Day 1:

Work began, as it often does for us, with capsule people.

I often use these capsule people as placeholders during development as stand-ins until proper models can be made. In this case, they fulfilled their role as I implemented the first person controls. It'd been awhile since I'd made FPS controls from scratch so it took a little while, but eventually we nailed it.

The player and zombies were simple low-poly models to save time. I'm always wary of rigging an armature, but thankfully there was no issue this time - it worked as intended the first time. I don't remember why or when ragdoll physics became a mandatory feature in our game, but at some point it did, so I had to figure out how that system worked. This results in a range of goofs and gaffes, from characters melting to them going into spastic fits.

We eventually ironed out that the character animation system needed disabled along with the main capsule collider to prevent the model from going haywire. We also had to worry about the bodies trapping the player, so it was decided that the player wouldn't collide with the enemy models after they died, making body collection easier and preventing the player from getting stuck. At this point I began modeling the buildings for our city, and we shortly ran into a problem.

After making our hospital, I thought I might have spelled the word "HOSPITAL" wrong on the building, but blew it off as me being self-conscious. However, when @floata3 pointed out the same thing, it became an issue. We spent a good while trying to convince ourselves it was correct, even Googling it multiple times to confirm, but it never did look right. It was at that point we decided we were tired and needed to break for the evening.

Day 2:

Reconvening in the morning, work began on making the city zones that would comprise the individual levels. Rather than make them in Unity, I opted to build the levels completely in Blender and import them each as a single monolithic mesh.

Day 2 was almost exclusively level creation because each map took a good while to build and test. I did have to problem solve the difficulty level mechanism, since we'd decided to have the Easy difficulty only play levels 1 and 2, while Normal did levels 1 to 4, and Hard took the player to 1 through 6. My solution was tied into how I tracked the difficulty. The difficulty was logged as an integer, 0 for easy, 1 for normal and 2 for hard, so I created a list of next scenes for the game to go to after completing a level, and had it select the one corresponding to the difficulty level (i.e. Easy selected option 0 from the list, Normal selected option 1, etc.). A simple, somewhat elegant solution to a fairly simple problem.

Day 3:

The third and final day was audio day. I needed to record voices for the zombies and source a gunfire sound effect. I tried multiple ways to create a gunfire sound, but the best I could create sounded like a cap gun rather than a proper pistol, so I broke down and went to Freesound.org for a gun sound effect. @floata3 came through with the music, and with that, we were largely done. The final detail was a pair of volume sliders on the title screen, to accommodate individual players' preferences.

With that, Zombody's Business was complete, and its fate is now in all of your hands. If you haven't given it a shot, now would be as good a time as any!