Right now we’re at a very ‘under construction’ stage with forthcoming builds, so we thought we’d give a quick run-down on what’s going on with the stuff that’s currently most in contention for an appearance. Just so y’all know what’s in the big pipeline that’s labelled ‘next’.

The biggest ‘key’ feature, as regular readers will know, are the new animations, models and combat which are, in themselves, a fundamental stepping stone in the plan for all the big-name content in later builds.

Right now Martin’s big re-export of all his work is at an end and Lemmy and Binks are getting the new system completed that will allow for both overlay clothing (so people can pop on a t-shirt, then a jacket on top of it) as well as overlays that will be used to allow for blood splatters during combat, zombie blood and gore to make the zombies a bit more grizzly to look at, and hopefully the ability to age zombies to make the zombies that have been shuffling around on the six months later scenario look a bit more like corpses that have been walking around for six months.

The ability to apply texture overlays will give us a huge amount of freedom to make the zombies extremely varied, something that has been lacking in the game up to this point. The backpack is in and working, as you can see, but still has a few weird issues we are trying to resolve before we can do any sexy in-game videos of it in action. So for now, an image! Hurrah.

RJ, meanwhile, is building up to an internal test of his metalwork revamp, and is currently back inside his Nutrition system to make weight loss/gain a less of a sheer face to fall down and climb – and also to nerf clever tactics like ‘chugging down jars of mayonnaise’ with a daily limit on calorific impact whether it’s dropping off you, or piling itself on.

A month or so ago we compiled a big report from all the community posts about the nutrition system (from both those who liked it, those who disliked it and who wanted improvement) and got a lot of good pointers that we’re currently acting on.

Something that we want to get RJ on to next, that we might have mentioned was in our minds a while back, is a refurb of the current sleeping system. In the earliest builds of PZ sleep felt a lot more haphazard – you had no control over when you woke up (or when you were woken by possible night incursions) and as such the simple act of resting felt quite scary and unpredictable. You’d also struggle to fall asleep when in pain, making sleeping pills more of a necessity.

This was all somewhat lost as the game developed, not least due to MP making sleep a trickier issue, but it’s now something we can get back to. It’s all under current discussion, but less controlled SP sleep, in-game alarm clock items (impact of which is heard by all players, and maybe zeds in close proximity in co-op) and maybe a few random events that player sleep opens up to us are all on the agenda.

TurboTuTone meanwhile is coming back onto the main game after getting WordZed up to a standard that’s fine for internal use, but probably not as user friendly as we’d like for a public release. We’re at a point at which we can easily package what we considered our priority (the release of community translations for Radio/TV in the next build which is currently looking like French, Russian, Polish and Turkish) so now Turbs is coming back onto the main build for a bit – to finish integrating his work on player boredom, the necessity of entertainment, learning from live and recorded TV and radio shows and hopefully a more analogue radio tuning system to help with tuning into secret wavelengths etc.

On top of all this we have EP in the Engine Room looking to slicken things up for future features in the pipeline, Mash is in the sprite/map room prettying things up further and obviously we’ve got the helpful chaps at General Arcade investigating the best avenues to integrate VOIP into PZ for our MP crowd too. More on all of the above in future Mondoidage. Have a good week everyone.

This week’s featured image by Markarkady off of Steam. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!