Research

Aug 24 2012

Doing What We Can

Today’s guest post is from the fabulous Annie Strain, a survivor well known to the Lab. She had a Survivor Cell before it was cool, y’all, and she’s here today to share the disaster planning that she has done for her family. Read on:

Hi Survivors!

I’m Annie and I’m married to Jeff Strain, the founder of Undead Labs.

While I’m not an official member of the development team, my love of both the company and the game is passionate and I have had so much fun watching the Survivor Cell pictures roll in. You guys get us!

In that train of thought…I wondered if you guys might enjoy seeing our own personal survivor cell, right here in Seattle, at the home of the company founder?

Jul 03 2012

Society Is Not Ready For An Apocalypse

If there is an actual zombie apocalypse, we’re screwed.

On Friday night, there was an epic storm in my area, sweeping from Indiana to Delaware. I do not use the word “epic” lightly. Five hours of unremitting, strobe-like lightning that never let up. Winds that hit 70 MPH (that’s roughly 113 KPH, for those of you in places that teach the metric system). Torrential rain.

Basically, it was like a hurricane with one important difference. With a hurricane, you get lots of warning.

Mar 09 2012

Scoring The Apocalypse

Film soundtracks are amazing things. One of the things I like to do when I’m thinking about the musical choices a film makes is to swap out a piece of music from a completely different movie — or even some of my own music — over a key scene, just to see how it changes the feel of the moment.

I love the idea that a piece of music can support, enhance, skew or even subvert the emotions on display.

Dec 09 2011

Capping Off The Week

This week, Phinney, Reid, Kevin, and Scott (who you’ll get to meet soon) piled into a car and took a trip to Vancouver, Canada. Their destination? Animatrik, a company that specializes in motion capture animation. If you’ve ever seen behind the scenes footage of people running around in tights with little reflective balls all over them, that’s mocap, and it’s been used in movies for years. As it’s evolved over the past fifteen or so years, though, it’s also become an important tool for game developers.

To give you guys some insight into what motion capture is, how it works, and how it’s going to apply to Class3, I sat down with Reid to learn more about what our recent session was like. Read on to see what he had to say!

Oct 14 2011

Everyone Dies

The zombie apocalypse is coming. You want to know how everything works. How dangerous is it? How can you protect yourself? We have the answers, but how much can we really say?

Mystery and uncertainty are a big part of the zombie canon. You shouldn’t go in knowing all the ins and outs. You shouldn’t feel like everything is perfectly understood. The unknown is part of the drama, and the seeking answers is part of the challenge.

So today, we’ll share what we can. It’s not a catalogue of spoilers from the dev team. Instead, what follows are the thoughts and observations of a fellow survivor in McMillanville.

It starts with a single, stark fact of life: Everyone dies.