Hey everyone !

A new update is dropping today for Dead Alone and with it comes some exiting new changes to the ennemies in the game: Improved AI, improved animations, various optimisations and more are included in this rework !

I will also have more exiting news to share in the next few weeks regarding the release of the game on Steam and the future of the game in general, makes sure to not miss those !

Anyway, let’s check what these changes are about !

With this update, the ennemies in Dead Alone got some various changes, let’s talk first about the improvements they received.

First of all, the AI has been completely redone with a better pathfinding system, it also received many optimisations and bugfixes. Various other AI systems have also been improved such as the spawning system which received several updates to make it more reliable.

The animations have also been improved with a much larger diversity of animations, a proper physical reaction to gunshots and several tweaks to make all the animations feel smoother. The jumping behavior and attack hit detection have also been improved with those updated animations.

Last but not least, all the ennemies now have a proper dedicated type, these types or “classes” describe the various attributes of a specific zombie such as it’s size, it’s speed, it’s strenght and even it’s 3D model. There are several classic types (light, medium, heavy, etc) that only have different statistics, but there are also “special” types such as the healer, the looter, the armored and a last one a bit more spicy.

• The healer is slower and deal only few damages but has the ability to heal nearby zombies, they can be recognized by their medical rope and their bright green blood.
• The looter is a more standard type of zombie which can drop some stuff on death such as ammos, projectiles or heal items.
• The armored has several armor plates over it’s body and so it receive reduced damages on the upper body and legs but is still vulnerable to any damages in the head and arms.

With this changes to zombies type also come some changes to their spawning logic, to increase gradually the difficulty over time, only basic zombies will spawn at the begining with more and more “special” zombies spawning in the more difficult areas. Game difficulty will now also have an impact on this spawn logic.

As a whole, this update brings many changes to the ennemies in order to create a more interesting and challenging combat experience !

And as always this update also include various changes and fixes:

• Various changes and fixes to some areas of the map to improve the AI navigation
• Various changes and improvements to UIs
• Multiple improvements to projectiles physics
• Further optimizations to various particle effects
• (Horde Gamemode) Special Weapons now have slightly less chances of being available in the shop
• Improved gameplay abilities when holding a projectile: The projectile can now be holstered back if pressing G again, heal and melee attack are now also possible while holding a projectile, these actions will now holster the projectile instead of being blocked
• Improved melee attack hit detection for the player and AIs
• Fixed an issue that could cause the player to remain stuck in the workbench menu at the begining of a wave
• Fixed an issue that caused the melee attack to not be possible if no gun was equipped
• Fixed an issue that could cause the projectile prediction to not be displayed properly
• Fixed several loading issues causing the progress in the horde gamemode to not be properly loaded
• Fixed multiple issues with incorrect objective markers being shown after loading a save
• Fixed various other issues with the saving and loading system