Zombox

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Did lots of work on Zombox this week….most notably the sound design, but here’s the overall scoop:

1) Many new props scattered throughout the city. Dumpsters, garbage bins, crates, trees….

2) All buildings are now labelled and their description will appear at the bottom of the screen when you enter inside (“House”, “hospital”, “department store”, etc)

3) The quality of the UI icons has been greatly improved. No more artifacting!

4) ….sound! I’ve begun the sound design process and it’s coming along nicely. Still much work to be done but I think the overall feel of things is there.

Here’s a Youtube video showcasing all of these changes:

Just making a note that comments are open on all posts here. Feel free to post feedback on anything and everything that you see. Constructive criticisms, suggestions and questions are welcomed!

This week I worked on a couple of new things in Zombox.

Firstly, zombies have a chance of dropping Zombucks (in-game currency) each time they are killed. These coins of varying values (values which depend on the strength of the zombie killed) can be collected and eventually traded for items that NPCs in the game world are willing to sell.

Secondly, the empty areas between buildings and streets (which were just flat concrete spaces in past builds of the game) are now populated with grass, bushes and trees. Like all interactive items in the game, the trees can be chopped down and destroyed.

Here are a couple of .GIF animations demonstrating the above features:

So this week I worked on the scavenge system.

Each building interior contains both contextual and randomized props which can be searched for useful items.

In order to search an object, you simply have to walk up to it…and if it’s searchable, it will flash green and a magnifying glass icon will appear in the top right corner of the screen. Once that icon is pressed, the inventory panel will open and the items contained in the object will appear in the bottom right panel.

I also added some food items to the inventory, and these can be found in various houses/restaurants/grocery stores/etc throughout the world.

So, I finished modeling all of the building interiors!

All the interior props have also been prepared for the destruction engine. This means that when you destroy any interior prop, it will break apart. Click the image below to watch some prop-destruction action!

I also got a day/night system going, as well as an in-game clock. Click the image below to view a full day/night cycle.

This week I worked further on getting the building interiors modeled. There are 15 building types in Zombox right now, and as the procedural city generation system generates buildings during load time, each building gets a random interior relative to its type.

I also worked on the interaction system. In Zombox, my goal is to maximize the number of ways a player can interact with the environment. Doors can be opened, closed, broken down, barricaded, etc…objects can be destroyed, searched, used as storage, etc…and obviously there has to be a way to alert the player when something is examinable.

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This week I’ve been working on a few things in Zombox.

Firstly, interiors have been designed for many of the building types. I’m about halfway done the modelling stage. In total there are 15 different building types, each with two interior variations.

Secondly, I added a button at the top let of the main UI that allows the main camera to be rotated up or down, so it’s easier to see what’s happening when standing behind walls or other obstacles. Some players might prefer the top-down view altogether.

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This week I worked on character customizations within Zombox.

The main character can now be dressed in various clothes, including over 60 hats, shirts and pants. Each clothing item provides a unique bonus to the character’s stats. Some items provide extra armor, some provide extra hit points, some increase speed, some increase the chances to land a critical hit, some increase attack and others regenerate health.

The clothing items, like all items in the game, can be found throughout the world.

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Someone in the Unity forums asked me how Zombox maintains performance even with all the active colliders and rigidbodies within the environment. I figured it would be a good time to explain some of what goes on behind the scenes in the Zombox engine.

The game uses a fairly complex pooling system I wrote to create the environment.

Firstly, because everything in the game procedurally generated from a small set of prefabs, I can easily enable/disable anything that is not directly within the view frustum. Not just disable its renderer…but literally remove it completely, and use its gameobject to create something that *is* in screenspace. This means the total number of active rigidbody/static colliders in the game is limited to what’s visible in screen space, because only a finite set of gameobjects are used to create everything. The entire city features over 350 buildings (each with many walls, props, etc….about 40,000 different “pieces” are required to create the whole city), many roads, rivers, etc…but all of that is generated using only 300 gameobjects, which are recycled constantly. This keeps the game running really fast and there are no load times in the huge sprawling environment once the initial city-generation load time is passed (and that initial load time only takes a few seconds).

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