New Year, Same Afflicted

4 January, 2024 

Happy 2024, folks (and Happy Thursday of course)! While the new year tends to bring light to new things, my diligence to present you with the greatest afflicted updates on this side of the Sun isn’t one of them. The work continues as we push ever closer to getting the game demo out to you all! Another week down and more substantial progress has been brought forth unto the game - as expected. So grab a hot cup of tea, cozy up to your favorite device, and get to reading!

Addressing the State (of the Game)

This week we got another fine glimpse into the inner workings and behind-the-scenes at what’s been going on over the past month here at 3rd Shift Studios, and a little bit about what’s to come! The 2nd official State of the Game is live, so if you haven’t watched it, go and do that! Not that you have to, but there’s a lot of great info in there about what we’re up to and why it’s all important. Ryan puts a lot of hard work into those, so at least let him know he’s doing a great job!

Fighting the Good Fight

On and on, the fight continues. Even now the team continues its glorious march to victory, and the turning of the tide (releasing the demo to the community). Seriously though, we’re still working hard to get the pieces all working and ready for you all to dive into. The latest updates have me really excited for the next couple of weeks:

• Ryan (AKA the One who Churns)

  • Added the new Zombrie DNA model with color variants + refactored the entity system to handle model swapping based off currency drop quantity. All parameters are now editable in the database for currency entity data types.

  • Cleaned up a ton of warning messages + reorganized the project some more.

  • Set up inventory to properly pick up quantities based on currency pickups.

  • Have inventory drop handler properly doll out exact change based on total currency of each type.

  • Implement different pickup effects / icons for different currency variants.

  • Added OnDeathEffects for Agents (FUNFETTI BABY).

  • Enhanced Inventory system to "smart stack." i.e. when you pick something up it’ll automatically find items of the same type and try and combine them.

  • Added ability to assign different pickup effects for each currency variation based on rarity.

  • Added Zombie Titan NPC Base Class.

  • Refactored the State Machine class.

  • Added footsteps for Zombie Mutant Titan.

  • Added IdleState and ChaseTargetState for Zombie Mutant Titan.

  • Added announcement mechanic for certain types of NPC spawns...like bosses and whatnot.

  • Added subtitles for announcements.

  • Made the afflicted StateMachine more generic.

  • Added Attack and Death states to Zombie Titans.

  • Added explosion spawning to Zombie Titan and enhanced explosions to not deal damage to the owning agent (NPCs wont kill themselves from their own explosions now.... IF thats how we define it).

  • Added camera shake to Titan explosion attack.

  • Added knockup + knockback to explosions.

  • Added a basic attack to the Mutant titan.

  • Mutant Titan now explodes after being in the Death state for 5 seconds (with fun graphics).

  • Added that ol' Zelda blink effect to indicate when the titan is gonna go boom.

  • Added foundation for dropoff + pickup cinematics when the player enters a match and successfully extracts.

  • Readded ... (((drum roll babyyy))) inhales THE DEV_MAP. This map will serve as a playground for the devs to test out all the features in the game. It will also be accessable for all players to test out upcoming features, weapons, etc. Basically a prelease branch within the game 🙂

• Bryan

  • Keeping up with Ryan’s fast-paced work on the technical side and making sure the game “feels” right.

  • Ensuring cohesion between technical aspects of afflicted and the established lore.

  • Conceptualizing POIs for the Desert and City maps.

• Bruce

  • Shared out Zombrie DNA model for icon creation.

  • Continued work on updated Terry model.

  • Kept the team sane with continued memes.

• Cole

  • Designed the Zombrie DNA icons as per Bruce’s models.

  • Updated several Swamp prefabs with additional detail.

  • Started work on improving Desert map POIs with greater detail.

  • Testing of the new functionality from Ryan.

  • Maintaining the community.

Things are going swell over here honestly, if that above list isn’t an indication. We’re rolling through the list of outstanding tasks as fast as possible to get this demo done and start playtesting (something that I’m hella excited for). We’re on the fast track to having this beast in your hands, after all, we gotta get on the path to the next Steam Awards!

In Closing

It’s 2024, and that’s reason enough to celebrate. A new year, full of new possibilities! Now, more than ever, I’m so grateful to you all for being on this journey with us.

Time for bed,  

Squid