A devlog by Neeraj Kotwani, who builds every game on Elipar.
Zombie Outbreak is a wave-survival shooter in a foggy midnight graveyard. Walkers shamble, pale runners sprint, and from the fifth wave on there are high-health brutes. Ten-round rifle, manual reload, and health that comes back if you can buy yourself a few quiet seconds.
The problem a shooter has in a browser is that half the players have no mouse. Precise aiming is a mouse affordance; on a touchscreen, asking someone to place a crosshair on a moving target with their thumb is asking them to lose.
The assist rotates your view, not the bullet
The usual fix is a generous hitbox or a bullet that curves. Both work and both feel like being lied to — you watch a shot visibly miss and the zombie dies anyway.
Here, on firing, the game looks for a zombie within about twelve degrees of where you are already pointing. If it finds one, it snaps your camera yaw onto it, and only then fires a hitscan straight down the new aim direction.
So the bullet always travels exactly where you are looking. There is no magic trajectory. What the assist does is finish the aim you had almost completed, and because the view turns with it, you see it happen — the shot reads as having landed because it genuinely did land along the barrel.
Twelve degrees is deliberately narrow. Wide enough that a thumb that gets close is rewarded, narrow enough that it cannot pull you onto a zombie you were not aiming at. If it were generous the game would aim itself; the version where you still have to point is the one worth playing.
The hitscan picks the closest, not the first
A detail that is easy to get wrong and produces a baffling bug.
The hit test walks every zombie, projects it onto the aim direction, and takes the perpendicular distance from the line — a cylinder test, with the radius scaled by the zombie's own size, so a brute is a bigger target than a runner.
Crucially it then keeps the nearest one struck, rather than the first one it happens to find. The zombie array is in spawn order, which has nothing to do with distance. Taking the first match means firing into a crowd kills whichever zombie spawned earliest — so the one lunging at your face survives while something twenty metres behind it dies.
That would not throw an error and it would not look like a bug in the hit test. It would look like the gun being unreliable in exactly the moments that matter, which is the worst kind of bug report to receive.
Regenerating health makes retreating a strategy
Health comes back at a steady rate, but only after about four seconds without taking a hit.
That one threshold is what gives the graveyard a purpose. The gravestones are not scenery — breaking away from the horde, putting stone between you and a brute, and buying four quiet seconds is a real play. Without regeneration, damage is a countdown and the only strategy is shooting faster. With it, there is a reason to move.
Four seconds is long enough that you cannot regenerate while fighting, which is the thing that would break it. A one-second window would make chip damage irrelevant and the brutes harmless.
Three enemy types, defined as data
The zombies are one table: health, speed, scale, damage, score and skin, per type. A walker is slow and weak, a runner is fast and one-shot, a brute has seven times a walker's health and hits for three times as much.
They unlock by wave rather than all at once — runners from the third wave, brutes from the fifth, and then only as a minority of each wave's spawns. So the game teaches you one threat at a time, and the brute arrives after you have already learned that retreating works, which is the skill the brute requires.
Everything scene-wide is shared too: one geometry and one material per type, reused across every zombie, so a large wave stays cheap to draw. That matters on a phone far more than it does on the machine I built it on.
Zombie Outbreak is free in a browser, no account, no download. The bullet goes where the barrel points.