Hello
I am excited to announce that Zombie Escape v0.9 (beta) is available for download on Itch.io
Design Notes
- Player may spawn in 1 of 3 random locations on map
- Full Controller support
- Mini-Map (radar) for close NPCs
- Full Player Map in pause menu (hit Esc or controller Start) in game.
- Player Stamina with Regen
- Created custom Status Panel Manager for making announcements to player
- Zombie and Skeleton NPCs are semi-randomly generated in location and physical size. This also affects their movement speed.
- Once Helicopter is called and seeks out player. Player must get to the landing zone for “pick up”
- Random NPC audio effects
- Beta build, no major bugs known of. Please feel free to post bugs found in comments.
- Suggestions welcome
Up Next
- Allow player to select day/night time. Night works now but you have to wait about 10 minutes in game for it to change over.
- Add Time Scoring system
- Add additional NPC Meshs
- New level(s) and a level select system
- 3rd person control vs 1st person?
- Better audio speech
This was certainly a MAJOR upgrade from our previous game attempts. I had to be a little creative on the AI side of things because I found that the Standard Assets AI controllers are not super efficient when you have HUNDREDS of npcs on a map. HA!
My solution to the AI controllers was an “area of influence” around the player that enables/disables the AI agents if they are beyond a certain distance from the player. This way I can have hundreds of automatic NPC spawn points but they are only active if with-in a reasonable distance to the player.
The second part to throttling the AI is if they are outside a certain distance from the player, the AI NavMeshAgent Update procedure is throttled by a pulse time, so agents that are “far away” may only calculate 4 times a second rather than 60.
Almost all graphical assets are either standard assets or from the Asset store. Though I did most of the UI masks, etc myself using Paint.net or Kryta.
Kegh