Patch Notes
Hi there! It’s been a little while since the last devlog, and we’d like to begin once again thank you for your generous support. Since our successful Kickstarter campaign in July, we’ve been ramping up development and moving the game towards a point we’d be happy to release into for our early access release. Since the Kickstarter, we have brought on two new animators and two new 3d artists to handle our animation and character art needs.
The zombies, as always, have gotten more love as they serve as the meat and potatoes of the game in its current state. On top of various improved animation and performance improvements, the zombies have received a new model in the form of the PSI-Z infector, though these will be much less common in the final game. The zombies now also have much more convincing ‘active’ ragdoll animations on death, accompanying the new dismemberment and gore system that allows us to chop any limb off of any character (theoretically).
The gunplay and character movement have also received continuous updates and improvements over the course of the past months. In addition to smooth crouch, weapon bashing, and an improved recoil system, we now have full foregrip, canted sight, telescopic sight, weapon bracing, and throwable support. This accompanies a series of general improvements to the gunplay feel, like simulated weapon sway, a reduced action animation for bolt and pump-action weapons to improve sight picture, and cleaner tracers and particles to make full-auto fire easier to use.
On the general programming front, most of the team has been focusing on the AI of the game. One of the biggest criticisms we received during the campaign was relating to the lack of non-zombie AI in the game, and while they were already planned, we decided to move forward with our development on SCP-173-B and AI guards to get them in a good state as early as possible. Currently, both are still heavily under development, but they are making good progress and we’re excited to show you more soon. On top of this, we’ve ported our electronics system to C++ for better performance and reliability and moved to a new steam backend for easier implementation and better networking performance.
ANIMATION/MODELLING
The Art department has gotten some love these past months, with a total of four new people joining the team. Our two new animators have finished a full reanimation of the M9, MP5, and Galil Ace animations, in addition to animations for a new weapon - the Stribog. The Stribog is a semi-auto, 9mm SMG that while not too powerful still acts as a good starting weapon.
On the modeling side of things, in addition to our work on the Stribog, an Aimpoint Sight, and textures for the Mossberg 590, our new character artist has been doing some amazing work translating the concepts for Pandemic’s guards and D-Class into game-ready models.
AUDIO
The audio team has been hard at work working not only on adding new sounds to the game but also iterating and improving on the criticism we received during the campaign. All of the non-suppressed weapons are getting a complete audio overhaul, with the MP5, Galil Ace, M9, and M24, Mock-18, and UMP-45 in progress. We also have the audio for the new Mossberg 590 fully implemented. The zombie audio has finally been fully overhauled, with over 50 unique sounds in-game. Alongside that, we also have various general sound improvements, with the reverb being rebuilt from the ground up and dynamic sound occlusion that muffles sounds behind walls.