So, it's been a while. Life happened, motivation ebbed and flowed, and my zombie city-builder sat there patiently judging me from my second monitor. But I'm happy to report that over the last month or so, I've been absolutely in it — and Safe Zone has made a huge leap forward into what I'm calling Phase 2.
Buckle up, this is a long one.
The Elephant in the Room: I Switched Engines
Yes. I did. I'm not proud of it, but I'm also not not proud of it.
Safe Zone started life in Unreal Engine 5. It would have looked gorgeous, the tooling is incredible, and I spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of time convincing myself I was going to get on with Blueprints. I did not get on with Blueprints. Every time I sat down to build something, I found myself fighting the visual scripting system rather than making a game. For some people it clicks — for me, it just didn't, and after enough sessions of untangling spaghetti node graphs instead of actually making progress, I had to be honest with myself.
So I ported to Unity.
Was it the right call? Ask me again if the game ships. But from the moment I made the switch, I started building instead of wrestling, and that counts for a lot. C# feels natural, the workflow suits how my brain works, and the momentum since has been real.
Anyway. On to the actual game stuff.
Where We Left Off
Phase 1 wrapped up with a genuinely playable game loop: place buildings, assign survivors, fend off zombie hordes, watch your settlement either thrive or collapse. Rough around the edges, but it worked. Felt like a miracle at the time.
Phase 2 is where things get interesting — more depth, more systems, more reasons to care about your survivors before the zombies eat them.
The Night Got Real
First order of business was fixing the night cycle, because "night" previously meant "slightly darker grey square on a monitor." Not exactly survival horror vibes.
I added proper moonlight — an independent light source giving the world that cold, eerie glow at night without just looking like someone turned the brightness down 10%. Horde spawning got a rework too; zombies now emerge from the edges of the map and converge on your settlement rather than just popping into existence. Much creepier. Much better.
Survivors Actually Go Inside Now
Sounds obvious in retrospect. Survivors were standing around outside at night, getting eaten. Very unheroic. Very fixable.
Survivors now enter buildings when working or resting — assigned to a building, they go in; time to sleep, they find a house. Buildings now provide actual protection rather than just being decorative job locations. Worker assignment logic got a full rewrite too, since "assigned" previously meant something fairly theoretical.
The Research System
The big one. Phase 2 introduces a full research tree, and five new buildings including a Research Lab.
Here's where I made a mistake that took embarrassingly long to debug: research was auto-completing. Queue a tech, blink, done. Turns out the completion logic was firing immediately instead of waiting for the player to actually choose. When you spend half an hour wondering why research feels weirdly frictionless, it's usually because there is no friction. Fixed now — you have to actually pick each tech, and it actually costs points.
Zombie AI was also getting stuck in a stalemate at buildings — standing there looking threatening but not actually threatening. Got that sorted too.
A Proper HUD
The UI's been bugging me since Phase 1. Rebuilt the whole HUD from scratch — better resource display, live production/consumption rates (so you can see you're burning through food faster than you're making it before it becomes a crisis), and a proper notification system so the game can tell you "a horde is approaching" instead of just ambushing you silently.
The Minimap (My Favourite Thing This Month)
I am unreasonably proud of the minimap. Three tiers:
1. No Signal — no Guard Tower built yet. Panel exists, shows nothing. Go build a tower.
2. Unmanned — Guard Tower built, nobody's working it. Basic visibility only.
3. Fully Manned — a survivor's stationed in the tower. Full minimap, entity tracking, click to move the camera.
Tying minimap functionality to the Guard Tower just feels right — gives the tower a purpose beyond "thing that shoots zombies," and creates a natural progression that rewards staffing it.
Save/Load (Still My Nemesis, But Less So)
Another round of updates. Much better place now. Won't say it's perfect — the moment I do, something will break — but it's solid.
What's Next
The research tree's in, but the really juicy techs are still ahead — things that meaningfully change how your settlement operates. Also want to revisit survivor behaviour, zombie variants, and keep pushing the horde system so the late-game feels genuinely threatening rather than just busier.
The game is starting to feel like a game rather than a tech demo. Best feeling in this whole process.
More soon. Probably.