SMLL
Co-Development, Prototyping, Game Testing, Bug Fixing
PC
Survival
SmallZ is a third person zombie survival game. Form a team or go solo to survive from many threats such as zombies, boss zombies and other players. Build fortifications on different buildings or build your own base from scratch. There are plenty of build parts available for you to craft!
The game features a day and night cycle system with more relaxed scavenge and explore gameplay in the day but more amped up action when the sun goes down as the zombies get deadlier and faster. Smallz also offers a lot of play type customization including base building, there are many unique ways of building your base. You can fortify existing buildings using many of the fortifications you can craft. Found some wooden planks? Create some window barriers! Found some metal pipes? Add them pipes over the window to make it even harder to break in!
Midnight Forge joined the games production in Q4 of 2022, the client was preparing to release SmallZ to Steam Early Access in December. After a review of their game, the pipeline and their code we managed to convince them to delay the release for another month while we made a release plan, carried out critical testing, bug fixing and polishing some of the core gameplay systems to enhance the player experience.
During our time working with SMLL Studio, we contributed to a number of mechanics and systems present in SmallZ, whether as fixes, changes or new additions. These include but are not limited to:
- UI fixes and making the UI generally more user friendly for first time players
- The Vehicle System - a set of drivable vehicles the player can interact with, search and fill up. They have their own health too, hitting too many zombies (or people) will break them!
- Replication fixes between the Server and Clients
- AI and Performance Optimization, taking the games framerate from 28 up to 70!
- Boss Zombie AI
- Code Review and Evaluations
- Gameplay Testing, Bug Reports Followed by Bug Fixing
I'd add stuff in like AI Optimization and add some numbers Say you took FPS from 28 to 70 etc. You did a bunch of optimizations with the map Over 200% improvement by using Mightnight Forge