New Website Overhaul

It's been a while, and I've kinda left this ugly website untouched of a couple months. Time for an update. Over the next week, I will be periodically updating this website (and adding new articles, so stay tuned for that), so it will only get better over time.
Thanks for visting the website!

Welcome to the New Website!

Hello! Welcome to my new website! This is where I will be showcasing all my stuff and telling the internet about me. I hope you enjoy browsing around the site!

Progress so Far | HALF-LIFE: ZOMBIES ATE MY NEIGHBOURS

Wow, has it really been 7 months since the last Dev Diary? Well. This'll be a good one then. Lead developer Sabian here. We at The Phoenix Project have been working hard to make sure Half-Life: Zombies Ate My Neighbours is a great game when it hopefully releases in 2021. To showcase this, me and Rafael created two trailers:

LEVEL DESIGN

Me, Ivan and Rafael have been working very, very hard over the past seven months to keep the maps in the campaign looking great. If you've downloaded the Proof of Concept Demo already, you can probably see this; we are restarting the game from scratch (except for the prologue). This is because, quite frankly, the original maps sucked.

This is all we can show as of right now, though these maps are included (though slightly outdated) in the Proof of Concept demo. Currently, we have 'refurbished' the maps z1a0, z1a0b and z1a0c. And there's going to be much much more. We hope to include MUCH more levels that take place in the ZAMN universe, including new segments never seen before in the original such as the sewer.

PROGRAMMING

Quite a bit of progress has been made on the programming side of things with the Grey Source engine. Originally, Half-Life: Zombies Ate My Neighbours was going to use its own engine called the Half-Life Zombies Engine (slightly named after the UK release of Zombies Ate My Neighbors) but because we already had another engine in the works, we had decided to use that instead. Because we already added loads of stuff to the then-called HLZ Engine, we had to synchronise both Grey Source branches Basic and ZAMNHL Proprietary with each other.

FOG

Here's something you might find quite cool. Since I spend a lot of time on TWHL, I found a tutorial called "Adding Fog," so I thought, hey why not try that? So I managed to add fog to the ZAMNHL branch of Grey Source and I must say, it looks quite good; special thanks to Overfloater for that!

BOBBING FROM SOURCE 2013

If you take a look at this video, recorded on HLZ Engine build 2003, you can see that we had re-implemented the old bobbing from the WON/retail version of Half-Life. We found that this was a bit dated, so with a bit of help, we added the bobbing from Source 2013 into the Grey Source engine! The results looked great:

SOUNDTRACK

Since I am a tad experienced in composing (I've been making music since 2016), we have been doing a lot, and I mean a lot of work on the soundtrack. I've already got where these tracks can go envisioned in my head. I, Rafael and another artist from Bryson Records have been making the soundtrack. There are currently two editions of the Half-Life: Zombies Ate My Neighbours soundtrack. The standard, which will be free (and currently is to stream and download) on the Bryson Records Bandcamp, and the definitive edition, including exclusive mixes and remixes, which will be paid for on the Bryson Record Bandcamp and on all major digital music stores thanks to Bryson Records' distribution partners.

UNTIL NEXT TIME

Thanks for reading probably one of the longest ModDB articles I may have ever written. The planned release date for Half-Life: Zombies Ate My Neighbours is 21st November 2021, though that date IS subject to change. I hope you enjoy the demos and the full game when it releases.