1 YEAR OF ZOMTERIA DEVELOPMENT

It has been over a year since the initial Zomteria development, and now this project is progressing better than ever. Along with tremendous changes that have been made to the game – compared to the first prototype, I have learned a lot throughout the process. And now, shall we have a look, of what has been done…

• HOW IT STARTED

I had been thinking about developing a game since 2017, yet until the beginning of 2020, I was able to get my hands on it. My mind was racing with ideas at the time, most of which proved to be unworkable. Then I thought to myself that it would be cool to make an apocalyptic game since I was inspired by games like Metro, Fallout, and L4D2. Now that I knew what I was going to make, another question arose: what would the game be like? I finally got the idea for the game's content while reading about a microorganism known as "zombie bacteria." “What if this bacterium can turn humans into zombies?” popped into my head – sounds like a great idea for my game.

Now some of you may have realized how the name was made, it is just a simple combination of “zombie” and “bacteria” into “Zomteria”.

So that was the brainstorming part, now it came to the harder part, the pre-production and prototyping. It was harder, but not the hardest. Since I had already had Junior experience in coding, it wasn’t actually hard for me to get used to game programming. Nevertheless, I just didn’t have any game designing and developing experience – therefore it was quite challenging as I didn’t know where to start.

  To be honest, I DID NOT do any of the proper planning, instead, I hopped directly into the game engine and started making the prototype. The game engine I chose was not Unity or Unreal like many people often go for, it was FPSC – a semi-coding-free game engine that can help you make games easier (or not lol). As I started making the prototype, I also started to learn how to use the engine through various sources on the internet. The FPSC community was also very useful and active, helping newbies like me with a lot of tutorials and supports. Overall, this was a good start, at least for me.

• THE PROGRESS

At first, I created a 3-level prototype of the game, with the levels being messed with random entities, Ais, and some pre-made weapons from the engine. I did not treat it as a prototype at that time, instead, I treated it like an actual game and I thought that the “game” was going to be amazing – but I regretted it.

An early prototype of Zomteria

When I realized that if I kept doing like this it would not going to work, I thought it was time to go back to the drawing board. So, I planned out the story of the game and how the game would work. In short, the game is about a guy that awoke after over 30 years of hibernation in a lab that had spread the zombie bacteria, now he has to try to survive in the world of death. Now the story is done, I jumped back to the level designing and creation process, all from scratch. The progress was slow, I mean very slow due to the fact that I had other work to do in life and I felt unmotivated sometimes, only by spending free time would I be able to continue making the game.

Then the feeling that the game is going to be bored and too basic, I felt I need to gather other people's ideas and feedback. That’s why I decided to make and publish a playtest demo to gain some feedback as well as recommendations. Yet again, it took me 3 months to make the demo, which was very long but the demo was well-made. In the meantime, I had made some new functionalities to the game, adding some new mechanics such as object interaction and healing; along with a new UI being made.

Map of level 1 in Zomteria demo

After the demo was finished, I started working on the weapons again. The weapon models were made by EAI media, and his works are amazingly polished and animated. I was working on the SFX of the weapons this time, examining different weapons from real life and other games to get the idea of how would I compose the sound. I prefer the sound not to be too realistic rather than game-experience-oriented. The SFX worked astonishingly and I am very satisfied.

Moving on to the AI, the pre-made AI from the game engine was terrible, so I managed to make a better-scripted version for the AI with the help of the FPSC community members – it is better than the original but not the best after all. The AI's pathfinding is quite buggy and amusing to watch, though more work for the AI is required in the future.

As said before, the development progress was quite slow, not to mention that I had to do everything by myself. Having said that, the level design is only about 40% complete. Making a level entails several steps. The first is planning on paper, where I have to sketch out the layout, player path, Ais spawn positions, prop placement, and player interaction spots. Then I have to create a simple draft of the level and make changes as needed; this step typically takes a long time. The final step is to finalize the level, which includes detailing the level, scripting, and adjusting settings and effects. Normally, it takes me about a month to complete a level.

 This is so far what has been done in a year.

• THE FUTURE

While things are likely to remain the same for the time being, I will try to spend more time working on the game and updating social media with more progress. In the near future, in addition to creating levels, I will begin work on creating the game's UI and HUDs, giving the game a fresh new look. However, I'm considering reducing the HUDs to give the game a more immersive feel. That is the current plan; we hope you will continue to support the game's development and stay tuned for future updates. Many thanks!

P/S: Don't forget to check out the demo if you haven't!