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One More Day - progress update


xtom

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blog-0003440001436709585.jpgIt’s been a while since my last blog post and since then I haven’t had the chance to put in as much game dev time as I'd have liked. But in the last week or so I have made some more progress.

 

So what’s new..

 

Mostly I’ve been continuing work on the map adding more buildings, areas and objects from the workshop to make the town more visually interesting and give more areas for the player to explore. I would say I’m probably over 50% of the way now from where I would consider it to be a decent small town. I still need to add more stuff and variety in the houses but will get to that eventually. Long term I might look at adding areas around the town but for now my focus is to have one good area to play the game in.

 

Also I have been making some cosmetic improvements to the terrain, such as scattering some stone textures and road cracks here and there and trying to break up flat areas with subtle changes. Terrain adjusting is pretty much an on-going process as more objects are added and I play test the game.

 

I have added a fog shader to the game which adds a distant fog on the horizon. I think this helps with the zombie creepy atmosphere of the game. I was debating making the fog closer/thicker, different sky box, lighting etc. and there are so many different looks to try but I don’t want to move too far away from the initial day time/desert look that I started with. I have an idea of varying the looks on different days/nights so maybe sometimes more fog but this is way down the list of priorities for now and not a definite.

 

I also added an atmospheric sound track and some ominous danger music that plays when a zombie is close and after you. This makes a big difference to the game I think.

 

And finally if you die the pause menu now has a restart option so you don’t need to load the game again.

 

So what’s left to do..

 

Well other than working on the map I still need to do some work on gameplay. For example when you start a game or sleep in the game I want zombies to spawn randomly in different predetermined locations. This should make things less predictable and offer more replayabilty. Possibly this will also allow for a difficulty challenge by spawning more enemies as each day passes, up to a point I guess, I’ll have to see how it goes. I also want to have some of them roaming around and the odd horde turn up every now and then but again this is down the line.

 

Hopefully I will be publishing an updated version to the game launcher soon. My data.zip has grown from 170MB to 361MB since the last publish so I need to play test for a while before committing to an upload on my slow connection.

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Nice work!

 

Is the game going to stay in that one town?

 

I think that'd be a good background; that the town is quarantined by the military or something like that and you have to survive in the town with limited supplies while killing zombies and helping(or not) other survivors.

 

You could have airdrops time to time from the military.

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Thanks. For now yes, the game is staying just in this town but I might at some stage create add-on maps with different areas you can travel to. But probably just areas around the town, nothing too far away, so the town would always be the hub you return to. Airdrops are something I've been thinking of so they could possibly be added. So maybe you find a radio and can call in a drop but you have to wait a day or two for it to arrive.

 

I'm trying to come up with something else gameplay wise that the player can do in between killing zombies and collecting supplies but I'm not sure what that could be yet. Two ideas are crafting and helping/interacting with other survivors but both of these are quite big complex things to add so I'm trying to think of something simpler for now.

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What about adding physics problems.

 

Stack boxes to get over a wall. Connect a wire to open a door. Open a tap to fill the room with water and reach a high up exit.

 

Just small things to give the player some variety.

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