This April we were quite busy. We attended Games Gathering conference in Lviv, showed our game to hundreds of people and won an award for best graphics, drastically improved lighting in our levels and significantly improved all aspects of our zombies.



At the start of the month, we attended Games Gathering conference in Lviv. Zombie Hunter inc won an award for the best art and we gathered a tone of bugs glitches and requests from over 60 people that played the game over two days. That is why we spent the rest of the months addressing the issues that surfaced.

Andrii worked on improving zombies. He added various death animations for zombies and merged them with our ragdoll system, to make every death pose unique. He also improved ragdoll, so that zombies no longer fly through geometry when you kill them with a powerful gun. At the same time, now our zombies have a vision system, made out of several zones: forward white – spotting player using rays, peripheral gray – spotting player with rays but slower, close yellow – instant spotting and orange – spotting via non-visual cues from the back. We plan on using this feature extensively once we start working on bandits and other gun-wielding enemies.

Egor fixed visual bugs and researched Unity water. We now know how to control the waterflow using special textures. He also experimented with foam effects and created a cool effect that we will use when water is flowing around an object. At the same time, he is finally working on sewers. We now have a clear understanding how the level should look: every tunnel, every corner must be designed to satisfy two conditions: to look man-made and to facilitate waterflow. So, no cave-like tunnels, no sharp corners and no square rooms.



In April I discovered a Black State gameplay video and was quite surprised and intrigued how they managed to achieve this level of visual fidelity. There were a number of games released recently, notable for their realistic graphics: Bodycam, Cyberpunk 2077 with mods and now Black State. At first, I dismissed them by thinking “we would never be able to achieve something like this”, “this is only possible in Unreal” and “it’s raytracing, once Unity improves its raytracing support, we will have it by default”. But after the Black State video Andrii told me: “We have all these extremely detailed assets, yet our graphics looks dated” and that really bugged me. So, I spent a whole day arguing with ChatGPT, trying to understand how these Turkish Arcviz guys managed to make their game look this good. And here is what I learned:
- They use only cloudy weather outside.
- Their shadows are very blurred, almost non-existant.
- What we perceive as shadows in their videos is actually high quality reflections of objects from puddles, achieved with raytracing. Which is a brilliant trick, as it grounds the objects in an environment, where there are no shadows.

This led me to create a plan:
- Make a high quality static ambient light baking instead of Enlighten realtime light, which is very blurred.
- Use Angular diameter for all lights, but especially the sun, to make shadows very blurry.
- Add puddles and raytracing to make everything look grounded.
- Turn on Raytracing for high quality Ambient Occlusion (better darkening) and reflections.

And let me tell you, this plan paid off big time:









See you next month.

Catch us at GG Conference in Lviv! This is your chance to see what we are working on, play the latest build of the game and ask us anything!
The event will take place in Premier Hotel Dnister in Lviv on the weekend of 5th and 6th of March 2025.

In March we finilized improvements to Timeline, reworked our inventory, added new models, effects and a new cool post-process.

Egor worked with timeline. Now you can speed up cutscenes by holding space.
Andrii helped Egor with timeline and improved the helicopter scene on the roof. Now if the player is hit while opening the final crate, he is immediately killed. Also, now if the player is wandering and does not know what to do – a timer would start right after he climbs to the very top. In 30 seconds, the final scene with zombies flooding would start automatically.


The Katchur family added a new batch of models. We are slowly finishing with Sewer models and moving towards Supermarket’s basement storage models.

I added a sewer underwater pipe burst effect and finally finished a dream of mine from many years ago: Light Color Grading. Now our lights can apply color grading effects. But only where they actually illuminate the area.

Color grading is a post process effect that changes the color of every pixel of the final image according to a certain 3d texture map, called “look up texture” or “LUT”. They are also called “Instagram filters” sometimes, because Instagram popularized this technology in their app.

The problem with color grading is that there can only be one LUT at a time. When developers want to change the LUT the standard practice is to just smoothly blend the current one with the next one. It barely works in First Person games – the change is usually jarring, or hidden by a loading screen or cutscene. For our top-down game I wanted to create a system that would have multiple LUTs on the screen that would blend smoothly. Here lies the problem: how do you make these LUTs blend beautifully and coherently? My solution was – attaching a single LUT to a single lightsource. That way as lights smoothly blend between different areas, so will my LUTS.
This is where the largest challenge was: creating a black and white mask of everything that a single lightsource illuminates. Unity lights are extremely complex and when they are computed, they are directly rendered into the final screen texture. If an object in the scene is black, you won’t get any lighting on it, or you will get a specular dot, which is not what I need. My only hope of making my mask was to write a shader, that mimics the scene (assumes the scene’s depth and normals onto itself) and render a white quad lit which will be simply lit by Unity. And that took me 5 years to figure out…
Recently Unity added a node that I thought would help me and I jumped into shaders again. Sadly my knowledge of shaders is very limited, so even with this tool I would constantly make shaders that failed to work, when you moved the camera around.

In the end of the day, I was lucky enough to receive help from legendary Remy_Unity on Unity forums and finally created the shader that I needed.

In February our main focus was on improving our last build. Andrii and Egor finished moving our cutscenes to Timeline, now we will be able to create them faster. Andrii also worked on optimizing and fixing our inventory system, while Egor created idle animations for zombies, improved Rooftops level and created missing wind animation for a few models.


Finally the Katchur brothers created a bunch of awesome new models.



Next month we are moving on to working on our new level - The Sewers, so stay tuned!

This January the team worked on fixing development issues we found when preparing the last release. We realize that our cutscenes should be done using Unity Timeline - this both makes it easier for us and helps us preview the final result without running the game. So Egor was doing just that for a few weeks. He also retopologized our main character, to reduce the model's massive polygon count.

Andrii worked on zombie optimisation. Our large level "Streets" had a very poor performance and we had to do something about it. In the end we found two issues: IK on zombies was eating a lot of performance and Reflection Probes produced stuttering when exploring the level. We fixed the IK and are still working on Refpection Probes.

Finally, the Katchur brothers Dmytro, Ivan and Vitalii created two amazing cars, while I worked on testing various ideas for our next level - The Sewers.

Zombie Hunter inc update is live. We've added the first proper level into the game. It now tells a short story of an IT guy trapped in a zombie apocalypse.

You will have to battle your way to the roof of the building, where you will be picked up by a helicopter.

Beware of zombie firefighters - if you are too slow - you are dead!

The build features two new locations with insane details, one new zombie type and one new gun - M60. Belive me - you WANT to try it).

Next update will bring back bandits and firefights with smart enemies. We also plan on adding our first mission with dynamic goals and emerging scenarios, stay tuned!

Also, due to popular demand, we added two options screens, one for changing graphics quality and game resolution and the second one for changing controls.

Hop in, zombie hunters! And have a Happy New Year!

Just like we promiced, an update is comming closer to the end of this year. In it, you will find a complete intro "Tutorial" level, a "Hub" level, where you would always would go back to between missions and a number of improvements to the large "Streets" level.

There will also be a new zombie type and a bunch of new items, including a new gun - M60.

The main player character model was completely replaced for a much more story-appropriate model.
Now you play as a shy IT guy running away from a zombie apocalypse with the help of Bob - the head of Zombie Hunter incorporated - a gang of zombie mercenaries for hire. Your house was overrun by zombies, while you were asleep. You need to get to the roof, shooting and looting in the process, and wait for Bob's chopper to come save you.

The update will also include settings menu, amon other things, which many of you have requested. You will be able to change graphics settings there and set up controls to suit your playstyle.

We plan on increasing the game's price 20% with this update, so now is a good time to buy it, if you want to save.



Wait for a more detailed review when the update is ready - see you there!
The Maya Gameworks team

It seems that the next year we will still be working as a team of 4 without a publisher support. Thus we plan on adding enough content to the game so that players can actually start visiting it regularly and providing us with constant stream of feedback.

To do that we will be adding a hub area - the main headquarters of Zombie Hunter, incorporated - "Bob's office". It is a large abandoned industrial building, turned gunshop, where the Zombie Hunter, inc gang resides and flies to their various missions from. Every adventure will start from this area.

We decided to use Midjourney as our 2d concept artist, both to save costs and to give use enough unique ideas that our hub looks awesome. Here are a few concepts we chose as our final references:


The tricky part would be to make the actuall gun purchasing area both functional and pretty. It needs to have a single gun per square, so that you can walk close to it, pick it up and test it. We won't have a standard system where you buy things via a menu. Neither we would have a system where you buy things by clicking on them. No, you pick up a gun, any gun, then you can go to the shooting range to test it. You can see it in your inventory, play with it, do whatever you want. If you change your mind - you can put the gun back, where you took it. If you like the guns you picked up, you come to your boss and pay for all of them.

The tutorial level will end up with the player on the roof of a building, waiting for Zombie Hunter, inc helicopter to rescue them. We want the player to exit onto a roof that was rebuilt as a restaurant:

and then move onto a more industrial-type roof:

where helicopter would pick them up.

Dmytro, our artist, is already working on rooftop elements. Here is one of them:


While Egor, our senior artist, is working on Bob's office:



We also plan on expanding our Streets level. It will include adding buildings, cars and a construction site. If you want to get a glimpse at why it takes so long for an update to be release, check out this twisted lorry:


We are striving to add objects into our game which bring realism to another level. Objects, you are unlikely to see in other games. The best source of models is photogrammetry. However, quite often photogrammetry models are of very poor quality, due to not having enough photos to build the model from. Then we will rebuild the high poly model from scratch, while using the textures from the photogrammetry model to have the best of both worlds: the amazing color textures and mathematically accurate normal maps and models that make sense, when you shine light onto the object. And that is not all, afterwards you need to remove lighting and shadows from the object (so that it looks consistent when being lit in-game), build roughness and metalness textures and assign propper materials. Here, the cabin of the lorry uses carpaint shader, while its tent uses silk shader to have this awesome anisotropic highlight.

So that's our plans for 2024. Thanks everyone who supported us all these years and have a happy new year!

Development of the game continues as an Early Access title. After talking to steam support we realized that this would be the best course of action. We are sorry for any confusion our announcements caused.

The next update is scheduled in a few month. Sadly, as we a re a very tiny team making an ambicious title, I cannot promice major update sooner than 8-10 months from now.

Today we announce that Zombie Hunter, Inc Steam store page is closing. No, this does not mean that game development will stop. Unfortunately the reality of modern game development is such that you cannot find a publisher and or be financially successfull releaseing a game that was in early access for many years. Especially if early access itself was unsuccessful. Nowardays the number of wishlists on Steam is king. We tried to revitalize the game with the latest update but it did nothing.

Therefore, we will be creating a new Steam page for Zombie Hunter inc and game development will move there. If you have a copy of Zimbie Hunter inc - contact us at cubrman@gmail.com and I will gift you the new game once the first release comes online.

Mike