We already mentioned this briefly in The Sunday Papers, but really it deserves its own post – both because of how flat-out tragic the situation is, and because a vocal subset of the online response to it has been repellent. To summarise: The Indie Stone, developers of Project Zomboid (as yet unreleased, but playable builds are offered to anyone who pre-orders) suffered a break-in over the weekend, with the thief making off with two of their laptops. One of these laptops contained the current and in-development code for the game and future updates. The other laptop contained the only backups of the latest code.
Needless to say, the team – just four guys making them game themselves, and funding it solely via pre-order money – are distraught, apologetic and enormously self-recriminatory. There’s a statement from PZ’s writer Will Porter here, but the long and short of it is that, while the game will continue, clearly it’s going to delay the next update. The finished game has never been given a release date, but the community has come to expect a regular trickle of new builds and features. The current build is still online and running however, and I’m assured the game’s wider integrity is not compromised. All will be well again very soon.(more…)