Hey everybody, it's time for another update on my zombie game I'm developing, title "Blood Holiday: The Flesh of July". I'm pretty excited because I just hit a major milestone and if I keep up the progress over the rest of today and tomorrow then I'll finally have an alpha ready!

I want to save the best news for last, so I'll start small. my friend has jumped aboard the project as art designer and art lead. as I may have mentioned before, he created several icons for the weapons that will be in the game (sorry, I dont want to show anyone them until I'm sure they're ready) and they look really professional. he also just finished a large batch of art assets that will be used for the actual game environment. this means that the game no longer has to just be run using text! he's going to continue working on art assets for the rest of the game and with his help the game will be much more interesting to look at and play!

the next big announcement I have is that I've completely finished coding all the statistics and functionality in for the guns in this game. melee weapons will be finished later as well as misc. items, but for now I think that's pretty significant since there's several dozen of them.

and the BIGGEST announcement I have is that I've finished coding the actual graphics into the game! that's right, the game actually has graphics now, and now that the entire infrastructure is in place, I can start adding mouselisteners and things of that nature to add interactivity! here's a screenshot:

some things to note: the screenshot represents a work in progress and in NO WAY does it represent the final product. also, the zombie models are a bit too green so I'll be fixing that so they stick out more from the grass. also, the map is only 10x10, so there's a big black space around it. the actual initial release will have a MUCH MUCH MUCH larger map, and as such it will fille up the entire screen pretty much always. also, I haven't finished coding in the directional changes for the zombies or civilians, so all of them face north in the screenshot. I'll fi this later today so that they face the proper direction.

so next up in the long list of things to do will be the quicksheet, the inventory GUI, and maybe even a larger map.

if you have any comments, opinions, or just general thoughts, please post them in the comments section! I'm always interested in reading what people have to say!