 14th century town. That involves a lot of research and we’ve touched on this a bit before in this blog. The research is never-ending, and in fact, the wealth of information available on Birmingham is the reason we chose it as our setting. Along the way, we’ve been picking up some nuggets of history to reflect in-game.
For example, if you watch our very first trailer, you can see that the St. Martin’s church’s doors are left open outward.
We’ve since then learned that medieval doors in Europe usually opened inward for security purposes. Isn’t that interesting? After this revelation, we updated the game so doors do just that--open inward. No more sticking out your entire body to close an open door, risking running into a zombie. It’s like the medieval folks were expecting a zombie apocalypse or something. ːsteammockingː
Well, hopefully this gives you a little peek into what we’ve been up to. It’s still only a snippet of what we’re working on so come back for the next log!
-ODS Team