👋 Hi! I’m Duane, a web developer, who’s working on his first indie game!

A month ago, I decided to follow my dream of making games. It wasn’t the first time I worked with Unity, as I have dabbled with some projects before, but never made anything great, and definitely never launched any games.

Art isn’t my thing. I tried 3D modeling before, and although I got the basics covered, I can’t make something that looks professional in a small time frame. This meant that I had to use assets, so I bought a bunch of packs from Synty Studios, amongst others.

This meant that I’m ready to start prototyping! I had an idea in mind, which kept changing everyday but still stayed within the same theme, so I had enough info in my mind to start laying some things down.

This is the first scene I created to try out the Synty Prototype Pack.

I think the scene looks good, but it’s far from a game. I got some zombies from the Synty Apocalypse Pack and got a player character placeholder model so that I can start working on the base mechanics of the game.

Progress! I managed to learn and make use of the Unity animation states. I hooked them up to the player and zombies so that they can run after each other in my prototyping area. I got the animations from Mixamo and hooked them up to the humanoid rig provided with the Synty models.

Obviously since we need a place where we slay zombies, I started working on one of the levels and used it throughout further development of the game. This is my favorite scene from the level.

I think shooting is going to be a big part of this zombie ‘shooter’ game, so I got it tackled. Did some work on the mechanics of aiming, shooting, reloading and weapon animations to pull the slider back and eject casing from the sides.

I’m not a fan of invisible walls; so to restrict the player from going out the level area, I made a dark fog around the level and when the player steps in it, the screen gets darker to give the feel that you can’t see through the fog. You also get slowed down so that the zombies catch up to you easily.

This was enough work to release the first early demo and get some feedback to have a clearer picture regarding the direction of the game. Please do give it a try and let me know what you think!