Project Updates

PROJECT UPDATE: A CRY AND LIGHT FROM THE SILENCE

Hello survivors,

It has been a while since our last update. Since most people we talked to preferred images and videos instead of words, we will try to keep this update short and full of goodies.

First and foremost, if you have knowledge in texturing and unwrapping 3D assets and you would like to be part of our team, let us know. We are constant need of more help. Also take a look at our jobs page for any other open positions. Texture artists and a webmaster is what we need the most at the moment.

With that out of the way, here’s what we have been focusing on these last 2 months.

• Programming: On the programming side we’ve been developing the player. We think that having a full body in the world is paramount to having the player immersed in our world. We aim to have our arms and head animations procedurally generated too. It’s nice to have a full bodied avatar wandering around the world, Survivor Zero is turning into a proper game each passing week. Plus, imagine playing an avatar in an ever expanding sandbox world with the Oculus Rift, should be awesome right?
  We have also improved the terrain generation making it 98% multithreaded, which means you should notice almost no drop in framerate while the terrain is being generated.

• Asset production: Our artists have also been working very hard. A multitude of models have been created, here are some examples:

After that our unwrappers and texture artists gave them a touch of their own. Here are some examples of how things end up looking:

• Sound: Our sound team is preparing a little surprise to our fans so be on the lookout for some mysteries. They have also been working on fine tuning the reverb inside buildings.

• Design: On the design side of things we have been trying out a lot of things and we are especially proud of the way we are starting to make our inventory system. Speaking of inventories, our crafting system is looking really great and already gives us a lot of possibilities with just a handful of items.

Thank you for your time, we hope you are enjoying what we’re doing. If you would like to know more about Survivor Zero as soon as we release the information make sure you follow us on Twitter and on Facebook.

Stay safe,

Julio Sousa - Programmer

Project Update: Found Footage and Disappearing Pandas

Survivors,

It has been a cold winter so far, but the Survivor Zero team is still hard at work crafting the ultimate apocalyptic experience. Over the last 6 months, our modelers and texturers have been hard at work producing around a hundred game ready assets, a new player model, and some zombies. Our animator has been experimenting with various different animations for both character and zed alike. The composer and sound designers have been bringing the world to life in a whole different dimension and our programmers have written and rewritten thousands and thousands of lines of new code, and this is still just the beginning.

Right now, the dev team has put together a small environment that is meant to stress test the game. This is where most of our growing up will happen. Once this small testing environment has been optimized and tested to its limits, we will produce others and the process will continue until we expand into full blown procedural city generation.

On the design side, a recent overhaul in the structure of our development team has meant we have a much clearer and conciser angle to approach the game from. It’s a big goal of our art director to make the visual feel and atmosphere of the game as distinct as possible. The world we aim to create will be as organic to explore as real life would be, providing the perfect balance between hand-crafted environments and procedural generation which is different every time. The designers are still keeping busy after cementing our initial concepts, and are coming up with more content to make the game have a lot more replay value without seeming overwhelmingly repetitive (as most survival themed games often do).

One of our happiest pieces of news is the teaser trailer we released last month. We are very excited to be able to finally show everyone a snapshot of the world we have been creating, and the gritty qualities we hope someone might experience if they found themselves having to document the world of the undead alone. You can catch a look at that here.

The teaser trailer should help give you guys a better idea of what we’re about - a completely immersive survival experience. Atmosphere over action, and cunning over killing. While the team agrees that gameplay is important, and will be just as polished as it can be, we also recognize one aspect that many horror themed games have missed in the past - sheer terror. It is our goal for the world you explore to be as vast as it is terrifying. We hope to be everything you have been looking for in the survival horror genre.

We would also like to put to rest some rumors about the game being played from the perspective of a video camera. The teaser trailer was just it, a teaser trailer.

Our small band of survivors has one more piece of good news for everyone. We have come together to form our small studio, Hidden Panda Games. A great friend of ours created our logo and we simply love it. Check out her portfolio here and don’t hesitate to contact her if you ever come in need of a designer. Besides all this, we hope to have more information on Hidden Panda Games in the coming updates.

If you’d like to join us, we could use the help of a talented texture artist or two! You'll be working with anything you can - organic/hard surface, environments, props, varying environments, player characters, zombies, and animals. If you think you’ll be dedicated, hard-working and self-motivated then send us a link to your portfolio and we’ll check out what you can do. Go to our Jobs page and get in contact with us.

Don’t forget to check our indieDB page found here and like and follows us on facebook by going here. Enjoy our re-released forums, enjoy your sneak peak into the world of Survivor Zero, and most importantly of all, always watch your backs.

SZ Dev Team

Our Facebook page is up!

Our Facebook page is up! We'll have exclusive updates in there so be sure to Like us and follow us in there.

https://www.facebook.com/survivorzerogame/

Take a look at our interview with GameFront.com!

A few days ago we were featured in an interview on GameFront.com. You Can take a look at everything that was said by clicking here.

Found Footage Trailer Released!

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We hope you liked the video, do not forget to Like and subscribe to our channel. Alternativelly you can follow us on twitter @survivor_zero and on Reddit on our very own sub-reddit /r/SurvivorZero where you can ask the dev-team all the crazy questions you like.