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.

And let me tell you, this plan paid off big time:

See you next month.