Day One: Dropping In
Yo yo yo, what’s up survivors! Mr. Nightwave here, and welcome to the very first entry in the devlog. Grab a board and roll back with me to where this whole thing started.
Picture it: an empty folder. No assets, no store-bought models, nothing. Just a plan to build a cute low-poly zombie survival game with a dark streak, written from scratch in TypeScript. Back then it wasn’t even called Nightwave. The working title was Shadow Zombie Survival. Humble beginnings, dude.
What dropped in the first build
- World creation with a seed, three world sizes, Survival, Creative or Hardcore, difficulty, zombie density, day length, Blood Moon frequency, loot, weather and a stack more
- The Forest: chunk-streamed terrain, lakes, mountains on the edge, and trees, rocks and bushes you can harvest
- Landmarks to loot: cabins, abandoned camps, crash sites, cemeteries (zombie city, bro) and military outposts
- Third-person combat with pistol, shotgun, hunting rifle, bow, axe, pickaxe, spiked bat, machete and torch, plus headshots, recoil and hit markers
- Zombies: walkers, runners and brutes. They run at night, hear you coming, path around your stuff, and smash walls when that’s the cheapest way in
- Blood Moon hordes in escalating waves
- Survival stats: health, hunger, thirst, stamina, bleeding, cold, and the Rested buff from chilling by a campfire. Lake water has to be boiled, so no free lunch
- Crafting at hand, workbench or campfire, and skills that level up as you use them
- Building with grid-snapped walls, floors, stairs and doors in wood, stone or metal, plus spike traps and storage
It was rough around the edges, sure. But the core loop was there from day one: scavenge by daylight, build before dark, and hold on when the moon turns red.
Stay rad and keep rollin’.
— Mr. Nightwave 🛹