It Started With Zombies

Before Corrupt Earth there was a smaller game. A much smaller game.

Zombie shooter. Missions, guns, waves of enemies, the usual. I wasn't trying to make something groundbreaking — I just wanted something fun to actually play. And it was. For a while.

The problem with making games is that finishing one doesn't scratch the itch, it makes it worse. You play what you built and instead of feeling done you start a list. What if the map was bigger. What if it saved your progress. What if other people could join. What if you could build a base. What if there were a hundred players on the same server.

That list became Corrupt Earth. No grand plan, just me refusing to stop adding to a document at 1am. Classic.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Four Biomes

The world has four biomes — forest, wasteland, swamp, snow. Each one has its own look, its own resources, its own feel. That was clear from the start.

Getting them to actually exist in the game took considerably longer.

My first approach was to use Unity's built-in terrain for the surface and layer voxels underneath it for everything below ground. Caves, mining, destructible stuff — all voxels. The surface stays smooth and pretty. Seemed like a clean split.

It was not a clean split.

Where the two systems met was a disaster. Gaps in the geometry, things clipping through things, the occasional hole to the void. I spent way too long convinced I was one fix away from solving it. I was not one fix away. Eventually I accepted that forcing two systems to share a border they were never designed to share was always going to be a losing battle.

So I threw out the terrain and went full voxels for everything.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Just Voxels. All Voxels.

Sounds simpler. It was not simpler.

Terrain is smooth. Voxels are boxes. Making boxes look like smooth terrain is its own entire problem, and I underestimated it badly. The first version looked rough. The second version looked rough but with more colours. By the fifth or sixth pass it was starting to look like something, but getting biomes to blend into each other — instead of just slamming into a hard edge — took longer than I'd like to admit.

Where I landed: the surface reads as smooth because each block picks its shape based on what's around it. The generator caches height data up front so it's not recalculating the same thing over and over. It's not perfect terrain but it's mine, and I know every part of how it works, which matters more than I expected it to.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What's Actually Done

Here's an honest list of what exists right now.

Multiplayer server. The whole game is built around a dedicated server

that might handle 100 players. I didn't want to bolt networking on later — that always ends badly — so it went in first.

Lua modding runtime. Every item, zombie, weapon, and effect is defined

in script files outside the game. Anyone can add content without touching the engine. I also built a tool that generates documentation automatically so modders aren't just guessing at the API.

World generation. The world builds itself in chunks as you play. Caves,

ore, biome-specific surfaces. It runs in stages so it doesn't freeze the game while it works. Atleast that's the idea... i'm still not happy with it

Loading screen. Shows real progress, not a fake bar. Tells you exactly

what's happening — carving caves, placing ore, populating the surface. I find fake loading bars personally offensive so this was non-negotiable.

Chat and admin commands. Global, team, local channels. A /command

system with permission levels. Not exciting, but multiplayer games without proper chat tooling are a nightmare to run.

Save system. Worlds save. You can come back to them. Felt important

to get right early.

The four biomes have a skeleton. The visual dressing isn't there yet

but the logic is — each zone knows what kind of ground it has, what it spawns, how it generates. Building on top of that is the next step.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What's Next

A lot. Zombie AI, combat, inventory, building, crafting, hordes, vehicles, quests — none of that exists yet. The list is long and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

But the world generates, the server runs, and you can stand in it. Given how many times earlier versions of this fell apart, that feels like more than nothing.

I forgot to take screenshots again. I was going to, I just never stopped to do it. Next time I'll actually remember.

Probably.

Did i use AI to write this? 100%, why? because i talk like this... and i mean... i'll try to add more details... Will AI code the game? yeah... parts of it... but hey... it'll still be a fun game... i hope?!

Note: if anybody ever reads this besides me and my friends... i'll see if i can remember to add the old screenshots from the shooter

================================================================================ -- Corrupt Earth devlog

← All Posts