Departments of the Damned

Happy December Thursdoid, and a big hello to all the new survivors who’ve jumped on board in recent weeks. This week we’ll be doing a quick check-in with the various different departments who are at work on Build 42 and providing a little freeze-frame of exactly what’s being worked on.

First though, we would be remiss if we didn’t inform all fans of raccoons, soft toys and ‘both of these things’ that: the Makeship campaign for the Spiffo plush has been EXTENDED for a full extra week due to everyone getting all excited about it.

If you are interested in sliding under a closing door then reaching back for your fluffy Spiffo, like Indiana Jones, then final orders can be made here:

https://shop.makeship.com/3FHlgG8

Okay, so let’s go round the Zomboid houses. Starting with… the sound team?

SOUND DEPARTMENT

Formosa (formerly Noiseworks) have a lot of different things on the brew – work on new music and music systems, all the new actions and items for B42 (switchblade, firecracker etc) and clearly all the animal stuff which they’ll be starting on in due course.

Something else they are starting work on, however, are ‘acted’ character noises – pants and puffs recorded by real life actors to add a little more depth and feeling to the game, not to mention a greater feeling of ‘real’ when you are standing next to a character who has exerted themselves or is being injured in MP.

This will likely be an option you can turn off if you find it intrusive, but the Sound team believe they will provide an extra layer of immersion for Knox Event survivors. The sorts of things they’ll be recording will be: effort noises for window and fence climbs, sleeping noises, pain noises when bitten or scratched, vomiting, sneezing coughing etc.

ANIMS DEPARTMENT

As those who read this blog might recall, we’ve been screaming out for a big brain to come in and lend their clever thoughts to some of the movement bugs and issues in our anims system for a while. Previous attempts to find a Chosen One didn’t work out, and as such since the 41 release we’ve had a significant blocker in terms of improving our animation system and our animation tools.

There has been significant rejoicing, then, that our friends at Ever Curious Entertainment have lent us their own big brain Steve North – who has been deep in AnimZed of late, and should be providing a range of changes and improvements that will help out our animator Martin no end.

In terms of a player-facing end result, this means that in B42 hopefully there’ll be better blends between anims to tighten everything up and make things look smoother. It could also, potentially, improve the responsiveness of controls and give gameplay a slightly tighter feeling. We’ll see how it goes when the fixes go in.

FIRE DEPARTMENT

Work on integration of the previously in-dev fire system continues, this week with the introduction of new mechanics like burnable oily surfaces and development of fire spread in save games and MP code.

We are also experimenting with visuals in that a more pixelated fire looks better in-game, and also will be having a VFX artist joining us for a time in January to further improve its appearance in our isometric illustrate-y looking world. It’s already looking a smidge better though.

MAPPING DEPARTMENT

Lots of fun new locations appearing from Xeonyx and Ayrton in the map channel, including this little doozy…

Over to