Pixel Polishing

The smallest member of our team is JJ, whose job is to polish pixels. This is the important task of making our currently clean and tidy city look like it's been through a zombie apocalypse. That means drawing lots of tiny pieces of detritus for us to scatter about the city to make it more realistic. Everything from spilled bottles, broken glass and rubble to corpses, pools of vomit, and burned-out cars. These are a few of our favourite things...

Progress Video

Here's a new video showing the progress so far, including all the features mentioned in the posts since the last video. You can now see our working title screen, then our player character gets dropped into the middle of the city where he's attacked by zombies (well, sort of mobbed, since they can't do a lot yet). Don't fear though, our hero is armed with a machine gun of sorts to take the horde down.

The AI is a little improved with some pathfinding going on, though the zombies still get stuck on buildings sometimes, so a bit of a rewrite of the AI is probably in order.

Oh, this video also shows off David's sinister background music and a gunshot sound effect I found on the web some place - more audio treats to follow...

Pathfinding

I've begun the task of making the zombies a little smarter by implementing a pathfinding algorithm. This will allow the little blighters to find a way to the get to the players, so long as such a path exists.

I have implemented the popular A* algorithm using the MSDN code sample for Minotaur Pathfinder. With a few tweaks, I've got a basic version up and running that works with the map data in 8bit Zombies. Pretty sweet.

As you can see from the screenshot, this enables our zombies to work out a route to the player.

There are a few things to do though yet. At the moment, the zombies can still end up getting stuck on the corners of buildings when they see the player, and get stuck on one another for some stupid reason that needs debugging. The other problem is that it's too slow. Or at least, when lots of zombies are doing route calculations simultaneously, the game stutters badly. So, some optimisations are required.

Blood added

Our zombies now die in style. I've added two basic blood 'n' gore effects. Firstly, there's a "starburst" effect, which sprays a few red pixels randomly out from the zombie. Secondly, there are some green flesh chunks that can come flying off the zombie, which in turn trail blood. I think these will look great with a sort of gravity effect whereby they can bounce around for a few seconds before disappearing.

Bullets added

I've implemented some basic bullet code, allowing the player character to shoot. Basically, a click event is captured and a new bullet object is created at the player's position, with a velocity that will take it towards the click point.

As each bullet moves some collision detection takes place, and for the time being any zombie that gets in the way simply disappears (along with the bullet). Obviously this will be replaced with code to make the zombie take damage until it dies, whereupon it will fall over and persist for a few seconds until removed. Next up: blood effects!

Player character added

A rudimentary player character has been added. I'm using a little non-animated vicar sprite for the time being. He can be moved with the keyboard at present, and the zombies now follow him around.

Test Zombie Video

A quick sample video showing the project at a (very!) early phase. The city has been procedurally generated and our non-animated zombies are running around rather stupidly, able to avoid one another just about, but getting stuck on buildings.

First glimpse

So here's the first view of 8bit Zombies. This is an image mockup showing a few conceptual sprites on a pixel-city backdrop.