If You Squint…
…it almost looks like a deer hunting simulator at times! I’ve started to clean up the outdoor maps that take place further away from the city and the thought had occured to me to replace all the zombies with deer and see if anyone notices. XD
I hope everyone is having a good 2025 so far! I meant to post much earlier, but there ended up being so much new to report that I kind of lost track on what to report! I’ve been on quite a roll with the progress that I just didn’t bother concentrating on the updates anymore!
First, a great preview video was created by Jonathan Sheridan that contains some insights into the project! I made some footage for him that isn’t anywhere else, so head on over and give him a thumbs up!
I’ve already started on the Outskirts/Blood Marshes map and cleanup has been 1000 times faster than the Grinwood Police Department map! (that is the most complex map in the game) Since then, I’ve tightened up a lot of game mechanics, I made 50% more monsters that haven’t been alluded to yet (no screens or info, no one knows what these are), did a great deal of bug fixes and just more things that I can’t even remember now.
When I first opened this map up to be cleaned/optimized, the visuals were a little different than I had left them. I made many changes and improvements to the post-processing, lighting system and materials since I “finished” this map a long time ago and so there were visual discrepnacies.
Some other silly little errors started popping up like below:
Since everything was so bright and blue before, I didn’t see the fine white outline on some of the alpha materials. Crap on a stick!
I also had to fix a bunch of foliage materials because I had a problem with distance assets showing up far too bright because they lacked shadow casting (for reasons of optimization, distance objects don’t receive or cast dynamic shadows) so I had to find a way to hide that, which I did with a couple of workarounds)
I also forgot to mention earlier that I brought in some weapons from the mod version! The pistol, axe, crowbar and machete can all be found at certain places. There is also an armor item you can get that gives you a similar uniform to the mod. I thought it would be a neat nod to the fan community! 🙂
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LONG NGUYEN | Digital Artist & Game Designer 
The thing with the dog is also a good idea, because in reality it has more advanced senses than a human and could serve as a detector to avoid dangerous situations. If you use technology it can seem kind of strange. Or you could use something like a magical amulet that can warn you and it gets warm and/or hot when monsters come closer and closer. It would also be cool if there was a difference whether you sleep outside or inside, so that you can be rudely woken up in your sleep, unless you prepare the sleeping area, for example with salt or holy relics around the sleeping bag, bed, etc. so that no demons can get to it, and each relic increases the chance that you won’t be rudely woken up so you can get a full night’s sleep.
I’m glad you like my idea and I’m excited to see how you implement it. Does Donovan have a watch so he can check the time at the touch of a button? Maybe it gets more dangerous in cities or outside of them after a certain time and it’s better to rush inside and go to bed until it gets light again if you’re not good enough yet? Nice progress, by the way.
That’s so interesting you said that! There WAS a feature like that where you could either have a dog companion that would bark and freak out, or a digital wristwatch that beeped at a certain time of night to warn you about an impending horde (I actually bought a soundeffect for it too XD) but because the game had to be restructured a certain way, I didn’t include that feature and am hoping to bring it back for a future spinoff of OoH. 🙂
At the moment, there is a Survivalist Difficulty that changes a few things about the base game to offer more of a challenge, but I do like that idea of different enemy types and such! Maybe I will look into fleshing this mode out a bit more when the times comes! 🙂
Would it be possible to add a replay mode after completing the game, similar to Resident Evil 4 or Parasite Eve 2? It would be great to start the game from the beginning, with tougher enemies that would otherwise only appear later in the game and new items (where you can take items from the first playthrough into the new one). Varied puzzles and locations would also provide more variety and increase the replay value (other places where items can usually be found and new weapons, more tuning, etc.). Is there something like that already, or maybe even a Steam Workshop? Good luck!