Hey there!, first and foremost thanks for checking SURVIVORS out, it really means a lot to me having people test a project that has been long in development from the humble starts that i had with my Garry's Mod server, as a sort of introduction to myself, this project came to be with a server that i had with a small community, i noticed that adding content and fixing stuff became too much for me at the time as a solo maintainer so i had to give it up at the time. 

But i always had faith in the gamemode, it's extremely fun and it was a shame it was held back by the ancient Source 1 engine, so i came to the conclusion that it's to be remade in the S&box engine itself so we can bring some life to it again with fresh ideas.

Which is why i listed all the things that made my server great, my community, the companionship & social aspect of it, the addictive and fun gameplay loop, and the look and feel of the Source 1 engine, these core aspects of what it was before are the pillars that i follow in this project.

With that i made SURVIVORS, it still has a ton ton of work to do since well, im a solo dev after all in this massive and ambitious project, but im motivated to keep going, i've had a lot of positive reception and i'm surprised by the already great experiences it has created, so far i've prioritized getting Co-Op stable for 16+ players, tons of zombie bots at once aswell as performance & key systems, but perhaps it's better if inform a bit what has changed in this update!

I've been hard at work sourcing some weapons for the game, a zombie game is nothing without something to kill them with, so i've had to put some effort trying to find some that i can use and are sort of suitable for the balance and fun factor of using them themselves!

For now i've introduced 15 new weapons in this update to add some variety to the gunplay, with the caliber system i can tweak a variety of parameters such as the kinetic energy of the bullet and the damage derived from it, it's penetration values, and other types of stuff that can make the gameplay a bit more engaging other than just plainly shooting a zombie with gun number #7.

Some weapons can penetrate armor better, others have better flesh damage as a tradeoff, some can pierce multiple zombies at once as the bullet loses kinetic energy by each penetration, & with the integrated in-depth hitbox system it'll make some pretty interesting interactions in the future, with doing more damage depending on damage on critical parts of the zombie such as the obvious ones like the lungs, heart & head, but the possibilities are endless!

Check the first iteration of the hitbox system, still clearly needs a ton of work but it's made to be as accurate to the model as possible, so if you see that you hit off the armor you will hit on the flesh instead!

I noticed in my first big playtest with around 12 people (thanks for participating in it if you were there!!) that performance was absolute trash, some of the big offenders were the obvious bugs with corpses & decals piling up and not despawning at all, but others required a bit more work

In general i've optimized a lot of the systems in the game, the AI is a bit more efficient in their planning and strategies, and i changed it so they use animation sequences instead of animgraph since it's incredibly expensive to use at the moment until Facepunch gets animgraph 2 out.

So at the moment the blood & gore system is optimized, having 40 zombies at once in the screen drops your fps to reasonable levels, and in general it handles big playtests wayyy better in general, if you got a beefy PC or one in general that is somewhat modern (post 2020) you'll definetely have 60 FPS at all times, but my aim is to have better than that since S&box runs extremely smooth when the games run at 120 FPS so it'd be a nice goal to achieve at some point for low end machines.

In general the gameplay was pretty rough, i had all systems somewhat working like barricading, role system, shooting, Source 1 movement, etc. But it was pretty boring/not balanced well enough for it to have engaging and hard matches and it was kinda lame since i didn't like having the game in that state at all.

Which led to me introducing all of the new weapons to have more variables to tweak to try and balance the game at all stages of the round, right now with the changes that i've made it should be substantially better compared to the slog fest that it was before.

First few waves are pretty accesible, but after wave 3 the real deal begins, zombies in general get pretty tough and smart, and you'll have to have a pretty good cader/engineer to withstand the waves onwards, so you better plan out what you'll use, where you will hold out and overall think of ways that you'll actually succeed and survive, there's still plenty of ways to make surviving possible but it's definetely not an easy feat now.

Hopefully you'll enjoy it a bit better now and remember that any feedback is appreciated!, it's hard to keep track of things with this many systems for a solo dev so it's inevitable for me to miss stuff from time to time so let me know!.

It was really lame that the game didn't have achievements, as a player i wouldn't like to play a game without ways to keep track of my improvement but not only that, you can now get your drops playing my game! since i added 40 new achievements to my game for you to try to achieve them at various stages of the game, some are easy, others are extremely hard to the point that i might not even be possible to achieve honestly!

But in general this first batch hopefully handles a lot of the cases where players wouldn't give the game a try because of the lack of them, i tried to be somewhat creative and not make every achievement "Kill 100 zombies" since it's pretty boring to do it that way.

In general it's been extremely fun working on this project, it has teached me a lot of new things about software development in general that i've found to be extremely useful that i apply in the game itself, it's still got a ton of work to do like the map is still very very early since i barely know how to map, the animations that i use are just the default ones from Facepunch aswell as the models.

But i've got a lot of motivation to keep going and this is just the beginning, as a small sneak peak im still working on a lot of the core systems of the "Objective" system, where it'll be a different style of map where you'll have to as a group advance through a map from start to end without dying, with a lot of procedural objectives to do, strategies and approaches so every run feels fresh, sort of like an evolution of those old Zombie Escape servers from the community servers in CS of course with some tweaks to make it work in my vision of the game.

So please if you enjoyed the vision of the game stay tuned and leave a like and favorite the game since it helps a lot with the discoverability of the game so it's above all the other slop in the platform, and hopefully tell your friends when you think the game is solid to your liking, since the game's chaotic nature makes playing with more people a blast, so the more people the better!

In a near future when i get the time too i'll make a proper discord for the game so you can be even more in tune with the community, organize massive play sessions & more!

See you at the next update!