Undead Labs

AUTHOR: Sanya DATE RECORDED: February 22, 2013 AT 15:35PM

As usual, you all asked wonderful questions, and we spent the week tackling them. The resulting document was more than ten pages long! The questions included:

* How do you switch between characters? What are the limits on switching between characters?
* How many skills are in the game total right now?
* Can skills like construction or vehicle repair be taught?
* How hard is it to raise the skills of a character?
* Does increased firearm ability prevent (or reduce, or slow) wear and tear?
* Can negative traits be improved?
* How do you tell a survivor he/she is no longer welcome in the group? What happens if yes?
* How will conflict affect people?

These and more than thirty other questions are on the forum now.

Y’all, I just have to tell you, I love doing the Q&As with you. It gives us a chance to find out what really matters to you, to clarify things we left unclear, and to see where we might need to focus in the future. It’s a lot more than just answering questions – it turns game development into a collaborative effort between developers and players. Thanks for being part of the process, as always!

Click the green tape reading “comment” to go to the Q&A and to discuss it with your fellow SoD fans.

AUTHOR: Sanya DATE RECORDED: December 19, 2012 AT 06:34AM

The response to Foge’s article was exactly what we’ve come to expect from our community: Passionate, and packed with followup questions. We gathered them up and did our best to hit them all. (This ain’t the royal “we” – the people behind this Q&A are your producer, your creative director, your weapons master, your president, your community person, and of course, Foge himself.) Check out the five sections of goodness here in our forum.

Questions include:

When in stealth mode, will there be a silent takedown button?

Since this game is third person, will we be able to toggle between shoulder views?

Will guns jam less if you are more experienced?

Will we be able to repair/maintain melee weapon durability at our base, or can we do it on the fly?

Will NPCs know how to conserve ammo also or will they just completely Rambo it and waste resources quickly?

Are there any other characters who can get me items from outside?

These, and thirty other questions, have all been answered… so what are you still doing here? See you there!

AUTHOR: Sanya DATE RECORDED: November 21, 2012 AT 14:05PM

Hey, those of you for whom this is not a holiday week/weekend? Those of you thinking “it’s just a Wednesday, why all this chatter about leaving work?” For you, we hereby present a mini Q&A.

Two notes before you click over to read it:

1. If you want to see the exclusive new screenshots before anyone else, don’t forget to participate in the latest Survivor Cell Challenge.

2. My gear apology/update is located here: Where’s the gear I ordered?

See you in the forums!

AUTHOR: Sanya DATE RECORDED: August 17, 2012 AT 14:58PM

Hey, everyone! We were excited to bring you the customization feature last week, and we kept an eagle eye out for your questions. Phinney tackled as many as we could for this week. He would have kept going, but some of these are destined to be full articles of their own. (Skills, for example.) Check out what awaits you in the forums:

* Do my characters have to die?

* Will survivors (when you are not playing them) be able to decide for themselves to sacrifice themselves for the greater good?

* Do I have to babysit everyone in my community to make sure they eat and defend themselves?

* What happens if a survivor has a bad attitude, or a trait the other survivors don’t like?

* Will backpacks and guns display?

* If time passes when I’m offline, what does that mean if I end up getting deployed, having a baby, or just plain need to be away from the game for awhile?

All this and more can be found in the discussion thread over in our forum. Thanks for the great questions, and be sure to thank Phinney for getting the answers.

Next week is going to be sort of big for us. Hope to see you all online ready to spread the word. What word? That’s the surprise. See you then

 Click “comment” to go to the Q&A and the discussion thread!

AUTHOR: Sanya DATE RECORDED: July 27, 2012 AT 15:41PM

Hey, y’all. We’re rocking a followup Q&A over at the forums, answering as many of the questions people had about the vehicle article as we possibly could. Head on over there and see what your fellow community members asked. The questions include:

* If the zombies are clinging on your car, will they weigh down your car down or make you lose control?

* How will vehicle damage be handled?

* Can we strip the car down and go all Kanye-West-and-Jay-Z-In-Otis-Music-Video?

* When you say finite, does that mean if we break all the cars, we can’t get any more?

* Can I have twenty cars all piled up at my Home in a barricade or something?

Click on the comment button to read the whole thing, and to join the forum fun.

Hey, while I have your attention – do you have friends in your town that might want to join you in playing Class3 when it launches? Tune in next week, when I tell you about a way you can get exclusive video footage and more.

AUTHOR: Sanya DATE RECORDED: July 13, 2012 AT 13:45PM

As promised, here is the Q&A with the zombie and survivor theme. (Click “Comment” at the bottom of this post to be taken right to the Q&A and the resulting discussion.) There’s a lot of stuff in here, so dive right in. Questions include:

* Can the NPCs be trusted?

* Will you be able to dismember a zombie?

* What happens if you kill off all the survivors?

* Will it be necessary to sleep in Class3?

* Is the zombies’ sense of sight dulled at night?

And a whole lot more!

This is going to be the last of the really long Q&As for a little bit. We’ve got to dig in and get more of the game polished, after all, and I can’t keep leaving key people in the pit trap if that’s going to happen.

That doesn’t mean the website won’t be updated, oh no. There’s a feature coming next week that I know you all are going to love, and plans are afoot for even more delicious undead content coming at you from this URL. Stay tuned!

AUTHOR: Sanya DATE RECORDED: July 09, 2012 AT 14:20PM

Monday greetings to all of you who survived the weekend! For those of you not stalking the forums, the Facebook page, or our Twitter feed, here’s the link to the second half of the interview we did with OnlySP. (They asked so many great questions, and we’re so excited to be talking again, that the final interview was over 6K words long.) Here are the questions we answered:

* How come you chose to make the game an XBLA title?
* What are your hopes for the future of the franchise?
* How “realistic” are you making Class3?
* Will the game feature a main storyline and sidequests like a traditional RPG?
* Can you give us some hints on what they premise of the storyline is focused on?
* How will the storytelling seamlessly merge with the open nature of the gameplay?
* How have you made your characters authentic, realistic and relatable?

Continue the discussion on the existing forum thread. And hey, while you’re at the forum, why not check out the Off Topic section, where I’m hosting a Survival Tip contest? I’ll be randomly picking one winner to get an Undead Labs T-shirt, and I’ll post the best of the advice every Tuesday.

AUTHOR: Sanya DATE RECORDED: July 06, 2012 AT 14:11PM

It was a short week, thanks to the Independence Day holiday here in the USA, but we got a lot done. In addition to moving ever forward on the game itself, and the PC announcement, we also did a long Q&A with a terrific news site called OnlySP.

In fact, the Q&A is so long that OnlySP has decided to split it into two parts. Part One is up, and it features the questions:

* Zombies are everywhere, Call of Duty, Left 4 Dead, Dead Island, even Red Dead Redemption. What are you doing that will make Class3 standout from the crowd?
* Have you been keeping a close eye on DayZ?
* What kind of consequences will be involved with death in Class3?
* How in-depth is the base building in Class3?
* Will other humans in the game be friendly, or is there a mix between them?
* How large is the open world in Class 3, and how varied are the environments? Will we see any type of weather patterns such as storms, fog etc? What about seasonal changes?
* Which games have been your biggest influences for Class3?

On Monday I’ll post the link to Part Two. Our own Q&A with the answers to your burning Zombie and Survivor questions will go up late next week, barring another power apocalypse at my house. Meanwhile, enjoy, and have a wonderful weekend, everyone!

AUTHOR: Sanya DATE RECORDED: June 22, 2012 AT 15:40PM

I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to turn around a Q&A with less than a day’s notice. My newly-acquired expertise in pit traps paid off, though, and I caught a dev. I gathered up a few of your questions and threw them down. He answered what he could, and he gets the ladder if you’re satisfied.

As I warned you, I ducked the release date questions like boneless cat doing the limbo. If I commit a date to print this early, I’Il jinx it. I won’t have that blood on my hands.

Speaking of blood, read on to see if I should fetch Producer Jess’s ladder, and let Jeff out of the pit.

How many zombies can the game engine produce without crashing?

The question is not how many zombies the game can produce without crashing; it’s how many zombies can the game produce without becoming an interactive slideshow. This is especially challenging in an open-world game, where you have a huge map (~8 km² playable) with zeds everywhere.

We’ve had to write a substantial amount of technology to maintain a decent frame rate while still making you feel like the world is full of your undead fellow citizens. Some of it is simple tricks, and some if it is quite sophisticated engineering. For example, we spawn zombies as you get close, but we choose spawn locations carefully, e.g. behind buildings, fences, and trees. You never even see them spawning, and the illusion is that they were there the entire time.

…which allows them to chase you, fight you, bite you, pull you into little pieces and eat you, jump out a house window at you, rip off the door and pull you out of your truck…Moving up the complexity scale, we have several tiers of AI, since running AI is expensive. It takes surprisingly smart AI to make zombie behaviors that are believably dumb. Zombies you see in the distance are running a very simple, dumbed-down AI that allows them to path around and investigate sounds, and not much else. As they get closer their AI is replaced with more sophisticated AI that lets them investigate sounds or lights, or interact with the world markup such as climbing fences. Finally, as you get very close to them, we give them the most sophisticated AI, which allows them to chase you, fight you, bite you, pull you into little pieces and eat you, jump out a house window at you, rip off the door and pull you out of your truck… You get the idea. The code manages the transition between these AI states so you don’t perceive the difference.

So the answer to the question is that the world has literally thousands of zombies. That’s not to say you can be surrounded by a thousand zombies at a time, but if you do stupid things, like starting a car close to a horde, or breaking into a house by shattering the window, you can expect to have a few football teams worth of visitors heading your way.

When will there be more gameplay footage/spycam video?

We’re working on it. Now that we are heading into the final stages of production it’s a bit harder to get away with the spycam footage. That said, we’d love to share some official footage, so that’s the plan from here. Stay tuned.

How much progress (and in what areas) has happened since we last heard from you?

Our focus over the past few months has been to reach the alpha stage of production, which means the game is playable from beginning to end. It may not be bug free (well, it’s not even remotely bug free), and some parts of it are merely roughed in, but you can by-god sit down and play it all the way through. To be clear, there is still a ton of work to do: animation polish, combat polish, simulation system tuning and balancing, fleshing out the tech tree, performance improvements, UI refinement, voiceover (VO) production, story tweaks, and the massive, massive effort of bug fixing and balance tuning the whole parade. So, we still have a lot of work to do, but we might just see the finish line coming up over the horizon.

Will the game be available on the new Xbox 720?

The what? Anyway, nope. The Xbox 360 is the exclusive console platform for Class3.

What kind of weapons will we be able to make?

You can build items in your Workshop, and as you upgrade the Workshop to a Machine Shop or Munitions Shop you can build more sophisticated weapons, including firecrackers, grenades, firebombs (Molotov cocktails), and various types of land mines.

Will we be able to kludge together barricades/defenses out of found objects? How exactly do you barricade a building?

You can’t build from found objects. Certain structures are available to build when you’ve obtained the requisite materials and have enough labor supply (i.e. your fellow survivors) to build them.

You can barricade a building after establishing it as an outpost (meaning it is a regular source of supplies for your base), and then choosing which windows/doors you want to barricade. We’re nice, because we don’t make you find the wood. We’re mean, because hammering in those nails makes a lot of racket, and, as you can probably guess, zombies like a good racket.

Do loud noises attract zombies? Could you distract a zombie by throwing a rock near it and then killing it while its head was turned?

Zombies are attracted to all kinds of noises. You have to be careful when moving through the world, and constantly make the tradeoff between noise and efficiency. You can jump in that awesome muscle car to go investigate possible survivors at the Swine & Bovine restaurant, but be prepared to draw unwanted attention from the locals. You can speed up your search for medicine in that house across the street from your base, but if you go too fast you’re going to make noise and risk getting penned in. And yes, you can throw a string of firecrackers off the roof to draw every zed in town while you make your stealthy getaway down the ladder at the back of the building.

What’s the Swine & Bovine? You’ve never heard of it? Only the best family restaurant in Trumbull Valley, where both pig and cow are the specialty. For our fellow fans of never having to make the terrible choice between the two, here are some wallpapers from our art director Doug to celebrate your freedom.

Can you tell us about the different kinds of zombies?

Our goal is to create a believable zombie apocalypse, where the zombies are undead humans, rather than reskinned demons or horrific tentacle beasts. That’s not to say all zombies are the same, because the source of the zombie infection (which remains for you to discover) can have varying effects depending on the morphology of the victim. We do have both fast and slow zombies (we like our Dawn and our 28 too…), which makes for some interesting tactical situations. And yes, we do have those special zombies, the likely result of victims who had “special” characteristics in life, that will make your life even more of a living hell when you stumble across them. I’m not going to spoil the surprise with too many details, but I will tell you that the pretty guy to the right is one of them…

What do you think, will these tidbits tide you over the weekend? If not, I’m already collecting questions for next week, so feel free to leave yours in the comments. See you next week — it’s going to be a busy summer…

— Sanya

AUTHOR: Emily DATE RECORDED: October 21, 2011 AT 17:03PM

Last week, we posted a new design article from Phinney that provided an in-game survivor’s take on what it takes to stay alive in the world of Class3. This week, we’ll answer a bunch of questions that you guys have asked on our website and on fan forums.

Read on to see the topics we’ve covered!

Shawn of the Dead from our website asks: “Phinney mentions that these ideas are the heart of Class 3. Can we expect the same from Class 4?”

Absolutely! In fact, we’ll be expanding on them for Class4, adding more diverse locations, vehicles, weapons, and survival options.

Jakesawesome  from our website asks: “In a real zombie apocalypse there are no health bars, damage meters, or levels. Will there be any in Class3?”

Yes and no. You’ll have a health bar so you won’t have to guess how much health you have, but zombies won’t. While we could have opted to have no health bar for you too, we wanted to emphasize the survival aspect of the game by having the damage you take stick with you until you can heal up. A health bar is a really clear way to show that and to give you clear choices to make about when to retreat or when to heal yourself.

As far as zombies go, the only way to kill one is to take out its head, so they’re not going to lose health from other damage — you’ll either kill them or you won’t. Of course, you can dismember them to give yourself an advantage, too.

Several folks from our website ask: “Is there a fatigue/stamina system that ties into inventory weight and the possibility of becoming encumbered? Does this system apply to weapons, too?”

Yes. Like in a real survival situation, weight matters. If you’re carrying too much stuff, you’re going to get tired much faster than if you’re traveling light. It’s up to you to decide what balance you’ll want to maintain.

The size of the weapon you choose to carry makes a difference, too. Larger guns are definitely heavier, so you’ll want to be strategic about selecting your equipment, making sure that what you’ve equipped fits the situation you’re heading into.

Rob from our website asks: “How deep are the characters you rescue along the way? If they die, are you balling your eyes out in front of the screen yelling, ‘Why didn’t you take me!’ or are you more upset that you lost a gun and some armor?”

One of our goals is to have a deep storyline and rich setting, so it’s quite possible that you’ll get attached to characters you meet. It probably depends on how sentimental you are.

Reidlos Dog from our website asks: “You talk about duct taping a structure together because hammering is loud. Does this mean that building structures will make noise and attract zombies?”

Fortifying an area is noisy business. You don’t have to try to set up a stronghold, but if you do, you should expect that zombies will find you, so do a good job setting up your defenses.

GhostMARINE from our website asks: “Are you hinting at being able to use different materials in creating structures? And if so, would we be able to use substandard material at the benefit of less noise in the construction, but at the cost of functionality/durability?”

Not exactly. The line about duct tape was mostly there for comedic effect. We don’t currently have any options for building fortifications with substandard materials, and we weren’t planning to add any. On the other hand, having people around who know something about construction is something the game takes into account.

Construction is an important part of the game, but we’ve tried not to keep the mechanics straightforward. So building structures will require resources, but as we’ve mentioned in one of our previous Q&As, we’re not making a Minecraft-style game. There will be a lot of options, but it won’t be 100% free-form.

We’ll be covering more details about how building things will work in a future design article, so keep an eye out for that.

Sean from our website asks: “Is there some kind of respawn system that causes you to wake up at your shelter when you are ‘overwhelmed’ by zombies?”

Yes. If you’re defeated by zombies, you have a chance of being “rescued” and waking up somewhere safe. Since zombification isn’t an instant thing, they’ll take you back to a safe place to allow you to regroup before you go out into the world again.

As Phinney implied in the article, though, you wouldn’t want to keep putting this to test over and over. They won’t always get to you in time.

Rob from our website asks: “Will other human settlements start to pop up in Class3?”

Zombies definitely outnumber living people, but you’re not the only survivor of the outbreak. As you explore the world, you’ll probably run across other characters who are trying to make it, too. For example, folks like the Wilson brothers, who our author mentions in his journal.

I’m a Zombie. Rawr! from our website asks: “If you die and become zombified, can you control a zombie version of yourself?”  

“We’ve seen how they act, more instinct than thought. And we’ve all seen that look. We’ve seen it in their eyes. Just hatred and hunger. Not one ounce of humanity left. Better that way anyway. It’s not your friend. It’s just a shell.”

As our author observes, zombies are husks — soulless shadows of people that used to be alive. They’re no longer human, and retain no characteristics that would make them controllable.

Lucien from our website asks: “How complex will NPC AI be? Will you need to order them around, or will they act intelligently on their own?”

We’re making an action game, so we don’t think it’s acceptable for you to have to issue orders in order to play the game. Our goal is to build NPCs that behave in the ways that you’d expect them to.

ShoelaceManiac from our website asks: “Will meeting other survivors be random, or will they be scripted story moments like car crashes?”

We plan to tell a story, and developing a wide variety of interesting characters is a big part of that. Like you’d expect in a real apocalypse, the ways you meet people will vary.

Ragnaroktheevil from our website asks: “Will there be specializations for the survivors? You mention a doctor, so can a player BE a doctor, an engineer, soldier etc.?”

Yes — proficiency with different skills will definitely be an important aspect of the game. We’ll be giving more details about how this will work in a future design article about characters.

ShoelaceManiac from our website asks: “Is there a delay between a person’s death and their resurrection as a zombie?”

That’s for you to find out.

And there you have it! Thanks for all of your questions and comments about Phinney’s most recent post. If your question wasn’t answered, don’t worry — we probably have a design article coming that’s going to cover your topic. Over the next few months, you’ll be hearing more from us about stuff like base building, characters, and everyone’s favorite topic: guns.

Even though we’re done with Q&As for now, keep sharing your thoughts, opinions, and questions with us! We may not be able to respond to everyone, but we do read every comment that’s posted. Hearing what you guys think is really helpful.

Have an awesome weekend, everyone!

Emily

PS: If any of you Seattle natives are headed to ZomBcon this weekend, I’ll be there too. If you see me, say hey!