Development Update #17

Hello everyone!

Welcome to the seventeenth development update for Haunted: Attack of the Dead Men.  This month's been very interesting indeed - not only have I had a much busier personal life than usual, I've also had a system update gone wrong which led to me having to reinstall my OS.  Despite all of that, and despite this month being the shortest of the year, I've still managed to accomplish quite a lot - the completion of not one, but two new maps!  Of course, both had already been started (with Map 14 being covered in last month's update), but on top of that I also made good progress on Map 10 and should have it finished very soon!  Once I'm done with that I will make a start on v1.7.0 of the demo alongside a new trailer, which will (hopefully!) reveal the exact release date of the game.  While most of this update will focus on Map 11, I have also recorded a video of the final boss fight so stick around to the end if you are interested in watching that.

The Gaze of the Abyss

Remember this short clip from the itch.io release trailer?

This was covered in Development Update #12 but I will recap the story so far here.  Map 11 comes after the first boss fight, where you defeat the right-hand man of the main villain.  Naturally, doing so has greatly angered him and now he has a personal vendetta against you.  In Map 10 you will witness the corpses of your fallen comrades being resurrected to fight you in addition to the Russians, but if you've made it this far then clearly that was not enough.

In Map 11, you will need to wait for an elevator to arrive - the elevator that will take you deeper inside Osowiec where you will uncover who is behind the resurrection of all of these Russian soldiers, and how he's doing it...

But before you can get there, you are going to need to fight some enemies.  Well, really you'll need to fight a lot of enemies.  In two waves!  Here's a video I've recorded showing it all in action.

Now, I actually struggled to beat the level even on Oberleutnant (medium) difficulty in this video, so I had to make a few balance changes afterwards before I could even attempt it on Feldmarschall (very hard - I have to test this difficulty to make sure each level is actually possible).  There will likely be further changes to come once I start getting feedback from the closed beta, but you get the general gist of this level.

Instead of a more open environment with plenty of areas to explore, this fort (Osoweic's Fort II) is small and densely-packed.  There are several sets of stairs leading down to the central area surrounding the elevator, which form a number of choke-points that allow you to funnel enemies in to grenades and other high-damage, high-spread weapons (such as the Trenchgun and Flammenwerfer).  You do have to be careful though, as if you stay in one spot for too long you will start getting hit by enemies sneaking up behind you.  And, once you think you've got it all sorted, you'll kill the last enemy and the second wave will begin...

What it can look like after killing everything on the hardest difficulty

You can see in the video I was caught with my pants down at first, being stuck in the centre and quickly surrounded.  I have since tweaked this so not all the enemies are resurrected at once, but it is still a challenge as you have a limited amount of time to find a good spot to deal with the start of this wave.  Generally, the centre is a bit of a trap, having lots of health and armour pickups but being very difficult to manoeuvre in at first.  It's better to clear out some enemies before trying to get those goodies.

Jump down too early and you can get cornered...

...Which is especially easy in this area as there's only one way in and out!

If you're a bit worried about this map being too difficult, that's understandable as it is supposed to be a challenge.  However, the difficulty here is actually a bit more dynamic than I make it seem in this video - I was trying to kill every enemy, but this is absolutely optional and you can exit the level at any time once the elevator has arrived (after approximately ten minutes).  This can even be done without triggering the second wave!  So, if you happen to struggle with this level you can make it easier for yourself by focusing on survival rather than aggressively taking out every enemy.

Music

There's been a lot of positive feedback on the game's music so far, which has been a pleasant surprise to me as I don't have much experience in this area.  I know some of you have been asking me to release the game's soundtrack somewhere, and I do have plans to do just that after the full release.  Much of the game's music comes from free MIDI assets I found and later edited, with only a few tracks being original compositions from myself, so before I make a soundtrack DLC I will reach out to the original creators to check if they are OK with this.  All but one of the tracks are public domain so I don't expect there to be any problems but, you never know.

While you wait for this though, I did think of a little something extra that I could add to the demo...

This new option sets the music to be played in the main menu screen, and will be included in the v1.7.0 update.  I'm sure many of you will enjoy this but the setting will serve a secondary purpose of allowing me to get feedback on some of the other tracks that have not been revealed yet.  It's also worth noting two more things: these track titles are subject to change (if I can think of better names), and Map 15's music has not been finalised yet (I have two potential tracks for this map and I haven't decided which one I want to use).  You can therefore expect this menu to look a little different when the demo update is released.

Undying Lair

Spoiler warning!  Before I finish off this update, here is the video of the final boss fight.  This video will remain unlisted on my YouTube channel so no one accidentally spoils the ending for themselves.

Well, I hope I didn't make it look too easy!  This fight is designed to be more straight-forward than the first boss, but only once you've learned his attack patterns.  I also made sure that on the harder difficulties there is actually not enough ammo to finish him off unless you unlock the secret area.  You can see at the end of the video (where I was playing on Feldmarschall difficulty) that I did indeed run out of ammo despite having a lot of help from a rogue Flammentruppe.

Although I said Map 14 was finished, there's a few caveats to this.  Firstly, in this preview he is reusing the sound effects from the first boss fight - this is temporary and I will record custom sounds for him later on.  Secondly, the graphical effects for his attacks may change before release as I'm not quite happy with how they turned out.

Well, that's it for this update.  Join me next month where I should have a gameplay video of Map 10 ready, and will also go into more detail about the other features coming in v1.7.0 of the demo.

Thanks for reading!