The Zombie Engine is the result of years of development of a game engine, framework and toolset, created as an in-house technology suite for creating PC games by Spanish developer Tragnarion Studios. Its starting point is nebula2, an open source
game engine originally developed by Radon Labs, and extended by the open source community. Developers at Tragnarion Studios took the original nebula2 engine and extended it in a number of ways, and created a complete game framework and toolset, providing designers and artists witha powerful environment.
Early stages of development were focused on extending and improving the features of base engine modules: rendering, culling, animation, terrain, physics, as well as the exporter tool for artists. These were used to put in motion the development process that would allow creating prototype levels and testing the engine capabilities, which would determine the constraints and requirements for the game design.
Later on, came development in parallel of the fundamental entity framework that would be used as the building block for the game framework, as well as the first gameplay-related features and utilities, such as navigation meshes for pathfinding, finite state machines, and other basic gameplay structures such as paths, triggers or spawners. Along these, the Conjurer editor was built to provide an integrated editing environment for building maps, importing data assets, and tweaking a large number of configuration parameters for the different features and components that were being added.
