State Of Zornhau - October 2026
State Of Zornhau - October 2026
Apologies for the radio silence for the past few months! A lot has been moving for both the game and for myself personally. This past Saturday I got married and the months leading up to that was a whole lot of planning and coordination. Zornhau has never fallen to the backburner though: development pushes forward and will continue to do so, until the game is in your hands!
The team at Mythic Foundry (myself and 3 others) have been working tirelessly to get the prototype into a state ready for playtesters. We've made huge progress towards that goal and are excited to give the latest batch of updates as development continues to accelerate.
On my end, I've been polishing the mechanics, building out the dynamic ragdolling and mesh cutting systems. I've got a basic networking solution built out, including local and simple relayed multiplayer working, along with all of the physics and hitboxing to come with it.
For environmental art, we have successfully completed our first medieval village set! That will be added to the project shortly and should be featured on the next update post. I'm so happy to see how it has turned out, our environmental artist EveXIII can really work wonders. The graphical fidelity is unmatched in a prototype like our own.
As mentioned above, our 3D modeler and environmental artist, EveXIII, has been absolutely cooking when it comes to our art.
I really only have to give him a few references to start and a few minor corrections, and they come up with some of the most amazing assets I have ever seen, let alone on the first try. I continue to be blown away with the quality of their work and the immersion that it brings. The results speak for themselves:
Dynamic mesh cutting (dismemberment) and ragdolling are pretty much feature complete, they just need some minor bugfixes and optimizations. Really loving how juicy it is turning out.
I am really excited for the next update to follow. Since this video was recorded late last week, I have been going crazy iterating on the combat systems, with my newly acquired free time. The animations are a lot more polished and closer to Mordhau in the smoothness and overall flow of combat. The enemy AI is a lot more intelligent as well, timing attacks, chambers, and parries and overall responding to you rather than the old hit-recover-hit cycle.
I've also been working a lot on scene optimization to get better and more consistent frame rates. A lot of that is reducing draw calls, just from the sheer scale of our scene and complexity of our meshes and lighting. I've got impostors, better culling techniques, and more aggressive LODs to tune.
As always, thank you so much for your support! This project really is my dream project and one I hold very close to my heart. The community has been amazing and steadily growing as the months pass by.
During that time, I've talked to a number of other slasher developers, and the feedback and collaboration is so incredible and often overlooked as part of the development process. The genre really is held up by its community and as developers, we hold a very important place within it.
Without developers supporting each other and sharing their feedback, we wouldn't see nearly as many awesome ideas and innovations come out of the woodwork. The community and fellow devs both keep us accountable and make sure we are releasing the best product possible, and as part of that, I just want to thank you all again from the bottom of my heart.
Cheers!
-- Frost