Merry Christmas everyone! Welcome to the fifteenth development update for Haunted: Attack of the Dead Men. As with the last update of 2022, I will start this update with another retrospective on how much the game has changed over the course of the year, then I will follow that up by covering some of the interesting changes coming in v1.6.0 of the demo in January. Let's get started!

Haunted in 2023

It goes without saying that 2023 has been a big year for the game. This time last year the demo had only been out for a few months, there hadn't been a whole lot of feedback, and a lot of the features that you can enjoy today (as of v1.5.0 of the demo) were either missing or hadn't even crossed my mind! I had estimated that the game would have been released by around this time, but unfortunately the game required a bit more effort than that so I had to delay it. Despite that I think the game is looking in much much better shape than it was, so I'll show this difference off with a series of screenshots (as I did last year):



The new weapon sprites are looking good!

It's much easier to see where you're going in this level!

The new blood effects are nice...

...But that first version of the Luger wasn't! In addition to the changes in gameplay, the main menu screen has gone from this...
...to this:
It's much more interesting to look at now! And finally, the game's cover art went from this...
Yep, at first it was just a screenshot of the menu! ...to this:
And that's not to mention all the new game options, quality-of-life improvements, performance improvements, the engine upgrade, bugfixes, and much more that went on behind-the-scenes to make the game what it is today. Even better, since this time last year five new levels have been completed, with good progress made on two more. Oh, and the game came out on itch.io! All-in-all, a very good year for Haunted: Attack of the Dead Men! For those of you who are curious, last year I mentioned that the game went from 200 commits in version control to 1200. This year, that number reached almost 3600, which is quite impressive I think! That effort is definitely reflected in the changes visible in the screenshots. But those of you who are paying close attention will notice (yet more) new things in these screenshots...

New Scenery

Those last few comparison screenshots, of Map 1 and the main menu, will look a little different to some. That's because I have been working on several new items of scenery and other assets to enhance the levels in the demo even further for v1.6.0. The first of these are flags. Osowiec was the site of an intense battle after all, so it would be nice to see a bit more evidence of this. We already have the various corpses of German soldiers littering the place, and of course all the enemies you face are Russians, but we could do an even better job of representing the two sides and the territorial control with their respective flags. In Map 1 we have several flags of the German Empire in the starting area, but as you make your way towards Fort IV you will start seeing more of the Russian Empire's flag.
In Map 2 (and the other "indoor" maps) you will only see Russian flags, seeing as the Germans never set foot in any of the forts, but you will see German flags again on the western edge of Map 3. You'll also see more Russian flags flying on Fort III as you approach it:
It's hard to tell in these screenshots but you'll see soon enough that these flags have an added touch - they are animated, fluttering in the wind, which makes them a bit more interesting. There's more stuff appearing in the indoor areas as well though. I already covered the addition of paintings in Development Update #12, which have now been added to Map 2. You'll only find these in the nice upstairs areas of the fort though, as the ground floor is meant to be more of a "storage" area. So I've made that clearer by adding a variety of different crates to the lower levels:
I have more assets planned for the v1.6.0 update which I haven't made yet, so expect to see even more new stuff when the update releases next month!

Achievements

This is an interesting one. You can't get achievements in the demo, so why am I spending time on this for v1.6.0? That's a good question, but the answer is simple - my intention with the demo is for there to be a seamless transition between it and the full game, should you choose to buy it. That means all your save games from the demo should continue to work, and any achievement progress you made should carry over. Additionally, I want it to be more intuitive to continue where you left off - if you finished Map 4 in the demo, you should be able to start the full game from Map 5 if you want, but it wouldn't be very fun if you forgot to make a save before going through the exit door. So how can I provide players an easier way of starting from Map 5? Simple - I just check to see if they have the achievement for finishing Map 4, and if so I can add an option to start from Map 5 in one of the menus when starting a new game. For all of this to work, I need to track achievement progress now, so all the data I need in order to make the transition from demo to full game is already there. Of course, since this is only being added now (and was not present in v1.5.0 or earlier), you'll have to finish the demo again in v1.6.0 to unlock the new starting option, but that's better than nothing I think! While I was at it, I did have a quick play around with the Steamworks API (at long last) to see how easy it was to use. I was quite surprised at just how easy it was in the end, so here's a little taste of what you can expect to see in the full game! Just ignore the temporary icons for now, I will add some nicer icons later...


Hmm, some might start to wonder if I'm a Clint Eastwood fan...
These two go hand-in-hand! Attempt at your peril... These screenshots show the achievements in Steam, but those of you who play the itch.io version of the game need not despair. The achievements system is completely platform-independent, so you will be able to view all of your achievements in-game if you aren't playing through Steam (but Steam users will still be able to view their achievements in-game). I had quite a bit of fun coming up with these achievements, but only half of the currently planned 54 have been implemented so far. The other half only apply to the maps that come after the demo, so it wasn't necessary to implement those just yet. At some point in the coming months I will implement the rest and show off the fancy icons for them as well!

Performance

What, this again? Yep. As I've been spending a bit more time on my laptop over Christmas it was a good time to see if I could make the game run even better. The good news is that I have, and quite dramatically in fact! A few months ago I thought of a script I could add that might make an impact, and I was quite surprised by the results - I have pretty much doubled the frame-rate in the outdoor levels! But, how? The answer boils down to some very technical details about how GPUs do things. In short, GPUs are very fast at drawing lots of polygons (the things that make up 3D models), so the real performance bottleneck comes when the CPU asks it to render something. This means there are two things you can do to render an entire scene - you can either ask the GPU to draw things one at a time, and so get caught up in this communications bottleneck, or you can ask it to just draw as much as possible at once - also known as batching. You can't draw the entire scene in one go, as the chances are you'll have multiple different models you want to draw. What you can do though, is batch all uses of a single model into one, and have the GPU draw that - you can then rinse and repeat for each model. If you are interested in learning more about it, this video has a good section on it. So if I've doubled the performance, you can probably guess what I was doing wrong before - each of the bushes that appear in Map 3 for example, were being sent to the GPU one at a time. So I wrote a script that converts all of them into one model, and draws that. Even better, this script can be added to pretty much any group of assets that share the same model - so I added it to everything I could, and, well, the numbers speak for themselves. Now that this is done, there probably won't be any other big optimisations to really do for the game before I finish it.

Haunted in 2024

With all of that out of the way, what's next for the game? Most of this update has been about v1.6.0 of the demo coming in January, but there are a few tweaks to the roadmap that I should briefly go over. The first is that v1.6.0 will not be the last major update to the demo before the game is released - instead, there will be a v1.7.0 update coming (probably) at the end of March, alongside a new trailer that will (hopefully) also announce the actual release date for the game (if I can predict it accurately enough!). This means that some of the more minor features I had planned for v1.6.0 will actually get deferred until v1.7.0, just so I can get back to working on new levels slightly sooner. I can't explain the reason for this just yet, but it will be a big deal and you'll see soon enough. Now, new levels - what's happening next on that front? Well, I am having the same trouble with Map 13 that I had with Map 5 last year, in that I can't figure out what I want to do with it yet. So I will skip ahead to Map 14 first - which is the final boss fight. I'm looking forward to making this one! After that, I will likely go back and finish Map 10 as the engine problems that stopped me from working on it before appear to have been fixed now. I will then (probably) look at adding Map 15, finishing Map 11, and finally coming back to Map 13, in that order. So the new roadmap (after v1.6.0 has been released) will look something like this:

• Implement Map 14 - hopefully will only take a few weeks, so will be done by early February
• Finish Map 10 - much of the backdrop is already in place, so this will hopefully be done by late February
• Implement Map 15 - I have some assets for this level already, but I'll still allow a month for it so it should be done by late March
• Release v1.7.0 of the demo - I don't have much planned for this update so it shouldn't take long, it will mostly focus on bugfixes and polish. It will be done by the end of March or early April at the latest
• Finish Map 11 - This won't take long as I already have most of it in place, it just needs proper balancing and testing (as well as a few secrets). This should take us to mid-April
• Implement Map 13 - I will allow six weeks for this, which will bring us to the end of May
• With all the maps in place finally, I will begin a closed beta period to test everything while I finish what is left. More details on this will come nearer the time
• Polish the rest of the maps - this hopefully won't take too long, and will bring us to mid-June (I know, a bit later than I previously estimated but still in Q2)
• Finally, the finishing touches. I will implement the remaining achievements and the other features that I have planned, and fix any bugs etc. that come up from the closed beta. With any luck, it will still be June (so Q2 2024) at this point and I won't have to announce another delay!

That's all for this update. It's funny how similar this post is to the third development update a year ago, starting with a retrospective and ending with details on the next version of the demo (last year it was the first update, v1.1.0). I'd like to thank everyone who made all of this possible, everyone who gave feedback, wishlisted the game, read these updates and showed their support (you know who you are!). It's been an amazing year and I'm looking forward to (finally) finishing the game next year! Stay tuned for the v1.6.0 update which will be out in a few weeks. I wish everyone a very Happy New Year!