Hello everyone! Welcome to the eighth development update for Haunted: Attack of the Dead Men. In this update I will go over how Map 5 has turned out and also provide a few teaser screenshots for Map 9. Well, it's been a while hasn't it. I first posted some early screenshots of Map 5 all the way back in the first development update, but I can finally say that it's done. After all that hard work, I'm actually quite pleased with the result in the end. So what's the deal with this map then? I mentioned last month that I thought I'd come up with some ideas for a fun level, so I'll explain what I meant now. Map 5 is, as you'll be able to tell, based on a variety of medieval and Gothic castles. This means high, imposing walls, cramped rooms, and plenty of traps to fall into. That last one was probably less of a problem in real castles, but is fairly typical for games set inside them. What kind of traps can you expect then? Well, here's some examples...
Hmm, a large room with lots of items and no enemies. Something smells funny...
I knew it! I got ambushed when I picked up the key in this room!
I survived, but still took a beating...
There's a lot of enemies out in the courtyard here, and you can add more by picking up the key or opening up the secret in this area
A lot of twice-dead men left in my wake...
...And again in this hall I'm sure you missed having a video to watch last month, but making these is only worth it when there is new gameplay to show off. And that we have plenty of now, so enjoy! [previewyoutube=puH15Onks78;full][/previewyoutube] Before I continue, I thought I'd better mention something about this video. It's not up to the same quality as my other videos - in fact, I recorded it in 720p/30 FPS, which is quite a downgrade compared to the 1080p/60 FPS I usually do. The problem is, this map needs a lot more optimisation to get it to perform as well as the other maps. This is mainly because it is one of the most densely packed maps I have made so far, and most of the optimisation done until now has helped when things are more spread-out. It runs well enough on my desktop despite this, but when I add recording software to the mix the performance takes quite a beating and recording it at 60 FPS would have made the video stutter a lot more. Not to worry though. I have some plans for how to fix this which I may be covering as soon as July, along with a major update for the demo. I will cover this in more detail next month. Anyway, you can see from the video there were plenty of moments where I performed certain actions (picking up keys, opening secrets etc.) and enemies ambushed me. In fact, there is one particularly nasty fight which is completely optional - if you open up the secret in the courtyard, 8 Machine-gunners will spawn in (on the hardest difficulty) to try and make you regret it! The rewards are more than worth it, however. You probably also noticed something a bit out of the ordinary at the end, too. Here's a close up of it.
You might remember from the second development update, I introduced "ambushing" enemies - not to be confused with enemies who spawn in, these are enemies who will start off facing away from you, and will only attack once you get too close or they hear you shooting. This allowed me to set up a crazy fight in Map 8, but I also mentioned I wanted more fights like this in other maps. So here we have the first of these big fights, but, as it will be your first encounter like this, there is a pretty big hint for how to deal with it:
Might want to use those grenades... So, that was Map 5! I hope you will enjoy dealing with the traps and finding some interesting secrets in this level. To finish off this update, I here are the screenshots I have for Map 9:


If you remember from the second development update, I showed off the outside of this church. The exit for Map 8 is the main entrance of the church - that means the next fight will be inside it. The good news is I have managed to finish designing the interior of the church for Map 9, so I should be ready to show off the whole boss fight next month. But, you will have to wait until then to find out what that fight will entail... Thanks for reading!