Development Update #21

Hello everyone!

Welcome to the twenty-first development update for Haunted: Attack of the Dead Men.  As I said in a previous update, I was expecting to have a busy June this time around, but as it turned out I had an even busier one than I anticipated back then.  This means I didn't have as much time to work on the game this month and this update will therefore be a bit smaller than usual, but despite that I still managed to finish Map 15 and implement a few features and bugfixes, so I'm still happy with how the game is progressing.  Let's get started with that most elusive of levels...

Dungeons and Draugr

This level is an interesting one.  Early on in development I knew it would be nice to have an extra level somewhere, something for returning players to try and find.  But, being so far removed from the rest of the game, it was a bit of a challenge trying to figure out what Map 15 should look like, and really just what the general theme of the level would be.  Eventually I settled on a theme of resurrection, not of Russians or anything like that, but of the game itself.

Wait, what does that even mean?  Well, before Haunted: Attack of the Dead Men became Haunted: Attack of the Dead Men, it was going to be something completely different.  To give an idea of what I mean by that, here is a screenshot from a very old build - over five years old in fact.

This build of the game is so old it actually predates my initial "boomer shooter" prototype.  Back then the game was intended to be a more realistic psychological horror game of some kind, but it never really went anywhere.  When the project morphed into the early boomer shooter prototype, these "dungeon" graphics were ditched in favour of something that was intended to look more like a First World War-style bunker (which itself would get ditched even later).  However, I decided to resurrect these assets to use them for the secret level, as I figured it would make for a fun Easter-egg.

Not only were these assets resurrected, but I also brought back the same layout as the initial prototype level I made.  This level was far from finished, but it was enough to serve as the opening of Map 15.  But that wasn't all I brought back from the dead here.  You may have noticed that something looks a bit off about the enemy in this screenshot.  Here's a side-by-side comparison of him and the basic Dead Man encountered throughout most of the game...

That's right, this is yet another thing that I resurrected from the prototype.  Five years ago, when the idea for this game popped into my head after listening to a certain Swedish power metal band's latest album (at the time), I got to work making the first enemy sprite for the game just to see if the idea would work.  Naturally, on my first attempt I made countless mistakes with the model.  Like, is he wearing mittens or something?  And don't even ask about the strange way he reloads his (anachronistic) rifle...

So why would I want this guy in the final game?  He's clearly not up to the task of being the main enemy in the game.  However, for a very long time he was just that - in fact, I only replaced him about a month before I initially released the demo just shy of two years ago.  That means for the majority of this game's lifespan, this early prototype sprite was the face of it (literally, his face was the icon at first).  It was hard not to get attached to the guy in that time, and so I knew I couldn't just cast him out of the game forever.  So when I was pondering what to do with the secret level, I decided it would be a great way of keeping this ancient sprite in without affecting the rest of the game.  And so there he is, reborn as Easter Egg Man.  The bastard's pretty tough too for surviving this long, so watch out if you happen to play through this level!

This stuff, on its own, was never going to cut it for a whole level though, so I had to come up with a few more interesting things to put in it.  In the end I figured it would be nice to have a challenge level of sorts, a series of puzzles to solve rather than just straight-up shooting stuff.  Here's what I mean...

How are you supposed to get across here?  You'll have to take the hint when you get to it

You don't want to hang around in here for too long

And of course, it wouldn't be much of a dungeon without, well, a dungeon...

This is where you'll find most of the health and ammo in this level

Achievements

This is the other big feature I was able to implement this month.  Not only are all the achievements implemented, the in-game menu and popups are also done!  As Steam has its own system for achievements, the in-game popups will only appear in non-Steam builds of the game, however the menu will be present in both versions.

You'll have to excuse the programmer-art icons at the moment.  And don't worry, these are not the icons that will end up in the initial release either, despite the fact that I mentioned previously that custom icons for each achievement would not be coming until a bit later.  Before release I will update the game's icon again and use that as the temporary icon for all achievements.

If you've had the chance to play the beta and look at some of these descriptions, you'll probably have noticed that there are a lot of references here.  Of course, the references may be difficult to spot until the custom icons are in place, but I took quite a bit of inspiration from the achievements in Paradox Interactive's grand strategy games, which are always fun to go for.  In this screenshot you can see one of those references, Anti-Human Revolution.  Can you guess the reference here?  It's a bit of a double-pun, but I'll give you a clue - the icon planned for this one will show the main character wearing some nice sunglasses, at night of course.

Just One More Month

That is a scary heading to be typing.  But it is true, there is just one more month left of development before I plan to finally release this game.  As a quick recap from the end of the last update, here is what there is left to do.

• Implement the "beastiary" (the screen that shows the descriptions of all the enemies)
• Touch up the enemy sprites a bit (5 are left to do)
• Implement a secret "bad" ending
• Record some custom voice lines for the final boss
• Add an ending cutscene that plays while the end-game text is displayed

This list is three (fairly big) items shorter than it was last month.  I don't expect the rest of these things to take very long, but there is always the chance that things will go wrong at the last minute so we'll see.  I will only make a concrete prediction of the game's release date in next month's development update, as at that point the game will either be only a few days from release or it will still need a bit more work which will require a delay.  Hopefully though, next month everything will be finished (including fixing a few bugs that have been found in the beta)!

Stay tuned for the next update, and as always, thanks for reading!