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[EyeballKid]

Fight your way through hordes of reanimated corpses as you descend down through the catacombs...

We're aiming for 60 areas of varied and interesting gameplay - some will be frantic arcade-style blasting, others will take more thought, and some will be trying to scare the crap out of you.

The target platforms are still to be nailed down completely, but there'll definitely be both VR and non-VR PC versions.

We're doing a regular twitch stream covering development, at 6pm PST daily:
https://www.twitch.tv/stickmenmedia

[EyeballKid]

And here's a screenshot showing where we are right now...



You'll notice all the zombies forming a nice orderly queue :- )
(they also slide along the ground like demented roller-bladers - currently they just play their idle animation the whole time)

If you look carefully, there's a little red dot, which is our stand-in aiming reticule. You can shoot the zombies, and they get blown satisfyingly backward in ragdoll mode, although they do tend to go a little jelly-like at the moment. Their physics models need some care and attention.

[EyeballKid]

The general gameplay:

The player progresses through a bunch of scenes. In each scene, zombies must be cleared away in order to progress onward to the next.

The player is stuck in place for the duration of the scene. This is partly a function of trying to avoid making people vomit in VR, but usually you'll have your back tot he wall and be pinned in by advancing zombies anyway.

If a zombie gets close enough to take a swipe, then things are pretty bad and you won't last long. Our zombies are pretty lethal. Mainly because we want to avoid that awful cheesiness of having a bunch of zombies looking silly as they stand around taking swipes at you while your health bar slowly diminishes.

I envisage that scenes will be quite arcadey and short - and you'll probably fail a bunch of times before you master a scene and get through to the next.

We're aiming for a load of variety in the scenes, for example:

 - huge numbers of zombies slowly advancing out of the gloom from many directions
 - just a few zombies.... but not enough ammunition to shoot them all
 - using the environment to block/kill them (eg gates, bridges, falling rocks, fire)
 - luring zombies to their doom
 - using silent weapons to dispatch zombies before they sense you

For VR with proper controllers, you'll be able to use both hands, for proper dual-weapon-zombie-killing badassery. We're trying out various ways to support dual weapons when VR controllers aren't available. I'd really like to make dual weapons a core aspect of the game, but we'll see...

[EyeballKid]

So today we've been experimenting with ways to handle dual weapons. I flippantly used the the phrase "Dual-Weapon Badassery" a week or two ago, and it's kind of stuck, a label for that slightly undefinable quality of "feels right" gameplay: we want the player to feel like a bad-ass Zombie-slaying hero.


In VR with proper controllers, dual weapons are easy - you just point your hands where you want to shoot and pull the triggers.
It's way harder on non-VR, with gamepad or mouse/keyboard controls. What we've been trying:

- Use the left gamepad stick  (or WASD keys) to look around. The left hand weapon is always aimed where you look.
- Use the right gamepad stick (or mouse) to aim the right hand weapon.
- gamepad left/right triggers or mouse left/right buttons to fire.

It's not quite there, but there seems like promise there - it feels great when you shoot two zombies coming from different directions.

Looking around with the keyboard feels a tad clunky, but I think tweaking the acceleration and inertia of the movement will help a lot. Aiming the right weapon with the mouse works great.
We did try it the other way around (traditional mouselook, with WASD to aim the second crosshair), but it didn't work - the second weapon felt useless in comparison to the mouse-controlled one.

On gamepad the two weapons feel much more on par with each other. I think it could work really well.
(But I personally find aiming with gamepad a bit clunky. I probably just need more practice on console games. Give me mouse & keyboard shooters any day :-)

However it goes, it's really hard to effectively aim two weapons at once - the player inevitably keeps one mostly-stationary, aimed at a specific spot, firing as enemies pass under it, and the other roaming around the view to pick off enemies.

Lots of other ideas to try out. I suspect some sort of light aim-assist could help. The logical extreme is to auto-target both weapons, with the player merely flicking between targets. This could work, but my instinct is to try and avoid it until other ideas have been explored. I don't want to spoon-feed the player unless absolutely necessary.