time they had been able to develop a game with what he thought was a reasonable team size and budget. The original Killing Floor was ported by ten people in a three-month period; by 2014 the studio had expanded to a team of fifty employees. The game was developed using heavily modified Unreal Engine 3. The developers considered using Unreal Engine 4 but decided against it as they didn't want to scrap their current work in progress and because of concerns that the game might not scale down to run on lower-end computers. The team launched the game on Steam's Early Access program to get feedback from players on weapon and perk balance. The increased budget meant this was the first project where Tripwire could use motion capture. Motion capture was recorded in San Diego at Sony Computer Entertainment's motion capture studio and the process was used for creature animations and weapon animations in both first- and third-person perspectives. This allowed them to record high frame rate weapon animations for additional detail and fidelity in Zed Time, a slow motion mechanic used in the series. The team aimed to design guns that feel realistic but capture the authenticity of games they had previously developed. They researched firearm speed reloading to create multiple reload animations, and matched the rate of fire of the game guns to their real life counterparts. Three focal points of the game's initial design were bullets, blades, and blood. These pillars lead to the creation of the M.E.A.T. (massive evisceration and trauma) system to depict dynamic gore and detailed graphic violence. Art and creative directors, David Hensley and Bill Munk both cited Soldier of Fortunes GHOUL system as an inspiration for the M.E.A.T. system employed by Tripwire. Bloodstains are a permanent fixture on maps in Killing Floor 2. Instead of the blood being rendered as a texture that is projected onto objects in the world, they created a system which, in real-time, modifies splatter map textures covering the map to display blood with little rendering overhead. In the original Killing Floor each of the enemy specimens had five individual points of dismemberment; in Killing Floor 2 this number of points has been increased to twenty-two to provide substantially more variety in the dismemberment animations. In Zed time, all colors except red become desaturated to enhance the visuals of the blood and gore. The game also features dynamic