Thank you, everyone, for joining us for another Dev Blog! This time, we'll be talking about Brooklyn Heights - our largest map so far. It's a massive work in progress and everything here is still in development and subject to change, but we think you will appreciate seeing it regardless.
Brooklyn Heights is the northern tip of the Borough at the south end of the Brooklyn Bridge which connects to Manhattan. It's a beautiful, modern, upscale neighborhood in real life that we thought would create a striking juxtaposition when collided with the chaos and terror of a zombie apocalypse. The neighborhood has a breathtaking vista of Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge from the Promenade which will allow us to allude to distant turmoil while using the historical brownstones and apartment complexes to tell stories of the final moments of the residents of this once elegant neighborhood.
On a September morning at dawn, Brooklyn Heights was condemned by the zombie pandemic. The aftermath of the recent outbreak can be observed throughout the streets; the formerly bustling neighbourhood has been reduced to chaos as citizens tried to flee and the military tried to maintain order. However, building interiors and underground areas were relatively unscathed as people abandoned their homes.
We want to have a mixture of areas that feel safe, chaotic, damaged, elegant, depressing, and we have so much room to play with on this map. The dichotomy of light and shadow intensify feelings of unease, making it difficult to know what could be lying ahead in the darkness. We want the environment to be dripping with tension. Just from wandering around the world you will see the telltale signs of last moments of the residents, police, and soldiers who once fought to keep this place - their homes - safe and secure.
This map is much larger and more nonlinear than any previous map. There are tons of places to explore and most buildings have at least some interior space. The map includes points of interest such as a courthouse, auto shop, record shop, basketball court, hotel, office building, doctor's office, and a series of large apartment buildings.
We also have underground areas to explore such as a sewer system, and subway.
One major thing we wanted to try and achieve with the Brooklyn map, as our second production map, was expanding our randomization system to go a step further. In NOTLD, our randomization is focused mostly on item and objective spawning, and in Brooklyn, we're adding in another layer of randomization which is randomly spawning interiors. As you can see in the proof of concept example below, we can have a row of brownstone houses and when the map runs, it'll randomize which of those houses gets an interior, and which interior it gets.
The scale of this map will really force players to explore, work together and struggle to stay one step ahead of their living and undead adversaries. Its complex structure, immense verticality, randomized elements and a mix of tight and open spaces create a truly diverse and unique environment in NMRiH2.
Thank you all for reading this Dev Blog and we can’t wait to show you more of Brooklyn Heights as it comes together over the next few months. It’s our most ambitious map to date and is shaping up to be something special. We hope that you’ll come back again for our next Dev Blog and join us on our Facebook and Steam Community pages!
**NOTE** Screenshots of the Brooklyn Heights map are early work-in-progress captures, we expect to share higher quality renders soon as we continue to build out the map within the game engine. Stay tuned!
Official No More Room in Hell Discord
We're now an official Verified channel on Discord! Join our community and chat with fellow fans and developers. A special benefit of being verified is better Voice chat servers! Check it out: discord.gg/nmrih
Hey where's that Halloween update?
Hey everyone Wazanator here and I’m to give you the rundown on our newest patch and what's going on with it.
To start off I want to apologize to everyone who was really excited for the patch to be coming out today, unfortunately we underestimated how long it would take to get it ready once we had everything together. When we got the patch together earlier tonight and tested it we found that we were missing some assets. Because of this we will not be pushing the patch out tonight as we want to make sure we don't make any mappers involved look bad because of a mistake on our end.
Our new release window for the patch is for later next week so that we have time to properly test and make sure nothing else is broken that might have been over looked. Again I apologize for this as I know a lot of you have been asking us through out the day about the patch and wanting to play these new maps.
In the meantime please enjoy this sneak peek at what maps you can expect to see!
Nmo_Boardwalk
By Dr Hammer, Demo, and BillionLioe
You’ve been on the run for what feels like an eternity, the undead always on your heels. There’s rumor of a safehouse not far from here that might be your only chance at salvation. With a poisoned ocean on one side and the merciless horde on the other, it’s either fight to survive, or give up and accept your inevitable undeath.
Nmo_Broadway2
By nay0r
We thought that we had gotten away from downtown broadway, only for our getaway train to breakdown on the tracks. Those of us that remain went to some apartment building to barricade ourselves in while we figure out what to do to escape this never ending hell. We think we might have seen signs of unlooted supplies to the south so that’s a better place than any to start.
Nmo_Quarantine
By Coolz
Weeks after a military occupation in New York was overrun by the undead, the survivors are clinging to life within a small laundromat. With supplies waning and tensions growing, the survivors are forced to take a risk that will either save them or kill them; leaving their safe haven and trying to get into the quarantine, within which the last surviving soldiers supposedly still reside. With means of escape.
Nmo_Shelter
By Fersigal and Atheist
You and some other survivors hide in a World War 2 shelter in Europe. You try to get from the old bomb shelter to a nuclear plant in order to destroy certain parts of the world which don't hold any survivors at all but you encounter some problems on your way.
Nmo_Suzho
By BillionLioe
The old city of suzhou has seen much in its centuries of existence, but the shambling army of the undead is a first. The city police force made an effort to screen and evacuate the people present in the city. Their efforts were not sufficient and the dead overran the living, packed evacuation centers became slaughterhouses, what few survived resigned themselves to death on their own terms. The evacuation centers by the Grand Canal are now silent... save for the whistling wind and the moans of the dead. Perhaps someone is still out there on the waters. One can only hope they are listening.
Nmo_Underground
By Atheist, Extragamer, and Drunk_Steep
Loading Screen By n a t t y. s p b and OLEG
Trapped in a tunnel during a military evacuation gone bad you and the other survivors will need to fight your way out of the underground and into the city above if you want any hope at survival.
Nmo_Vertigo
By Ulreth
We all think that big skyscrapers are secure and have everything necessary to survive a zombie apocalypse. The problem is that this huge building is now surrounded by dead hordes approaching on your location. You will have to carefully rise to the top of it in order to be rescued if you want to live. But be careful, watch your step as you can fall to death in this old skyscraper. Can you escape from this vertigo nightmare?
Nms_Camilla
By Atheist and Extragamer
When the outbreak happened a group of us had holed up in Camilla’s and while that worked out well for awhile supplies has almost dried up completely. The good news is the military is on the way and we just have to survive this night.
Happy Halloween to one and all, this time of year is very special for all of us here at Lever Games. We’re bringing you this special BONUS blog this month! It’s but once a year we get a holiday to celebrate all things horror! We’re deep into development on No More Room in Hell 2 but we wanted to take a quick moment and show off some new screenshots and never before seen zombies.
P.S. we will have another announcement coming soon about the release of a content update for No More Room in Hell 1 which will include a number of community maps and the offical map Broadway 2
- David
NMRiH Halloween Patch and a Call for Custom Maps!
Hey everyone Wazanator here and I would like to let everyone know that we are hoping to get a map pack out this Halloween! We had lofty goals for 1.10, but our plans scaled back as our focus shifted to the future with NMRiH2, new technologies and the promise of delivering an amazing successor for all of you. The one thing we can do, though, is bring you some excellent new maps!
While we will be adding in some new maps of our own we thought it might also be a good time to start looking at getting some of our more active community members that have been making custom maps involved. If you are interested in having us look at your map to see if we can add it to the main game please see this thread.
Never made a map before but would like to? Check out this tutorial!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=600125731
So what does this mean for future No More Room in Hell 1 patches? As most of the team has shifted it’s focus to the sequel we are looking at freezing features. What this means is instead of new gameplay mechanics you can instead look forward to things such as new maps, new art assets, and bug fixes. We are not abandoning NMRiH, we love this game and the community it has attracted to it too much to let that happen.
Going forward we would like to have the occasional update where we put out a call for community made content so that others who don't check out our forums where people post really cool maps can get a chance to play them in addition to anything we've been working on. We will of course be giving these contributors credit where credit is due.
If you have any questions about this or want to express any concerns please leave a comment and we will try to address them.
Dev Blog #9 - Tone and Inspiration
Hey everyone!
Another month, another dev blog! This is a second one from our writer Infr4mer who has been hard at work on our backstory and timeline, as well as establishing our world narrative.
In this blog he covers some more narrative tone for the game, as well as external sources of inspiration that help us remain focused on our goal.
Nayor talks about level design, what maps in the works, and his experience using Unreal Engine.
We also have a Q&A section at the bottom based on questions some questions we have been getting about level design. Let us know if you have any more in the comments!
Also fans of the mod there's a special bonus announcement in there about nmo_broadway2
Dev Blog #7 - Guns. Lots of guns.
Hey all!
Welcome to our 7th Dev Blog!
First off I'd like to issue a *BANDWIDTH WARNING* if you're on mobile or a limited connection, there are lots of images in this post.
Today we show off a few of our weapons with side-by-side comparisons to nmrih1, as well as some of our new ones! This will give you an idea of the level of quality we're aiming for and we hope to show more off soon in action in the future!
Check it out here and let us know in the comments what you think!
Dev Blog #6 - Dev Grant, Recap and Forecast
Hey all! Time for a new Dev Blog! This one is just to talk a bit about our Dev Grant from Epic and an overall look back since this is our 6 month anniversary of starting the Dev Blog as well as a tiny taste of our next teaser :)
Next month, we'll have a Blog showcasing some weapon art (and maybe even some side-by-side comparisons to the first game!)
New Dev Blog! This time, we're discussing a little bit about narrative, world building, and the universe that is No More Room in Hell!
We want to add a bit more character to our world and make it more cohesive and coherent. We want the environment, the world around you to do two things narratively: tell you a story about the state of the world, and tell you small, personal stories of the individuals who perished in violence and chaos.
We're building a world that doesn't glorify death and violence, but instead we want to remind you of the tragedy of every lost life. It's a hard thing to accomplish, but we feel it's one of the narrative tones that sets our game world apart from others in the genre.
