fixerrr The game has a lot of potential, but there's still a long way to go. I understand that it's hard to build an Unreal Engine game on your own at this scale and without much experience, but I think you're off to a good start, and I hope you continue working on it.
To help you out a bit, I've collected a list of issues and bugs I encountered in the version uploaded here. I don't know whether some of these have already been fixed in the full version of the game, as I don't have access to it.
Some issues:
- As many people have mentioned, there's a pretty big need for optimization improvements, and that's coming from me while running the game on a 5090.
- At the same time, the pop-in is pretty extreme at the moment. It might be worth looking into implementing LODs.
- People have been complaining about the dialogue being slow. You should indicate at the beginning of the game that dialogue can be skipped with the space bar, as some players might not realize this. Tbh, I would remove auto-skipping dialogue or make it optional, since it sometimes continued before I could finish reading.
- Audio settings don't seem to affect the main menu music.
- When setting audio to 0 and then increasing it again, the sound doesn't seem to return until going through a loading (map transition or loading a save).
- At home, the swimming pool is pretty loud and can be heard when standing next to the main door. I'd make that sound audible only when standing outside. Also, the swimming pool audio doesn't seem to be affected by the audio settings (the same happens in Isabella's house).
- Every time I want to enter or exit a building, a confirmation popup appears saying the door is unlocked and asking if I want to enter. If this confirmation isn't required for the transition to work, you should consider removing it so when interating with the door it immediately enters the building. Otherwise, it becomes annoying pretty quickly.
- At home, in your room, I got stuck inside the door multiple times when opening it while standing too close to the corner of the room.
- Pressing ESC while using the computer removes the cursor and soft-locks you on the computer screen.
- As far as I can tell, there's no way to exit the computer other than turning it off. If you interact with the computer while it's already off, you get soft-locked.
- When aiming the camera at walls while moving, a small black box rapidly flashes in the middle of the screen.
- It looks like most things don't make any sound outside of the background music, for example, the car and player movement don't make any sound.
- The car respawns every time you enter any building. This is pretty annoying, though it might feel less bad if there were more fast travel points.
- The player indicator on the map doesn't move while in a car. I can even guess why, along with this, the player's shadow remains visible outside when entering a car and it stays in the same place.
- There's no button to return to the main menu from the pause menu, so it's impossible to start a new game without restarting the game.
- The center dot is visible during the intro text and loading screens, which doesn't look right.
- Not a big deal, but I found it funny that I could move while the ESC menu was up.
- Some NPCs have body parts clipping through their clothes.
- This one is hard to trace, but for some reason all my saves started spawning me in random locations instead of where I saved at some point. For example, I saved at home, but when loading it spawned me near the big fountain or outside the church in another save.
- In the quest log, there's a line saying "Enter a description for your quest here" right above the objectives. This seems to be the case for all quests.
- There's floating text saying "Scarlett's House" above the mailbox next to home.
- The folder structure of the game is very strange. The game folder is just called “Windows,” and the main executable is named “ZombiUE52.”
As many have mentioned, I think the price is a bit too high for such an early stage of development. A lower price would allow more people to afford it and provide feedback, making it easier for you to focus on what needs to be fixed, but in the end of the day, it's your decision.
I'd be happy to provide another list of bugs if I can get my hands on the full version of the game at some point.
1- optimization is a bit confusing for me honestly. could the issue you had be the city map loading slowly? normally there is an fps drop for the first 7–8 seconds and then it should be fine. some people say they have issues even on very high-end gpus, while others say they have no problems at all on much weaker systems. either way, i’ll keep working on improving optimization
2- i actually use lods quite a lot. the reason the cars look weird when you move a bit away from them is because of the lods
3- yeah, the dialogue auto-skipping after around 8 seconds was intentional at first, but people didn’t like it so i removed it. in the latest update it shouldn’t happen anymore. maybe you downloaded an older version?
4- yeah, i didn’t include that because i thought it wouldn’t be used much, but i’ll fix it
5- thanks, i’ll fix this one too
6- yeah, i guess that sound feels relaxing to me personally, but i didn’t really think it might be annoying for others. i’ll fix that as well
7- you’re right, i’ll fix this too. i had some issues with lockpicking before, then in later updates doors themselves started causing problems and became pretty annoying. when i finally saw they were working in the latest update, the part you mentioned stayed like that. thanks for pointing it out
8- thanks, i’ll check this one as well
9- yeah, i fixed this one just recently
10- yeah there was an issue with computer interaction, that one is fixed now
11- i’ll check this one too
12- yeah i’m a bit limited when it comes to sounds, but i’m planning to add more in future updates
13- i’m not sure i fully understand this one, isn’t the car respawning a good thing?
14- yeah that’s probably the reason, good catch
15- true, yeah it would be better to have that, i’ll add it
16- ah i didn’t think that would be annoying, i’ll fix it
17- i’ll check this one too
18- yeah, when body features change it’s honestly pretty hard to keep clothes perfectly adjusted. i didn’t see this as super urgent, but i’ll fix it in future updates
19- it should always spawn you at the saved location actually, maybe it’s related to autosave overlapping or something like that?
20- ahh i completely missed that one, i’ll fix it
21- missed this one too, i’ll fix it
22- yeah i didn’t really care much about folder names, but i just saw someone download the 18gb game and then delete it without even trying it just because the folder was called “Windows”. i guess people do care about stuff like that, so i’ll fix it
about the price, i actually thought the same, but not knowing that steam doesn’t allow discounts until at least 28 days after release was a big mistake on my part. i’m waiting for that period to end now
thanks a lot for the detailed feedback and sorry for the issues you experienced in the game. i’d be happy to give you access to the full version, though after this level of detailed feedback you honestly scared me a bit lol. are you secretly working for steam’s testing team or something? jokes aside, you found some really hard to notice stuff like the scarlett text, that was genuinely impressive. if you’re interested, i’d be more than happy to give you the full version. you can message me privately, i’m on discord if that works for you
