WIP: DEAD EARTH

Hey Guys, just wanted to show you something me and my Bro have been working on for some months. This is our first trailer...ever...so be kind

 

Looks quite polished already, great work so far. How long have you and your bro been working on this?

 

This looks excellent! The graphics and gameplay look quite polished!

The only thing I noticed off was some of the shooting animations, they just seemed a bit fake.

 

Yes, this is an early trailer, still working on recoil. It's about 3 months work.

 

Looks quite good for - yet another zombie fps - but if it's your first game - who cares what genre it is. Just do it!

The animations, minus the girl running in the puddle, all look a little stiff, and the undead creatures seem to take on some consciousness when they get close to the player, like they loose a bit of brainlessness and have slightly more logic.
It come across as conscious beings rather than undead with an animalistic craving to feed.

The blood splatter on the camera seems to be the same splatter pattern every time. Consider varying the effect and reducing the bump/normal effect slightly.

When asking for feedback - it's best to ask for honest feedback rather than asking for kindness. If something looks like crap - to be a successful artist/designer people telling you crappy content looks good won't help you improve, and might cause you to overlook some things that could be fixed before release.

Nice work so far.

 

Holy Moly......

The 3D models, sounds and environments look really polished!
As said above the animations could use a little adjustments, the zombies look a bit mechanical
Besides that, it looks awesome!

Could you share with us some more details? (Game features, mechanics etc.....)

 

Hi Guys,

Thanks for taking the time to give us your feedback and all points are well taken.

With respect to the animations, we are actually building this game as part of a step by step tutorial game programmers at the Game Institute, rather than as a title to release in its own right. Part of the downside of this is that we have set ourselves goals to try and use easily available assets so that the students can follow along without breaking the bank. For example, all the zombie animations in use at the moment were downloaded free from Mixamo which I agree is less than ideal. The same to is true for most of the assets, which were either free or very reasonably priced asset packs on the asset store. The idea is essentially to bring this in within a micro-budget.

The blood spat criticism is spot on and something we will definitely be varying a little further along in the dev cycle. At the moment many of the systems have been prototyped with only one style of animation/effect so that we can go and add variants in the polish pass

The perceived intelligence of the AI is actually by design. I can't really give too much away about the storyline at the moment, but the Zombie's are not the “Walking Dead” like zombies from many other zombie titles. These do have intelligence (think alien tech gone wrong) and we are still working on even more for them. They will seek you out if you hide, follow the source of a sound that they hear or even react to light changes in the scene. All of which causes them to investigate. Given the lack of variety that we will have (given our extreme budget constraints), it's an important part of the game design that much fewer zombies give the player a march harder time. So rather than fighting hordes of mindless zombies that are easily killed, our game will have fewer but more more cunning zombies making you life difficult.

The game style is more in the vein of a survival game with respect to weapon and inventory management. For example, you can't walk around in this game with 8 rocket launcher, 15 machine guns and 150 hand grenades strapped to you back. You basically have the ability (via weapon mounts) to carry one two handed weapon and one single handed / melee weapon at a time. This puts the player in a position at times when he/she might have to leave their favourite ass-kicking gun behind in favour of a lesser weapon because the ammo is more plentiful for the lesser gun.

The game also has a PDA system (much like the early System Shock style games) where you can find and play back audio logs that help further the story line. There will also be interactions with friendly NPCs at times as well although we are yet to implement that or its associated dialog system currently.

Thanks again guys for you encouragement and I'll keep you posted of our progress.

 

Very nice so far!
My first thought when i looked at the trailer was "god damn, i really hate all those you tube commercials!" and then it turned out it was a part of the trailer : D

 

That's great. We hoped the commercial was at least a little realistic.

 

Well in that case - well done - it is evident even at this stage.

 

Looks really good, even for using ready-made assets. I have to admit I was skeptical about the amount of work you put in the trailer, as it has high production value. What I mean by that, is I thought two people modeled, textured and animated everything, and also produced the music, sound effects, and voice overs. Which, I really couldn't believe, as it easily looks like over a year's worth of work for two people. It sounds like most of these are ready-made, and the core of the work is preparing and integrating the assets into the pipeline, and programming (and preparing tutorial coursework, too, which also takes time)? I also admit that the last screen that said gameinstitute threw me off, so your response post was very informative. Good job!

 

Its not that easy to take other ppls work and make it look really good either, i can see a lot of work went in to it, not only the code : )

 

Thanks Guys. The game would be further along but as we are also recording tutorials every week it's obviously taking longer to finish the game. The idea is that the student follow along with us. The story is based on a sci-fi novel my Brother wrote 2 years ago so it's not gonna be your normal zombie shooter....hopefully

 

Here is another project we are working on, teaching students how to make a racing game.

 

Wow, that racing game looks really cool! Almost pro quality level!

 

Thank you very much.

 

That looks pretty amazing, the cars seem to have lots of grip, maybe adding one to slide around a bit in would be fun.

 

If you're going to deploy to Steam I would definitely make sure to swap out those default assets before Early Access or launch. I recognized several Mixamo asset models/textures in there. If someone like Jim Sterling gets a hold of a game that still has free Asset Store or Mixamo assets, etc it will get nailed. I find the easiest thing to do is just to kind of re-texture certain areas of the assets to give them a unique and different look.

 

is Death Earth released ?

 

The first part of this course they released is awesome but it didn't complete the game unfortunately and left a lot of unanswered stuff for students to figure out. I really hope they come back and finish this with the part 2 they promised students were going to be getting.