Hey everybody, 

Project BlockchainZ is already available on itch.io. You are so welcome to download it: https://projectblockchainz.itch.io/projectbcz

Just to remember, a few words about the game:

In a world shattered by the nonliving hazard, while the reinforcements arrive you must protect the bunker and keep the settlers alive, not only against the zombie menace, but also the blistering raiders. 
Right now, there’s only one way to destroy the damn zombies: the BlockchainZ Ammo (Bz Ammo). 
Be extremely careful: the more Bz Ammo you get, the more raiders will attack you. Your mission is to destroy all the zombie hatches around the worldmap and spoil as much as Bz Ammo as possible in order to protect the bunker.
The future of the colony depends on you.

Hi everybody! Devlog 2 is over here: SciFy Storyline + Gameplay. 

Scify Storyline

Far away in the future, the world has fell down and there’s no hope for the hopeless. Society is completely broken in pieces and the few humans alive try to survive at any cost. The whole planet is crowded of buildings burned to the ground. Cities have just became into ruins. But we are not alone. This is not our world anymore. We are sharing this shattered planet with something we get used to calling the dead ones but they are not now.

We created them. We created these creatures in the glory days of our society, when technologies were on the top of the world and we felt capable to return the deceased back to life. It took us a long time of failures to understand that death is something we cannot revert. And we tried to revert it so hard.

Now, these nonliving creatures are walking around the world, eating us, feeding themselves with our blood and beating our meat. Our bodies are just their fuel for life. What a terrible irony: living deaths killing the living ones.

Zombies. 

That’s the word we try not to tell. Because that simple meaning do freeze our breaths. They are not just ordinary zombies, like movies always claimed. These creatures are stronger, incredibly resistant and very, very frightening. Just imagine for a while that you meet with something extremely capable to kill you. What would you do?

Survive. 

That’s the only purpose of the life.  And there’s only one way to kill zombies: BlockchainZ Ammo, a type of munition especially made to kill living dead, based in a very strong poison which attacks the zombie brain.

Gameplay

Once you are ready to play this game, you must understand there are some critical situations you will have to pass through:

• You must protect the bunker until the reinforcements arrive.
• You have to kill whoever and whatever attacks you. People protection depends on you.
• You must clean the key places infested by zombies.
• You need to spoil as much as Bz Ammo as possible to the raiders in order to kill the living dead. But remember: raiders will counterattack.
• Be careful with the hordes of zombies. Once they arrive, there is no way out.
• The world is based in a completely ruined city. And this city is your worst enemy.

Wanna ask you something: how many zombies are you capable to kill in just one battle?

Remember: we are on Discord!

In Project BlockchainZ we want to develop the action of the game with a huge variety of battles divided in the defensive ones and the offensive others.

Defensive Battles

• Defend the bunker against the hordes of zombies attracted by the noise of your activity.
• Defend yourself from the blistering raiders who want to spoil your BlockchainZ Ammo.

Offensive Battles

• Assault the Raiders Storages to get the valuable BlockchainZ Ammo.
• Clean up the zombie-infested key areas.
• Anticipate your enemy attacks and intercept them at some point on the map before reaching your bunker.

Before fighting: make your own strategy

Once you start Battle Mode, you have time to plan your strategy. There are some elements you can place in the battlefield before the enemy attacks you:

• Place alarm bait: Really useful to attract the zombies attention.

• Place barricades: Not only to keep your soldiers away from the zombies but also to find some cover.

• Place explosive mines: these little bloody bugs can kill zombies and raiders easily.

• Place explosive barrels: Find a cool location for the barrels, place them and, once the enemy is closer to the barrel, just aim, shoot and enjoy. The simpler, the more successful.

• Defend your territory: With all the traps placed in and all the elements strategically settled, prepare your soldiers for the fight. No regrets!

While fighting: strategy goes on!

Get ready to think as quick as possible. The hordes of zombies and the attacks of the raiders are very fast. With the help of the Tactical View, as a player and also as the Captain of the soldiers’ platoon, you must array your troops to the victory. Command your soldiers to any position in the battlefield and be the leader the world demands to be saved.

Destroy the zombie tombs inside the hatches and so you will stop the hordes of zombies.

Do not hesitate: aim, shoot and reload!

Spoil as much Bz Ammo as you can. But be wary of the raiders: they can counterattack.

Remember: your mission is to keep the bunker in safe. Each every single survivor you find across the Worldmap is a little big victory. 

[BzLog 4]: Worldmap

In Project BlockchainZ you will fight in a procedural map where you can find different goals managing the whole action strategically. This procedural map will be your Worldmap.

Worldmap Hud

On the top left corner you'll see how long will reinforcements take to arrive at the bunker. Also, you will notice how many civils are inside the bunker and how much BitecoinZs do you have to spend in the technology's store. In the middle up of the screen, there is an alert about when will the new zombie wave attack the bunker. Time Controller is for the speed while moving across the worldmap. Finally, there is an small world map on the left bottom corner where you will notice all the events around the worldmap.

Worldmap Events

We've just started creating 5 diferent types of events:

• The Bunker. The place where you can manage your soldiers, train them and buy some technologies. These technologies will be to improve the character skills and so create a better battle gameplay.
• Zombie Hatch: it is formed by zombie tombs (remember: we are still thinking on the zombie idea and what kind of creature could fit better in the story). If you destroy the zombie hatch, no more zombies will appear from this area.
• Raiders Storage: it's where the Bz Ammo are. You can spoil it while fighting against the raiders or defeat them directly and so you'll get the Bz Ammo.
• Raiders encounters: sometimes you will be find some bandits across the battlefield. You can try to flee, but sometimes you won't. If you decide to fight against them and finally defeated your enemies, you'll earn BiteCoinZs.
• Zombie waves: the worldmap is crowded of zombies walking around the streets and ready to kill you. Kill them and win not only experience, but also BiteCoinZs.
• Raiders with hostages: defeat the enemies and you will rescue the hostages. These civils will go directly to your bunker.

Move freely among objectives around the worldmap but be careful, this world is full of dangerous situations and you must manage the risk of every single action to anticipate your enemies movement and choose how to fight every battle.

The Bunker: RPG elements.

Through the Worldmap you will manage your troops and enjoy all the RPG attributes like the troops training, all about buying elements to use in the battlefield and much more possibilities.

In the worldmap you will be capable to manage the challenges of every battle in order to success. There are some technologies at your disposal. You can buy them with the Bitecoins you earn in the battlefield.

Right now, we are thinking on new technologies, so any suggestion is welcome. You can comment here or talk about it on our Discord Server.

Thanks for all, guys! Next update: a patch is coming!

[BzLog 5]: Fresh news! Patch notes 1.0.1b

Hey everybody!

We’re working on more meaningful additions, so here’s Patch 1.0.1b! The update is ready for you! We are introducing a new kind of raider, bigger and more powerful, who uses a shotgun (Let us know if you like it). We also add some improvements in the Bullet Time skill, which we’ll explain you with lots of details in the next week devlog. Besides, a new weapon is at player’s disposal, The shotgun: Ready to kill zombies without remorse. Also a big optimization that allow us to put more Units at the same time: 100 to 300.

                                              

https://itch.io/embed/362807

Additionally we are still working on the story. We’ll show you very soon more info about concepts and who are the factions and what we finally decided about the zombie idea. We are discussing it on our Discord Server, and you are invited to participate.

Patch Notes:

• New weapon included: shotgun.
• New Raider with a shotgun.
• Big optimization that allows more units on screen at the same time, from 100 to 300.
• Movement of enemies improved (Improved pathfindings).
• Response time and physicis now uses less resources.
• New mini map icon for zombies.
• Adjusted win time to concentrate action in more fast paced battles.
• Modified alarm bait duration to make it more usable.
• Changed Bullet Time, now it’s a time based skills instead a stamina one.
• Now you can choose whether the soldiers in the bunker come to help you or not.
• Now you can choose the initial weapon when you start the battle.
• Some aesthetic improvements in the text boards.
• New Feedback when the alarm bait is activated.
• New Feedback while Bullet Time.
• Increased player jump height.
• New Feedback when you are reloading ammo with the Ammo Box.
• Raiders Supply Depot always have bandits inside.
• AI units identify the Ammo Box as an obstacle.
• Bug fixes.
• … and much more in future patches!

We will continue working on new improvements and patches, and will be glad to know any feedback or suggestions you have. Don't forget to join us on Discord!

Thank you all for the support, it’s really useful. Hope you enjoy the new patch and have fun!

Project BlockChainZ Team.

[BzLog 6]: Wanna kill zombies cooler? It's Bullet Time!

Why Bullet Time is your best choice to survive?

Have you ever felt alone in the middle of the battle, desperate to survive against a massive horde of zombies? Us too. And that’s why we are so glad to introduce you the Bullet Time skill, an abbility really useful once you need more time to kill your enemies.

Just imagine for one second how funny could be to freeze the time for a while and see these horrible enemies rushing over you in slow motion. That gives you a break to choose the best response. Lots of situation could happen then. You could kill more zombies, or find a way out, give orders to your troops in order to take a huge advantage on the battle. Also, it looks pretty cool to kill zombies in slow motion.

Bullet Time improvements

• Fixed duration (we’re thinking about the possibility to last more depending on the player's level experience ).
• Bullet Time  cooldown reduced.
• Time skills (Doesn't use stamina).
• Improved SFX feedback.
• New camera effect for feedback
• Much Better aiming while using the shotgun.

Take advantage of the Bullet Time and the new shotgun. It looks amazing while killing a lot of zombies. Just try it!

We will talk about other kind of weapons in our Discord Server. Join us!

[BzLog 7]: It's all about Optimization

Hi there

In the last week, we have been working really hard (besides on new features) on optimizations in the game's performance. Today i'll let you know the main problems we've been through this and how we are fixing them.

Right now, the most fps-consuming place in the game is on battles with tons of units, which if you are fighting against zombies it's actually pretty normal (even more if you are playing the hard level as a ranger and you are in late-game).

                                         

https://itch.io/embed/362807

 

AI improvement

The most consuming part of the battle is (without a doubt) the AI from your troops, raiders and/or zombies. They need to know a lot of information before they can decide what to do and this is usually where it takes most of the time (paths, line of sight, friendly fire, take covers, etc) and what we could improve the most was the pathfinding (Finding a path from point A to point B avoiding all obstacles). Just because we have a lot of units at the same time, we decided to use a different pathfinding (from the usual pathfinding that Unity uses) that could improve performance, but the counter part was the paths were a bit choppy and hitting stuff that moved in a weird way wasn't fun.

So we decided to remove this pathfinding and stick with Unity's systems, which actually led to better paths and, to our surprise, better performance. This change allowed us to raise the amount of units a battle could have.

Physics Improvement

One term most of you are probably familiarized with are "hitboxes" or what it's actually called "colliders" (The box that "collides" with stuff and take damage). In order to have accuracy with shots' hits we needed to have up to 8 or 10 hitboxes for every unit (Chest, head, legs, arms, etc). This is fine as long as you don't move them or you don't have a ton of them. You can think that 8 or 10 for unit it's not that much, but having in mind a battle can have up to 150-200 units at the same time. this means 1000-1500 colliders (which it's something that Unity doesn't like).

The way we decided to solve this was to change dynamically the amount of colliders a unit have. If it's really far away and not doing much, we don't really care what is actually hitting it, so we leave it a simple collider, but if the unit is in front of you, we change to a complex collider with up to 8-10 hitboxes so you can keep headshooting and dealing those sweet +300 dmg. This actually uses more rules to manage how the colliders change and makes sure that the player doesn't notices this. And with this we lower the number of colliders from 1K to 200.

Results

Before the patch we released a few days ago, you could only have 100 "real" units on the battlefield. Even if you are fighting vs 500, they will appear on rounds of 100 (So the game could actually be playable). Now the number raised to 300 (it can actually be higher, but we decided to leave room for low-tier PCs). Even with this, there's still room from improvement using some of the latest Unity's features like ECS (Entity Component System) and Job System (Which allow us to use multiple threads to improve game performance), Hopefully, in future patches, we will let you know how all of this evolve and make a better experience!

Don't forget to join us on Discord!

[BzLog 8]: Why BlockchainZ Ammo will save you from death?

People say the only way to kill a zombie is by shooting in its head. What if this is not an ordinary zombie? What if this creature is something... rare. And we mean something stranger than the original zombie concept. Because maybe you would need more than one bullet in its head to destroy this horrible enemy.

What if there's a better way to kill this damn creature? Something really rare to find in this shattered world but extremely useful to your purpose. Well... it already exists: it's called BlockchainZ Ammo, and there's only one place where you will find it.

Bz Ammo, I choose you.

When the world has fallen by the zombie menace, people tried so hard to find a cure or something to fight with. As the cure never succeed, civilication created this special kind of ammo, which attacks directly to the zombie brain and erase it in a few seconds. Sounds really good, isn't it? The problem is that BlockchainZ Ammo was really difficult to create, so there's a limit amount of Bz Ammo. Who has it on his power? The blistering raiders.

Life in this ruined world is about surviving at all costs, and that means you must be the one who uses all Bz Ammo as possible to keep your people in safe. So, do not hesitate: go for the Bz Ammo, spoil it and kill all the raiders you have to. Otherwise, zombies will arrive to your bunker and kill your people. There's nothing worse than living in a empty and hopeless place. Save the bunker, save the world.

Why Bz Ammo is so cool?

• It gives you the chance to kill much more zombies in less time.
• You can kill zombies with just one shoot. (But not the big ones, they need a little bit more bullets).
• It helps you reducing the stress that comes to you when you are trapped by a bunch of enemies.
• It improves your strategy. You can prioritize your targets. Big zombies first!
• You can combine Bz Ammo with Bullet Time Skill. And enjoy the pleasure of killing zombies.

Feel free to use Bz Ammo whenever you need to. Just a remind: zombies are coming. Your people's life depends on you. Don't waste the Bz Ammo. Every single bullet counts.

Did you use Bz Ammo? Let us know your experience, visit our Discord Server!

If you feel ready to save the bunker, and also save the world, let's join Project BlockchainZ!

                                                                                            

https://itch.io/embed/362807

[BzLog 9]: Future is now. Concept Arts

Hi all,

As you might know, Project BlockchainZ is a concept game and it works as a big blank canvas to create a much more interesting game. These days we've been working a lot in the concept of the environment and the city where the game take place.

When we started developing the video game, we had the idea to create a huge city completely ruined by thousands of years of struggling. It would be a desolated scenario to play. We believe the city will improve the concept of the worldmap, and the player will experience what means to walk around a place devastated and crowded of terrible menaces. 

One of the most important things about this city is to turn it into a interesting battlefield where the player has to survive, fight , hide, explore...

 We're talking about a moment far in the future after of centuries of conflict when people have no hopes, no dreams, no food. And not only because of the nature's cruelty, but the human malice. This mega city will be strongly divided in factions and parties, and not only the zombie becomes a menace, but also those who are supposed to be on your side.

We are working so hard in the identity of every faction. Confrontation among factions in a shattered world, a place to die, a battlefield. Seems like a pretty cool idea, it will be plenty of inhabitants, some enemies and others that might cooperate.      

One of the most important things we imagine about a post-apocalyptic world is to understand the desperation and also the complete desolation the few people alive could ever feel. It's our main purpose to create this devastated environment in order to enrich the idea of the  inhabitants. And we really want to develop it with you and all the community and of course share the improvements each week.

What do you think about this concepts?  How do you imagine each faction in this ruined world concept? Remember that we are still working on the zombie/monster idea, and we want to develop a new kind of creature that you might love. Anyway, don't forget to give us some feedback! All suggestion are welcome.

Wanna try to save the bunker? Let's download Project BlockchainZ!

                                                 

https://itch.io/embed/362807

Feel free to participate in our Discord discussion!

[BzPatch 2]: Updates and improvements!

Hey everybody!

New Patch is here! Say hello to Patch 1.0.2b (Patch notes below)  A new update with nice improvements for a better game experience. 

Firstly we have reworked so hard the AI, so now they will react much better to the different situations, more work will be added, like advanced behaviors, different animations and there will be more in futures patches!

 Also we've done optimizations in the shooting feedback, first we add some shake to the camera. Also we have been working a lot in the IK stuff so when you shoot the gun move the character's arms and shoulders.  And we have changed nearly all the SFXs for a more interesting version.  Give it a try, you will notice with the first shoot. 

What is IK? 

IK is the acronym for Inverse Kinematics. IK is an animation technique that allows much more responsive animations in games. 

Unfortunatelly, this improvement forces us to turn off the option to disable the Right/Left Angle shooting until the next patch :'(

You'll see that now the difficulty level is a little bit more harder (We also took out rookie level), because we want the video game to be a really interesting challenge for every zombie killer. Nobody said that killing zombies was easy. The real challenge is to survive until your reinforcements arrive. 

Finally, and not less important, we have corrected some nasty bugs!

Are you capable to save the bunker? Prove it and save the world.

https://itch.io/embed/362807

PSD.: we are still working on the story. And now we are so happy to show you some of the concept arts  we have prepared. 

Check it! 

When we started developing the video game, we had the idea to create a huge city completely ruined by thousands of years of struggling. It would be a desolated scenario... More on the Devlog

What do you think? Let us know on our Discord Server.

Patch Notes:

• General improve on AI, now the bandits reacts much better.
• Big optimization in shooting feedback.
  • Camera improvements.
  • SFX improvements.
  • IK optimizations.
  • New SFX for each every weapon.
• Now the foots adjust to the terrain.
• The character reacts when is hitted.
• Fixed zombie speed bug.
• Not the zombies let some space after attacks.
• Rookie challenge level removed.
• Now the challenge level includes the difficulty.
• Challenge level adjustment in order to create a more interesting challenge for the player.
• Fixed some related bugs on AI.
• Aiming by the left is temporarily disabled while improving the character's IK.
• Now you can't train the last civilian in the bunker.
• Fixed the bug related to the updates, now it works fine.
• Some adjustment to max units at the same time, to avoid performance hitccups
• Minor Bugs

Additionally, we are working on the auto-resolve feature that let the easy battles be done without wasting time  Eg. when you have 20 soldiers and fight against 3 raiders. These kind of battles have no sense at this point, so we believe player doesn't need to waste time them. Just focus in the good ones. Once we have this feature totally balanced and tested, we'll update it in the next update! 

We really hope you enjoy these new improvements. If you find any bug, please tell us right here or through our Discord Server. 

Thanks a lot for all the support you are bringing to us. It's great to know how do you feel about Project BlockChainZ.