Another Quick Update!

Hello! I met a few personal milestones so I decided to post a quick update. I haven’t had an awful lot of time because of the day job, but in whatever spare time do I have I put into my true passion! I had quite a few features and overhauls planned and I’m happy to report I’ve met them (and they even turned out better than I hoped)

I did a complete overhaul of the melee system because I noticed during the last playtest (a while ago) that the testers were having trouble connecting their hits sometimes. This is because I originally came up with a convoluted method of enabling and disabling a damage collsion section of the weapon (the tip) so whenever the weapon reached a certain time in the animation, the collision would become “active” thus allowing damage to occur, and then quickly “deactivate” so that i doesn’t continue to do damage if the player wasn’t swinging it around. This worked fine, but there were problems with it that I discovered over time.

One of the problems was that if the framerate was low, the code (delay) wouldn’t fire off properly whiched cause a lot of those “misses”. In essence, the melee only worked properly if you had a consistent framerate so I ended up scrapping it and building another system using traces which turned out to be much more reliable.

Another is the gore system that you’ll notice in the video below. Since I was always a fan of melee-centric combat, I needed to make sure this one was as satisfying as possible and I think I accomplished it. When things get hairy, the shit really flies!!! This whole game is turning out to be everything I originally wanted the mod to be all those years ago.

I also implemented a “shove/push” system that can potentially help you get out of a sticky situation. The shove animations are different for every weapon and there are slight differences in what they do as well (if you don’t have anything equipped, you push with both hands and the enemy has a chance to move back further or if you’re using a firearm, you pistol whip for some damage etc.)

As you’ll see in the video though, if you’re not careful you can get mangled pretty quickly! The difficulty is entirely intentional since I want every monster to invoke a feeling anxiety. There should be no real difference whether you’re facing off against 2 zombies or 20, you should always feel as if everything can go south in just a few seconds.

There were actually a few more things that I did as well, but my mind is just blanking right now because there was so much of it. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the video!!!