State of Decay 2 Devs Talk Zombie and Loot Placement

State of Decay 2 is home to a vast world filled with resources and zombies, two parts of the game that Undead Labs says are procedurally generated by a few different systems.

The developers of the upcoming Xbox One and Windows 10 PC exclusive recently spoke to Gamasutra about the loot and enemies found in State of Decay 2.

“Containers where loot can be procedurally populated are placed by hand, but no loot drop itself on any location is ‘hand placed.’” Brian Giaime, State of Decay 2 systems designer told Gamasutra. “Every time we generate a map, a variety of items and resources and loot and vehicles are distributed according to this process.”

The designer explained that there are some elements that will be the same throughout different instances of the map. For example, the gas station sites that players will come across will always have at lease one gas can, as players may naturally expect, so heading towards one of those is a surefire way to find that resource.

Other resources, however, won’t be found consistently in the same manner with different rules applying situationally.

“Say for example that across the whole map, we want to drop, say 25 normal melee weapons. These aren’t guaranteed to show up in certain sites, but are instead distributed procedurally across all sites, into containers whitelisted to make sense dropping items of certain implied physical sizes which make sense for them.”

As for the zombies that’ll be standing between players and those resources, State of Decay 2 gameplay engineer Jason Hail said that Undead Labs uses a special system to place zombies throughout the world.

“We have several systems that contribute to the on-going, ambient zombie population in the world of State of Decay 2,” Hail said. “The largest one of these is the Ambient Population Manager. Not surprisingly for an open world zombie game, this was one of our earliest prototypes when we started working in Unreal Engine 4. It has evolved continuously over the entire development process, keeping flexibility and rapid experimentation as our highest priorities.”

Like other open-world games, Hail explained, you won’t have fully-formed zombies throughout the entire map.

“Full-fledged zombies don’t exist everywhere in the world at all times, since that would be a waste of resources,” Hail said. “Instead, we only spawn zombies as you move into a new unpopulated area, or kill existing zombies in your current location. As you leave the area, we reduce most zombies to a ‘probability cloud.’”

You can read more about the procedurally generated enemies and resources through Gamasutra’s article, and look for State of Decay 2 when it launches on May 22.