Deadly Days - Pixelsplit
Hi survivors,

today another dev story at the campfire. In the process of changing the game significantly (see our other posts) we are also changing the weapon system. Today we want to explain how this system will look in the future, but let’s start with what was wrong in the previous system.

What was wrong in the previous system?
In the previous system a weapon drop was a normal ability and weapons were destroyed after the clip was empty. What the player normally did was spamming huge amounts at the beginning of a day around the map so characters can easily pick up new weapons. Since we think abilities should be something that you can use often with fun during the game the weapon drops are misrepresented as normal abilities.

Another problem was the progression of weapons. When you upgraded the weapon crate you unlocked new weapon types and later on stronger versions of these weapons. But you could never have a sniper quite at the beginning, since it was a linear upgrade path.

How does the new system work?
We explicitly shifted the weapon stuff in front of sending your survivors to the city. So you equip your survivors individually with a chosen weapon prior to that. But where do weapons come from? You find them while looting the city or in special events and can assign them to your survivors in the next night. But prior to equipping new weapons you have to “repair” them. And now comes the interesting part.

Different weapon rarities and modifiers
Weapons can be found in different rarities, e.g. a pistol can be found in “common”, “enhanced” and “rare” versions. The rarity determines how many modifiers will be applied to these weapons. What is a modifier? It can be as simple as boosting the damage stat. It could also be a rare effect modification that gives your weapon some special ability, like instantly reloading as soon as the survivor killed someone or piercing enemies with your bullets. These modifiers are rolled (chosen) randomly as soon as you “repair” a weapon. There might also appear occasions where you can re-roll weapons in an special event.

Here you can see how the UI for equipping and repairing weapons works:


Comparing weapons looks like the following:


What is coming next?
    In the next posts we’ll talk about:
  • New ability and special power system
  • New item system (which replaces base upgrades)
  • Map generation and selection

We still don’t have an ETA for the big update yet, but we are eagerly working on it!

We’d love to hear your feedback to our plans. Feel free to leave us a comment or join our Discord and discuss with us: https://discord.gg/4KCf5zt

- Your Deadly Days Team
Deadly Days - Pixelsplit
Hi survivors,

we just wanted to share with you some details of the ongoing development process of “Deadly Days”. We know the last patch has been a while but like mentioned in the last “Campfire stories” its due to major changes. What does that mean? There are so many changes that you could name it “Deadly Days 2” (but we won’t ;) ).

We were quite vague about the specific changes last time since we were evaluating several approaches, but today we want to tell you more more about concrete plans.

Goals and progression
One real issue we had with the “old” Deadly Days is the endgame and goal orientation. You are hunting for parts but when you get close to having upgraded everything you lose orientation what to do.

Our new approach is going much closer to the Rogue-lite genre. The game will be divided in runs. Each run will force you to start from zero (so no more persistent upgrades). Each run consists of a fix amount of days (we are considering something between 14 and 30 days). During these days you scavenge different maps for loot and scrap to prepare yourself for what is to come. When these days are over you are faced with a final fight (huge zombie wave, dedicated bosses, etc.) - if you win this fight your run is won. Whenever your game is over (won or not) your whole run will be rated and you will be awarded with some sort of points (of course more if you won the run). Based on these points you will unlock new loot which can be dropped in all the next runs.

The new approach is drastic but offers much more replayability and stuff to discover and learn.

Unlockable loot
So what is this loot we mentioned in the previous section? Loot can be special powers (previously known as special abilities which you found in crates [e.g. Map Freeze]) and items. Items are the stuff that you upgrade your base with. After every day you return to your base which is no longer contained in the map (you will travel around with a bus). Your base will have equipment slots and you assign items to them. You will start with about 3 slots and you will be able to unlock more slots with scrap. But you will have to make decisions which items you want to use since the slots are limited. Each item can also be upgraded once, which also costs scrap.





Let’s make an example. During scavenging you find a new item called “Freezer”. When you get back to your base you can put this “Freezer” into one free equipment slot. This item unlocks the “Freeze Airstrike” (airstrike which freezes enemies). For some scrap you can even upgrade this “Freezer” item. The upgraded freeze airstrike not only freezes enemies but also deals damage. During the next days you will find more items and you will have to decide if you spend your scrap for new slots or for upgrading your items.

This system makes the game replayablesince the drops are random and you have to play with the loot (powers,weapons and items) you get and adapt your strategy accordingly. This means every run will be completely different and exciting.

Where to find loot?
Like previously you still find scrap on the maps. The special loot you will find in all new crates. These crates need to be opened on the map itself and will take some time. But if you manage to open it, you are guaranteed at least something cool. There will even be other opportunities like merchants and traders. More infos on that in a later post. But these changes mean our old crate system will be completely replaced. We still think this is the right move, the new system integrates more smoothly into our core game experiences and there is less clutter to manage between rounds.

Random map generation V2
Like mentioned in the last post we are working on a random map generation. However in the course of development we had to scrap our old random map gen approach and replaced it with a new one. The old one was way too “random” and didn’t yield enough lovely detail. We did implement a new approach which is based on hand designed tiles which are put together. This did cost some time but we are happy that we did it, because the results are much better now.




Upcoming
This post is one of many posts that will inform you about the “Deadly Days” evolution. In the next posts we’ll share details about:
  • the new special power and completely new energy system
  • the new random weapon system
  • choosing different maps and events

The first update will be released in the not too distant future (no exact ETA yet), which will already bring many of these changes.

We’d love to hear your feedback to our plans. Feel free to leave us a comment or join our Discord and discuss with us: https://discord.gg/4KCf5zt

- Your Deadly Days Team
Deadly Days - Pixelsplit


Hi survivors,

today we release the 8th patch for Deadly Days. This patch is some sort of milestone since it will be the last patch before the beginning of the upcoming major changes (see here). So here is what we changed in version 0.9.12.

GORE
This is not the most important change but the most eye catching one - so we put it on top of the change list :D See for yourselves



No more ability tokens
We thought we’d give the game more strategic depth by making players buy different tokens in the night (airstrike, healing and weapons). But in the end our observations revealed that it doesn’t have the desired impact. With this patch we completely got rid of those basic tokens and now abilities are directly consuming scrap. The night mode now is a place to rest, activate special tasks, open your crates and maybe get some reserve survivors for your next day.

Improved special zombies
Deadly Days has many different zombie types. In this patch we wanted to increase the impact and differentiation of the various types. We did the following adjustments:
  • The Marathon Zombie now runs slower, but when it gets close to a survivor he will start running really fast.
  • The emitted gas cloud of the Gas Zombie now poisons your survivors instead of continually applying damage to survivors inside. The poison lasts until you heal them or night arrives.

Furthermore we are introducing a new zombie type: The Freeze Zombie. It can get quite dangerous for you by dying in an explosion, freezing everyone caught in the blast. It also has an aura which slows down survivors in the vicinity.



Improved AI of survivors
We received quite many complaints about the survivor AI. We condensed the feedback down to reactiveness in the near surroundings. Now survivors are continuously scanning and checking their near surrounding and check if there is something more important to do, e.g. picking up a medikit, weapon or killing a nearby zombie which comes too close. Furthermore we fixed a big problem with shooting, where characters would shoot the edges of obstacles. We now take the bullet size into account when checking for line of sight, which fixes this problem.

Upgraded to Unity 2018.1
This is nothing visible to you, but important to us since it will allow to utilize multi core CPUs better in the future. We hope this will enable much more zombies in the future. For now we've got some small performance improvements and some optimized programming language features :)

Other changes
  • Balancing: Weapons now have doubled ammunition (but also cost more). Your decision which weapon to provide should have more of an impact now.
  • Fixed: Memory leak when using airstrikes.
  • Fixed: Survivors targeting far away enemies if using “Enemy Focus”.
  • Fixed: Wrong localization for last special task tutorial.
  • Fixed: Main Menu zombies' walking direction and order.
  • Fixed: Double language entries in the language selection drop down.

Thanks to everyone who gave feedback and makes this game possible. Any constructive comment and STEAM review you leave us is really helpful! Feel free to tell us what you think about the newest changes. Feel free to join our Discord Server: https://discord.gg/4KCf5zt

- Your Deadly Days Team
Deadly Days - Pixelsplit


Hi survivors,

it has been a while since our last update so we want to share some of our development progress. Firstly, be assured that we are working on steadily improving Deadly Days. Here is an overview of the major changes.

Random map generation
Probably the most noticeable thing is the upcoming random map generation. The current static map makes the game feel repetitive and lacks a bit of visual fidelity. A while ago we experimented with a random map generator which builds a different layout for each round. Your survivors will travel to these unique maps by truck. There will occasionally be special buildings with special events tied to them. The survivors' base is in a seperate area. We think this will significantly lower the repetitiveness of the visuals and gameplay and create a more fun experience. In the end there will be exactly 2,147,483,647 possible maps ːsteamhappyː

New art style
In the process of working out the random map generator we found out that the perspective mixing of front facing characters and top-down buildings isn't super aesthetic. So we overhauled the graphics to a front-facing style (see the picture at the top).

We know that this is a really a big change but we are confident that this will be for the best of the game!

Changing the flow
One of our biggest goals is to give the game some much needed structure. In the future we want to redirect the game flow. We already have some aspects that resemble a rogue-lite and we want to push even more in this direction. A complete game will be much shorter, and include end conditions and the possibility to upgrade between every mission. You will also not be automatically safe after sunset. As the night looms, stronger zombies will appear. Be fast to reach the truck or dare to gather more loot. Winning once will not be the end of the game; unlocks and unlockable content will be waiting for you.

The first feature affected by this change in the near future is night mode.
Currently, every night you have the possibility to choose from three different token types (Airstrike, Healing and Weapons) which you can then use for different abilities in the following days. We initially thought this would give a strategic meaning to the game which turns out to not be the case. So we will get rid of the token system and directly tie abilities' cost to scrap. This will change the functionality of the night screen quite a bit but we believe it to be a step in the right direction. Eventually in a later update we want to completely merge the night and upgrade screen to give a more seamless experience.

Overhauling character AI
We see that players often struggle with the survivor AI since it does its own thing. In the last patch we tried helping the players by presenting target lines so they can forecast what the survivors will do.


But this still seems to not be perfect. So our goal is to make the survivors smarter, especially with evading and fighting zombies. We also consider giving more control to the player but we are still discussing this.

Changing the weapon system
One thing we observed when others played the core game was weapon spamming at the beginning of each day. We don't think it's very fun and we want to give more meaning to the weapons. We are currently evaluating several approaches.

Much more...
All the above mentioned topics bring up related topics and systems and it is quite a big chain of changes. We try to split it as much as possible to incrementally implement and bring you these changes, but some major features have to be released together. We'll tell you more about the exact plans in the near future. Further topics that we'll handle in the future are special abilities, end conditions of a game (or run) and side missions.

We hope you liked the insight and the direction we are going. Feel free to leave us feedback!

- Your Deadly Days Team
Deadly Days - Pixelsplit
Hi survivors,

today we release our next patch with some new features and several bug fixes.

Leader tactic
Many players requested a permanent grouping functionality. Now it is possible to let your survivors stick together in very dangerous situations.
The tactic tab now contains a “assign leader” ability. You can mark one of your survivors as a leader and others will try to stay near him. They still fight and loot but will make sure to always catch up to the leader. But be aware that they’ll collect less resources since they don’t spread out to scavenge.


Target indicators
We often received feedback that the behavior of the survivors is confusing and hard to follow. To help with this problem we added target indicators which will always show their next target. Furthermore the indicator will be colored red if they intend to fight an enemy. With this you can predict movement and actions much better and hopefully keep your survivors alive for a longer time. If you do not like the target indicators you can turn them off in the settings.


Furthermore we made the following changes:
  • Added: Sounds when scavenging cars and bins
  • Added: Experimental support for 21:9 ultrawide screens
  • Improved: Character movement should be a bit more direct now
  • Improved: You can now zoom out more (thus seeing more from the whole map)
  • Improved: Dropping weapons check if loot is beneath (so no more weapon drops on scrap / parts).
  • Improved: We increased the range of the sounds so you can hear them even with high zoom out.
  • Improved: Improved accuracy of prioritize enemy and back to base ability (now the entity nearest to your click gets the effect, instead of a random one).
  • Balance: Kills caused by the level up blast no longer give experience to the character.
  • Fixed: The camera can’t be moved via keyboard anymore when locked to base
  • Fixed: Several sprite overlays were now correctly aligned to the map (Map freeze, flash and nuke)
  • Fixed: The truck konvoi event was not time scaled thus being too slow when fast forwarding.
  • Fixed: The unlock cost of fitness area and fire are no longer 0.
  • Fixed: Time scale is now reset when game is over.
  • Fixed: In some cases the tactic bar could break which is now fixed.
  • Fixed: Leaderboard display in game over screen should be working again.
  • Removed: Daily bonus

Thanks to everyone who gave feedback. We really appreciate any comment and STEAM review you leave us! Also tell us what you think about the new features. Feel free to join us at Discord: https://discord.gg/4KCf5zt

- Your Deadly Days Team
Deadly Days - Pixelsplit
Hi survivors,

today we release our next patch with some new features and several bug fixes.

Leader tactic
Many players requested a permanent grouping functionality. Now it is possible to let your survivors stick together in very dangerous situations.
The tactic tab now contains a “assign leader” ability. You can mark one of your survivors as a leader and others will try to stay near him. They still fight and loot but will make sure to always catch up to the leader. But be aware that they’ll collect less resources since they don’t spread out to scavenge.


Target indicators
We often received feedback that the behavior of the survivors is confusing and hard to follow. To help with this problem we added target indicators which will always show their next target. Furthermore the indicator will be colored red if they intend to fight an enemy. With this you can predict movement and actions much better and hopefully keep your survivors alive for a longer time. If you do not like the target indicators you can turn them off in the settings.


Furthermore we made the following changes:
  • Added: Sounds when scavenging cars and bins
  • Added: Experimental support for 21:9 ultrawide screens
  • Improved: Character movement should be a bit more direct now
  • Improved: You can now zoom out more (thus seeing more from the whole map)
  • Improved: Dropping weapons check if loot is beneath (so no more weapon drops on scrap / parts).
  • Improved: We increased the range of the sounds so you can hear them even with high zoom out.
  • Improved: Improved accuracy of prioritize enemy and back to base ability (now the entity nearest to your click gets the effect, instead of a random one).
  • Balance: Kills caused by the level up blast no longer give experience to the character.
  • Fixed: The camera can’t be moved via keyboard anymore when locked to base
  • Fixed: Several sprite overlays were now correctly aligned to the map (Map freeze, flash and nuke)
  • Fixed: The truck konvoi event was not time scaled thus being too slow when fast forwarding.
  • Fixed: The unlock cost of fitness area and fire are no longer 0.
  • Fixed: Time scale is now reset when game is over.
  • Fixed: In some cases the tactic bar could break which is now fixed.
  • Fixed: Leaderboard display in game over screen should be working again.
  • Removed: Daily bonus

Thanks to everyone who gave feedback. We really appreciate any comment and STEAM review you leave us! Also tell us what you think about the new features. Feel free to join us at Discord: https://discord.gg/4KCf5zt

- Your Deadly Days Team
Deadly Days - Pixelsplit
Survivors,

we just released the next major patch.

Special tasks
Sometimes you wish you could do more with your survivors? Now you can. During the night you have the opportunity to send them to special tasks. This could be raiding a shopping mall or go scout out a hospital. Sending one or more survivors means surviving without them for the duration of the mission but they come back with plenty of loot. But be careful some missions are dangerous and your survivors could even die. So prepare and send strong survivors to maximize your chances.



Please note that the slot machine got removed. At the same position you can find the special tasks now. We are re-evaluating the slot machine for future use.

Shadows
Some of you (and we too) felt that there was a need to adjust the style of the game a tiny bit. It needed more contrast and depth. Therefore we added shadows to most of the ingame sprites plus a movement of them according to the progress of the day.



Fast forward
We have also included a much requested feature to accelerate the time during the days. Now if you find yourself in a day that is far too easy for you, you can speed right trough it. You'll find respective options in the bottom right corner of the screen now.


Other changes
  • Added: In-game option to switch to windowed mode
  • Improved: When playing in windowed mode the game will not pause when you leave focus. So playing while doing something else works perfectly now.
  • Improved: Buttons to buy tokens are "holdable" now so you can quickly buy a ton of tokens.
  • Improved: The reward screen directly skips to the summary if there is just one reward in the reward bundle.
  • Removed: Slot machine.
  • Fixed: Camera scrolling speed by mouse behaves correctly now

We really like to thank everyone who gave feedback and still appreciate any comment and steam review you leave us! Tell us what you think about the new additions. If you like join us at Discord: https://discord.gg/4KCf5zt

- Your Deadly Days Team
Deadly Days - Pixelsplit
Survivors,

we just released the next major patch.

Special tasks
Sometimes you wish you could do more with your survivors? Now you can. During the night you have the opportunity to send them to special tasks. This could be raiding a shopping mall or go scout out a hospital. Sending one or more survivors means surviving without them for the duration of the mission but they come back with plenty of loot. But be careful some missions are dangerous and your survivors could even die. So prepare and send strong survivors to maximize your chances.



Please note that the slot machine got removed. At the same position you can find the special tasks now. We are re-evaluating the slot machine for future use.

Shadows
Some of you (and we too) felt that there was a need to adjust the style of the game a tiny bit. It needed more contrast and depth. Therefore we added shadows to most of the ingame sprites plus a movement of them according to the progress of the day.



Fast forward
We have also included a much requested feature to accelerate the time during the days. Now if you find yourself in a day that is far too easy for you, you can speed right trough it. You'll find respective options in the bottom right corner of the screen now.


Other changes
  • Added: In-game option to switch to windowed mode
  • Improved: When playing in windowed mode the game will not pause when you leave focus. So playing while doing something else works perfectly now.
  • Improved: Buttons to buy tokens are "holdable" now so you can quickly buy a ton of tokens.
  • Improved: The reward screen directly skips to the summary if there is just one reward in the reward bundle.
  • Removed: Slot machine.
  • Fixed: Camera scrolling speed by mouse behaves correctly now

We really like to thank everyone who gave feedback and still appreciate any comment and steam review you leave us! Tell us what you think about the new additions. If you like join us at Discord: https://discord.gg/4KCf5zt

- Your Deadly Days Team
Feb 14, 2018
Deadly Days - Pixelsplit
Hi survivors,

unfortunately we had a little issue with our Mac build that could lead to a crash on start. We fixed it and the update is available now.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

- Your Deadly Days Team
Feb 14, 2018
Deadly Days - Pixelsplit
Hi survivors,

unfortunately we had a little issue with our Mac build that could lead to a crash on start. We fixed it and the update is available now.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

- Your Deadly Days Team
...