Project Update: A State of the Game Address
May 10
Hey guys and gals!
This post has been a long time coming, but we’re hoping it’ll give a clearer idea to our fans about the state of Survivor Zero. To start, I’ll outline a tiny bit of our history, where we’ve been and what we’ve learned, then continue on to where we stand right now and the state of the project in our current iteration, and doing so I’ll give a little bit of information as to how we’re approaching the next phases of development without revealing too much — we do have a few surprises up our sleeves and we’re gonna keep ‘em there. For now.
We started this project a little under a year ago, and since then, we’ve gone through a lot of changes and a lot of volunteers. To those who have worked with us, we’re hoping everything’s good in your lives after your Survivor Zero experience. For many who are still a part of the SZ experience, however, this has been one of the most interesting, oddly demanding volunteer-based work opportunities we’ve ever had. To give you an example of our development education, though we’ve all learned much as a part of this project, I’ve gone from part-time writer who was just throwing in a few narrative ideas at a time to someone who’s taken the helm of a lot of sub-projects and settled into work as a sort-of-project-manager as well as Creative Director. The willingness we’ve had to centralize our organization in this way has saved us from a lot of beauraucratic trouble, though we still approach the game from a very, very team-oriented focus, so there’s nothing the leadership cannot be questioned on and, very often, a brilliant mechanic-design idea comes from the ranks of audio or art. We are what we are — dedicated members of a solid team that have nothing but the deepest passion for what we do, and we just happen to get along in such a way that we’re seeing plenty of progress on something that to this day is expected by many to vaporize in the coming months. But then, it’s only us that’s seen much of that progress and while we’ve become more open about talking about it, it’s been realized that we haven’t shared much of that progress as we’ve gone. So let’s change that.
In a comment on reddit, I posted a shortlist that showed a bit of what currently was in a state worth saying it “works”. Now, to explain, the concept of “works” is always different between departments and “acceptable” is a concept that’s subjective per project and person, but for the most part, all of the following is in a functioning state:
First off, we have an engine — Unity. This should come as no surprise to anyone, but I think we have left some so in the dark that they imagine we haven’t done much with it. But as you’ll see below, I’ll provide some information showing how we put that engine to work.
We have spawning of non-player characters and our favorite mindless flesheaters working just fine. Not only do our zombies spawn, but they dynamically navigate their environment, pay attention to the player, follow each other if they “think” they’ll be led to food, monitor the last known location of the player, remember, and forget. It’s pretty fascinating to watch them work, but we’re still working out their varied walk cycles, and with them, we’re shooting for behavior that gets truly unsettling. Our animations are growing cleaner and more numerous weekly and we’ll be showing them off in a special kind of way here in the near future, so keep your eyes peeled as always and you’ll start to see some good stuff coming in soon.
Our programmer, Julio Sousa, has been one of the stars of the team lately, having put a ton of his time into procedural terrain generation — the game’s ability to randomly create sweeping plains, rolling hills, deep valleys, and tall mountains to create a personal world for each individual player — that all flows smoothly and naturally. We have trees, grass, and rocks, accounting both for clearings and space for more urban areas. At the moment, we are set up to generate 13.9 million square miles (36,000,000 square kilometers) of virtual untouched-by-man-but-infested-by-zombies woodland like this — a space about the size of the moon. For that terrain, we are currently putting work into city generation, with close attention being paid not only to the placement of streets, but what is left in between them. For that, buildings that are currently being built by our generator that will construct a building beyond 50 floors. To add a little clarification, we still haven’t modeled enough floors to even fill that space yet (check see the info below about application if you’re a modeler), but we’re taking it one step at a time. We find the technology to be more important than the practice right now, focusing on the foundations to create a sort of fill-in-the-blank programming perspective that will accept input of any sort when we do get those buildings built. (I can’t make any promises here, but we are looking into the option of community modding later in the life of the project — it’s important to all of us that if we make modding available, we make modding simple, but we’ll update on this once we’ve worked out more of the basic game.) To populate the buildings, however, we have a growing collection of varied assets like lamps, couches, fans, counters, sinks, toilets; you name it, we’ve probably got an iteration somewhere in a hard drive. We also have road cones, fences, signs, billboards, and various other random bits and bobs that will come to flesh out the believable world that we’re looking to roam.
Finally, to nail down the atmosphere within that world, John J. Harvey’s audio team has remained one of the busiest. They’ve kept active with bounce after bounce of incredible audio (one of which we posted recently) and continue to keep other members of the team motivated with even the roughest of their mixes thrown into the developer chat. Alongside them in the creative department, our designers and writers are hard at work as well, coming up with new ideas all the time about basic items and craftables that will engage the community and encourage experimentation. We want our players to love to play, and we’re focusing on making sure that none of the mechanics or required actions in the game will feel like work. We’re looking for simplicity and balance, but all that means is that when we come up with an idea, we give all our effort to make sure we bring it to the barest of bones before even discussing how it might apply to SZ. This makes design discussions run a bit long (one of the reasons I’m just getting to finish this post), but through that process the idea becomes solid, backed by our foundations, and succinctly implementable.
Overall, and probably most importantly is this: we are making a game. We may not always have the art assets we need, we may run into an absolutely stupid zombie or two, we may have errors or bugs every once in a while, but we have our builds and they are getting better all the time. We are, in all, on the right track to getting this game finished, and unless something drastic and horrible happens, it’s looking far less likely than ever that the project will vaporize for any reason. The only trouble that remains about it all is that we’re still in a state of picking through self-motivated individuals who are dedicated enough to keep their own project intentions together, though the core team is enough to get the work done right. In order to approach serious completion-quality work anytime soon, however, we do need to make a few additions to the team, especially a character modeler, but we’re actively looking for others to join in on art and modeling, so please, feel free to check the links that follow.
If you’re as interested in working with the team as we are in having you, go ahead to our application forum, register, and post a new thread with a link to your portfolio (or even just a link to a screenshot of your latest work thrown up on imgur) and we’ll do everything we can to get back to you pretty quickly. Skype is the way we run the show, providing us the opportunity to have offline logs, so if you do drop us a line, be prepared to pm the team member who gets a hold of you with your screen name so that we can keep it all as simple as possible.
As always, we appreciate all the support we’ve received from you guys, and we keep an eye on the subreddit and @Survivor_Zero, so let us know if you have any ideas or thoughts about the game and, generally, someone from the team will do what they can to join the conversation! If you wanna talk about this post, head over to the comments for this post on Reddit and we’ll be in touch.
Until next time, keep your head low and your ammo count high. Never know when you’ll need it.
