Hello!

It's been way too long since our last update, we'd like to Heavily Applogise for this. We realised soon after launching in Early Access that we had been very Pre-Mature but it was too late at that point to go back so we tried pushing on with what we had, putting more and more on top of a poor framework which just lead to more and more issues.

We thought we could make some massive progress when switching to Gamemaker Studio 2 however the change caused more issues than fixed, such as having a working Level Editor in Gamemaker 1.4 however it was completely unusable in Gamemaker 2 due to how the tiles were used which meant making more changes. We then had Animation issues with them not displaying correctly, we were able to optimise a lot but unfortunately it didn't have much of an effect. These were just a fraction of issues we encountered.

Ultimately it became clear that no matter what we did what we currently had was not viable and so months of work ended up being useless.

At this point we knew we had to re-do the entire game from scratch, we decided however that Gamemaker could not be the engine we used so we have Switched to Unity and it has been a massive improvement.

Unity Progress

So when re-making the Game in Unity we wanted to Stay true to New Outbreak's Original Design, But, a lot of things needed to be re-tuned to work better such as the Combat and the AI. Zombies needed to feel like Zombies, your Dog needed to Act like a Dog and the Player needed to be fluid and fun to control.

We were given a lot of Freedom in Unity to create this.

The first thing we did was Re-Design the Main Menu.



The video still needs to be updated but will be according to the new gameplay, Unity also supports Video Playback meaning it is no longer a Gif and instead a video that plays much smoother and is a lot nicer to look at.



Options menu is currently placeholder with placeholder settings but will be fully present and working in the Unity version.

The Map

The Map is being almost completely Re-Done from Scratch, leaving only a 1:1 recreation of the Starting Town however we are adding onto it and improving it, the town is now it's own separate Island, being separated via a bridge and surrounded by an ocean, work is done on the Starting Town and now we are getting the surrounding area sorted, we have someone on board now to help design parts of the map to help things progress.

The rest of the map is being completely overhauled as well and by that I mean it's gone and not coming back, we want to take our time and make it right, we are planning on releasing the map in stages. We're unsure how we will enforce this however the Starting Island will just have the Bridge connecting the island blocked off making exiting it impossible.

How Will This Be Rolled Out

We are going to be releasing the Unity version in an early form to get it out as soon as possible featuring the remastered Starting town, this will allow us to fully focus on building the rest of the map and taking our time to create something much fuller with more to explore, Quality over Quantity this time around.

More To Show?

We'd like to get things in a more solid state before showcasing it all, however we will show the new Animation system with our Weaponry and an in game screenshot (Hud Removed while working on it)

https://imgur.com/zfPZr0T

Also the zombie used in this Video has since been removed (As Seen Below), Performance did not like many of these being on screen so the normal sprite based ones are now in, we would like to re-introduce them however they need work first




And here are 2 early screenshots of in game with our New UI, some parts are hidden while we work on them.







We are also going to work on sorting out the Forums so announcements have their open seperate forum with only very important information being Pinned in general, and work on a much easier way to provide feedback.


We would like to Apologise again heavily to those who have been awaiting an update and hope that once we can start rolling things out more regularly it will be worth it. We wanted to push this announcement out a lot earlier however the move to Bone Animations made us re-think a lot of what we had done and we wanted to ensure it was ready and possible before showing it.



If anyone has any questions we will be checking comments here and of course will respond to any questions on the forums.


If anyone also has any Feedback on what we have shown we would also Love to hear it!

Thank You