Zombie Barrel Blast Devlogs #1, #2 and #3

Welcome to the first blog post style devlog for Zombie Barrel Blast. Most of the updates I make for this game are on my YouTube channel. Consider this an update for the first three videos, which have already been put in place there.

Concept

I originally came up with the idea for Zombie Barrel Blast sort of by accident, while doing some testing on platformer mechanics. At the time, I wanted to see if I could recreate some of the mechanics from the Donkey Kong Country games from the Super Nintendo – some of my favourite games from that console.

The very first thing I attempted to recreate was the barrel blasting aspect of the game. I used a zombie as a placeholder asset. And when I successfully made a zombie land in one barrel and launch out of it, I added another barrel… and then another and another. My plans to recreate the original game’s mechanics in Unity were soon put on hold as I was having so much fun launching zombies out of barrels.

At this point, I could have changed the player sprite from a zombie to something else, but it was oddly fun to launch a brainless zombie from a barrel. Plus, I’ve always been a huge fan of the Walking Dead series. The icing on the cake was when I had my dad and my fiance’s dad each try the game together on my laptop. Her dad didn’t speak any English, but our dads took turns and bonded over playing the game together, laughing every time the zombie bonked its head on a wall.

At that point, the concept was sealed. The game would retain its jungle-like atmosphere from the original Donkey Kong series, plus barrel blasting game mechanics. But we wouldn’t be launching monkeys – we would be launching zombies from barrels. The game was officially born.

Graphics

For the longest time, I was satisfied with the way the game looked graphically. Until recently I hadn’t planned to change anything until I started subscribing to more game developer Facebook and Reddit groups and seeing what other developers were doing with their games. Zombie Barrel Blast is supposed to take place in a jungle, but when I started seeing the way other developers had decorated their games I realized there was a lot more that I could do.

A simple change I have recently implemented is adding extra layers of depth to the game. In the previous version of the game, I didn’t have all of these extra trees and foliage in the background. It looked okay, but it looked more like the game was taking place in a mountain setting. A simple but highly effective change was simply adding extra layers of trees and making them parallax properly.

If we go behind the scenes you can clearly see how all of these individual layers can easily be added or moved around to create an illusion of depth. I really want Zombie Barrel Blast to have a jungle feel to it, so this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Something else that was added was particle effects in the form of these greenish dots floating around, as well as all of the falling leaves. The dots were created using the default particle in Unity and that was easy enough. The leaves were a little more complicated. I couldn’t find a particle in the shape of a leaf so I had to learn how to design my own. It turns out the process wasn’t that complicated. All I had to do was take a photo of a leaf, bring it into Photoshop, overlay it in white and make sure the background was transparent.

From there, adding it into Unity and setting it as the particle type for the leaves was easy enough. All that was left was to play around with the settings until I was happy with the effect of the leaves falling.

Finally, I added some 2D lighting to the game. Right now, you can’t see too much of it because the game only has a daytime scene. But you can see a couple beams of light shining down. I’ve never experimented with lighting before so I’m honestly not sure of how I can use it to its full potential yet, but now if I want to add afternoon, evening or night levels to the game I’m certain lighting will play a much bigger role there.

Camera Work

Finally, from the previous devlog entries (namely 1 and 2) I added Unity’s Cinemachine into the game to create for some cool camera sliding. I hadn’t been quite aware of the impact that having a smooth camera could have on the effect of the game. But after implementing it, I’m glad I did. As you can see when I contrast from the previous version of the game to the more recent version, with Cinemachine in place – the difference is drastic.

Implementing Cinemachine did come with a few of its own technical challenges. The Cinemachine brain follows a target, which in this case is a tracker I set and remove from the player at appropriate intervals. What I didn’t realize was that the rotation of the trackers has a huge impact on how Cinemachine follows. It ook a while to figure out, but once I did, I made sure that the tracker did not rotate and Cinemachine started behaving a lot better.

Coming Soon

I don’t have a planned release date on Zombie Barrel Blast other than to say it’s “coming soon” and “when it’s ready.” I hope you’ve enjoyed this Devlog entry. If so, please feel free to enter your name and email address into the sign-up form below. As soon as Zombie Barrel Blast is ready to launch, I promise you’ll be among the first to know.