Dead on Arrival

Developer Diaries 1, 2 and 3

3rd week comes physic and zombies and the intro on the Art side

Be sure to checkout the video below as the art boys tell a different story then the text... They give you the Art style introduction in the Johnny and Saxon style.

Now back to coding ... We wanted to work out the animation system and also see how far we could push the physics in DOA so we got to it and added just a touch of each so we could test these out on mobile devices. We added a few joints to get the door to make it swing and also a few rigidbody components for some environment objects in a small room to see if a player interacting with objects (seeing objects move because you ran into them) would add to the experience. The door seemed to work well but it turned out, no one really cared if they pushed over a wheelchair, so the door stayed and the environment object physics went.

We managed to get a robust animation system working after our preliminary test in this build so this was a good test to see how we could work with blending. (the test zombies / animations are not the best but hey, we had to start somewhere!). Saxon I can’t believe you were hired after you produced these poor looking zombies for our test ... be it you did them in 10 minutes and I said super low poly but come on :)

Finally we wanted to do some tests on lighting so we could set an unsettling atmosphere. We incorporated the light flicker and also added dark areas to try out what was too dark and what worked. Turns out in the end dynamic lights were just to much for the poor little mobile devices so we baked in all the lighting while still maintaining the light flickering, shadows and dark areas.

The 2nd week of the infection ...

The progress started to speed up as a few key elements started to get sorted. We were moving a little better and actually had the functionality to kill a few angry red boxes. The health of the player went in too which meant hitting the bloody reply button over and over again ... wish we put God Mode in sooner! So to cap it off, dual thumb-sticks with attack and move went in. A player forward direction and red box enemies with their own forward directions made it in. A VERY simple layout, enemy awareness, targeting and group spawning tests and last but definitely the favourite, the simple box fire hose machine gun where the bullets never disappear ... WHO FORGOT TO WRITE THE DESTROY FUNCTION??

The start of the infection ...

This was our very first build (first week of development). We decided to get the controls (semi) working so that we could easily navigate around the world at the view we thought might end up being in the final build. From there we did some tests on cube and sphere collision and ran it on the mobile devices to make sure that we could get optimal performance in these areas as we wanted to make a game that had proper collision, not have sprites or 3D objects going inside of one another when they come for you. The test ran ok on the medium to high end mobile devices which was our benchmark anyway so we pressed on.

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