June 2011 - An Update

After much trial and tribulation we finally have an update! Don't be alarmed. Development is going swimmingly. We (I) just had a minor mishap with the update process and ended up losing an entire draft of the update due to internet issues. So enough bullshitting around lets get to it! The past few months have been full of milestones and "hell yes" moments but more on that later. Awhile ago Dman posted about our DevBlog. We'd like to thank those who submitted their questions. Don't worry if your question hasn't been answered yet, we queue them up as they get answered. It's also the best place to get information apart from our regular updates!

The past few months have seen several new faces joining the team. [member=Sammy-ROCK!] joined in the programming department and has already had great success in stomping out some game breaking bugs such as the recurring server crash that has plagued our play tests for so long. We also welcome [member=Slayback] to the team as our mocap specialist. Approved by SickJoe himself, the masterful [member=Kynde] is on board to help us with character concepts to fill our remaining character slots. A familiar face recently rejoined us in the animation department. You may know him as [member=sn1pe]. So give them a warm welcome. No physical contact though, unless they request it.

Development is coming together faster than Congressman Weiner's career is falling apart. Adding to our never ending list of assets is LSR with a fresh new vehicle prop: the Humvee. He also turned his attention to map specific props like an oriental gate for Chinatown. Lastly we present his re-vamped version of the S&W. Maxx focused on feature oriented props and came up with several doors that zombies will be able to break down.

On the topic of level design, nay0r has been making changes to the atmosphere of Chinatown. The map is now in the midst of dawn which allows us to actually see the grand architecture of the city around you. Each play test is a different experience since he is constantly reinventing the designs. SotaPoika completely overhauled his old map Quarantine. It is now a completely fresh layout with some very unique elements. Vincent is getting Nightfall to a near finished state while he continues work on the survival map Flooded.

For the vast majority of NMRiH's development, zombies didn't behave like zombies. They casually walked after you in a predictable and rather friendly way. Thanks to the power of Kinect and some great animators, zombies now shamble after the flesh of our play testers. Kinect is a cheap and efficient way of capturing realistic animations through the use of iPi Soft's Markerless Motion Capture software. The animations turn out very smooth in Source as seen in this old test demo Slayback did.

The team has been conversing over character concepts Kynde and SickJoe have been coming up with.

One of the favorites so far by Kynde: The Asshole

NMRiH will release with two game modes. Objective and Survival. In Survival, players will fend off wave after wave of zombie hordes. After a certain number of waves a helicopter will fly in and perform a supply drop where players can stock up on weapons, ammunition and other supplies. Here is an early look at what the supply drop will look like.

That's it for this update. What is to come in the near future? We have a new contest planned that has to do with writing so stay tuned for that. Also we'll be rolling out a map spotlight for Chinatown and a few goodies are in the works, we'll just call them "swag media" for now. Thanks for reading, thanks for watching and thanks for sticking with us!