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Not an actual game?

@mypalmike @pilarius @saxops1 Unfortunately the game was unplayable by the deadline because of bugs which I've since been able to fix. So, now uploaded a working version. I'm not too fussed about score but it would be good to see what you guys think of the actual game now its here. Thanks

The Games cool, It just needs juice(feedback/game feel) and the game crashes when you try to restart. Here's a good talk on game feel if you interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg

Othwise this would this is a solid subbmition

This feels like a small prototype game and that is okay, but some music, sound effects or just a bit more polished visuals could have made the game so much better.

Very nice Entry

I'm a sucker for zombie games and movies, so you get points for that. Like others mentioned, I miss the actual game feeling.

Good job on making a game. As stated, the game feel is lacking, and you never know when you hit someone without looking at your score.

I had trouble with the keyboard and mouse controls, sorry I do not hae any controller available.

A very fun game, i laughed a lot with this game

I ran like crazy killing everything in my path and it seems a prototype for a game that could be better, I wish you had put music, I had fun for a while killing crazy.

@frostbyte4k Thanks for posting that interesting video and I fully agree, there's a lot I wanted to add to it to improve the feel but I wasn't able to get the core mechanics in within the time and I would add polish/juice once those are completed. I'll take a look at the crashing on restart issue, it works fine for me, it freezes for a few seconds before the new scene loads up. Its a pretty resource intensive game with all the multi-threading, could you pm me your system specs, it may help me diagnose the problem.

@jk5000 @notredamstra @doot @gameovermexico Thanks, I agree with your feedback too. To clarify, this project was deliberately over scoped and is intended mainly as a prototype and proof of concept to see if I can use Unity DOTS to achieve massive performance and render thousands of enemies (20,000 - 144hz for my pc). In that sense I'm very happy with the result. I had problems with the vertex skinning shader which sucked up most of the jam time. Now that's all working I can add plenty of juice, sound effects blood splatter, zombie variation etc and pickups so you are actually able to survive. Although it won't count for the jam, I do now have a solid prototype I can develop into a full game in the future.

@geri @lazzydev72 Thanks for playing and rating, glad you enjoyed the game.

Great concept. Love the atmosphere and the animations. It was fun wreaking havoc and shooting everything that moved. However with time it got a little repeating and few variations would have done wonders. Overall, Great game.

@tony-artz Yes, that will be a top priority for future development. Will be adding better animations, design variations and different enemy types to the horde to give them more personality. Also will add some non enemy characters that are fighting the horde too, that you can interact with, help them out or leave them to die etc. That should make the world feel a lot more alive and dynamic as the different characters play off each other.

The idea is nice and it's always fun to shoot some zombies. I liked the lighting effect you used.

But it definitely needs polish to make for an enjoyable gameplay:
- Some background music and sfx would do wonders for creating the atmosphere
- As it is an infinite shooter, you need to display some stats to the player on the game over screen. Like: you stayed alive for this many minutes and killed this many zombies. I know there is a tiny number of zombies killed at the button, but when you're shooting, you're not really paying attention to that. And without the stat screen at the end, I have no real incentive to try again and do better.
- Something to refill your energy bar would be nice. Because otherwise it also feels sort of tacked on. It just keeps depleting till it's gone and that's it. It provides no further interactivity and stops serving any purpose.
- Ability to control the camera would be nice (zoom in and out).

Good job on finishing a jam game!

Nice game! The light looks cool. How did you manage to handle so many AIs? The shooting mechanic feels smooth. I noticed a small bug where the mouse looking centre becomes offset as you move from the starting position. You can fix this by saying something like LookPos = transform.position - Input.MousePosition;
Nice game overall. I agree that variety would help. Nice job!

Hi @convg Thanks for rating and the feedback, that's a good question, without a simple answer but I will try, haha.
I found with my demon hunt LD40 jam game that unity slows down after about 100 skinned meshes due to the cpu bottleneck and overhead of processing the animation. So there is a technique to pass animation data to the GPU using a texture that has the bone matrix transforms encoded within it. This means those characters are not skinned meshes at all and are, in fact, just standard mesh renderers which have the advantage of being instanced too(draw thousands in a single draw call).
That's just rendering though, how to calculate AI for that many agents too? That's where Unity's new DOTS api come in to play, Demon Hunt could, at a push, simulate 2000 agents around 30fps with optimised steering behaviour and a quad tree to optimise the neighbours lookup. That's good and almost up to Left 4 Dead numbers but I wanted more. So I ported the steering behaviours over to DOTS for this jam and just a basic implementation, without spatial hashing to find each agent's neighbours, enabled 20k zombies. After adding spatial hashing using a NativeMultiHashMap container, I can now push it beyond 100000 and still keep above 30fps. However for this release 20K running at full fps is a strong proof of concept.

The offset is intentional, it shouldn't increase as you get further away though, it's set 3m in front of the player. Perhaps it is more noticeable as the energy runs down and the camera gets closer. So I should reduce the offset the same as the camera distance so it isn't so jarring.

@avitt Nice! Thanks for the awesome reply. That's really interesting.

@fabula-rasa Thanks for the feedback, yes pickups are missing which would include energy refills. The light is meant to act like a shield, the zombies will try to avoid it so as you run out of energy the danger increases and the view closes in adding to a sense of claustrophobia, also you can't see as far making it harder and more intense. Sadly those features aren't fully finished, so it more a visual thing atm, unfortunately.

Its a twinstick top down shooter like geometry wars but with zombies that could potentially run on mobile devices so tried to keep controls minimal, even rotating the view is a bit much but will be needed when there's more scenery. I considered adding aiming which would have a zoom but didn't feel it would add much.

Good point about adding the stats to the Game Over screen, I will add that in the next release, thanks.

Seems that you haven't rated games yourself! There is still enough time to boost yourself in the ratings!

Had to pull out my windows laptop for this. Oh boy my laptop didn't like it one bit! :fire: :computer: :fire:
Buttery smooth 10 fps. ne me gusta.

Art style is relay nice and the shadows give it a creepy atmosphere! Game play needs some work tho.

Interesting concept for a game, I have been wanting to try and make a dots game too, but have been too afraid to try it for a game jam. I would have liked to see how far it could go, but it keeps crashing on me. I felt like I was getting into a rhythm to get a really high score at one point, but again a crash.
So as other have said, sounds and some hit feedback would be kind of critical to make it feel just better enough to be fun just slaughtering through the thousands of zombies. That and the crash fix as well. After that, pickups to get different weapons to enhance the zombie massacre and you've got the start of a fun time waster experience.

Good job! It works great here on my PC, I am very interested in how you could create this large number of units without crashing the game. You could make the source code available here on the game page.

On a post-compo version, you could add a high score screen at the end of the game.

@voidsay Yeah I haven't had time to rate yet as I has to fix the bugs so the game was at all playable, I will be playing and rating as many games as I can after work before the deadline hits. Sorry to hear you had such poor performance, it is a resource hungry game so a decent cpu and a gpu is needed. What are your system specs? Maybe I could add some settings that could help improve performance on lower spec machines. I plan on possibly releasing this on mobile so any info would be appreciated.

@archimagus Yeah DOTS is really powerful but there's a lot of head scratching involved so was tough working with it under the time pressure of ludum dare. Not sure what's causing the crashes, I had them too occasionally but they went away so I published it. Sorry they are still happening, its pretty disappointing tbh. Yeah fully agree those things are all planned just didn't have time to put them in for the Jam. If you follow me you'll get notified when I post updates after LD.

Thanks for the feedback both of you.

@danilo-bezerra That's great to hear its working well for you. I'm not sure about releasing the full source code full the complete project as I want to make this a commercial release and don't want someone else to make it before me :wink: I wouldn't be against a classic team up though

https://forum.unity.com/threads/when-animated-gpu-skinned-instancing-goes-wrong.512279/

Checkout my forum post ^^ about Skinned Instancing which has source code for for my first failed attempt and some alternate solutions. It's actually very close to working and formed the basis of this project. My maths was correct but the texture format I passed to the shader messed up the values. The Unity Blog has a working example of skinned instancing which is what I referenced and used for a previous version but it will not work out of the box with DOTS, also linked in the forum. I hope to update the forum with my results from this project too.

The Ai code has already been published as the source code for Demon Hunt and includes quad tree generation and optimised steering behaviour. The only difference is it uses standard mono behaviours. It's the same logic here just ported to DOTS to run in parallel. Also there are other open source projects available that do similar things with zombie hordes in DOTS, lookup DOTS of the Dead and converting you game to DOTS with Mark Geige. As learning material I would recommend Daniel Schiffman's nature of code series on the coding train on YouTube. He breaks down the concepts and explains Ai steering behaviours and is what I've have based my work on.

Also happy to answer any questions you may have as you get into it.

@avitt Intel i5-8250 and no GPU. If you plan on developing this more seriously you should definitely have an adjustable zombie number. They are usually the ones eating (I won't stop with puns) all the performance.

@voidsay ahh that'll be it then, the animation system need a GPU without it the cpu will try to do it instead but its a massively parallel problem. Maybe DOTS animation could provide a reasonable number for devices without a gpu but I haven't got to that yet :wink: Yeah some settings would definitely be good to have as shadows and a number of other things can also have considerable performance hits.

@avitt congrats looks like your game is safe now!

@voidsay Thank you so much, I really appreciate everyone who played the game and left all the great feedback. I gonna do the best I can to pay it back tonight before the deadline closes. Best of luck to everyone.

Oh, and never stop with the puns :wink:

Thank you so much for your answer @avitt! I will take the time to study the resources you suggested to me because I like these topics very much and I want to learn more. Thank you!

This is a great starting point to create something of really good. Work on it, add weapons, special items, sounds, background and a little story.

Really impressive scale! Crashed on me on restart, but since I played it using wine on Linux, I'm not sure if it's not a wine bug or a missing dll. Besides that, I had butter smooth frame rate! As a programmer, I get it. It's great! Gameplay could use more touch, though. I wonder if you can do complex animations and blending with this DOTS system you've mentioned in a comment above. Good job making it work on such a scale!

wow good game, very nice

@civmaniac wow thanks, good to know it did eventually work on linux with wine. Yeah the new DOTS anim system looks promising but seeing this is already CPU bound, moving animation back onto the cpu, will only hurt performance in this case. I will flesh out the animation system with a state machine to achieve a similar effect on the gpu, not sure about 2d blendspaces though. Want to switch the player over to using DOTS animations, that will perform better than the current animator component and adds possibility to add interesting dynamics too. Plus it would be nice if the player was an Entity.

@avitt sorry, your game doesn't run properly, but I know it's not easy to check if you cannot try on a mac! I asked my friend @nuanda to play it on windows and i'm sure his feedback is on point. In any case great job and thank you for thinking of mac users too!

@giulia Thank you for trying. I was able to test it and found a problem which I'm not able to solve right now(the zombies don't show up). you need to run sudo chmod 777 ./KreepAlive-Mac.app/Contents in the terminal from the folder with the game in. Then in system preferences->Security & Privacy there should be an option to allow you to run it even though its not from the app store.