Project Zomboid Message Board

Mid-way through Rezzed, I decided that somebody must have cloned Dean Hall. The DayZ creator was everywhere. One minute he was talking about the most frightening moment of his life – hanging off the side of Everest, I hear – and the next he was playing games on the showfloor. If he wasn’t admiring Maia with an excited twinkle in his eye, he was telling interested parties about how much he digs Project Zomboid. The man loves games and since he has so many interesting things to say about them, we should be thankful that he enjoys talking about them quite as much as he does. One panel involved The Indie Stone folk and Hall talking about zombies. They offer a defence of the oft-maligned enemy and it’s often compelling. Behold.

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What are you doing this weekend? I’ll be doing what I always do: travelling to Wales to watch a roller derby match, and playing a multiplayer survival game in a world populated by zombies. No, for once the latter doesn’t mean DayZ, but Project Zomboid. The long-in-alpha isometric RPG recently released a new beta-for-the-alpha, which adds multiplayer and is downloadable via Steam. … [visit site to read more]

Scene: The RPS chatroom earlier this morning.

Graham: I tried playing Rust and didn’t really click with it. It feels earlier even than DayZ.John: Another interesting sounding game ruined by the presence of awful other people.Graham: Haha! Do you play Project Zomboid at all? It’s singleplayer.John W: I haven’t for a very long time.Adam S: I played Zomboid a couple of weeks ago – still feels too empty for my liking. I end up surviving for half a day and then running around attracting as many zombies as possible just to make something happen.

Good news for Adam and bad news for John then: about an hour later, Project Zomboid’s developers revealed they had multiplayer up and working. They’ve demonstrated their ability to spy on our conversations with three videos posted on the Zomboid blog.(more…)

If you’ve ever invested time in a level editor, there’s a good chance you’ve started looking around your environment and considered how you might re-create it in a game. If you’ve ever invested time in a piece of zombie fiction, there’s a good chance you’ve started looking around your environment and considered how you might survive an attack by the walking dead. The Project Zomboid Map Editor lets you explore both fascinations by enabling you to create your own home, office, or other environment, and port it into the alpha-developed isometric zombie survival RPG.(more…)

Project Zomboid is up on Steam Early Access now. Project Zomboid is a zombie survival RPG with a grim tone, and it has been in development and paid-alpha for ages.

That’s it. That’s the news. It was in the title. I’m always a little wary, though, of posting things like this, which are just straight-up, matter-of-fact pieces of information about a thing you can now buy in a new place. So to prove that I’m a hard-hitting journalist, I reached out to Will Porter over the weekend to ask him about the game’s launch into Early Access.(more…)

Everything has a horde mode. Just the other day I accidentally set my microwave to horde mode, and when I returned from a pre-dinner poo I was overwhelmed by burritos. They were deliciously angry. I tried to phone the police for help, but in the stramash I accidentally switched my phone to horde mode as well. There were burritos and phones everywhere. I’ve sealed the kitchen up, but the intoxicating aroma of pico de gallo wafting through my house is driving me mad, and when someone texts me all the phones go off. In other news, did you know that isometric zombie survival game Project Zomboid has just updated with a “Last Stand” mode? It puts you in a house in the woods against all the zombies. Like I said: everything has a horde mode.(more…)

The saga of Steam Greenlight has, thus far, been packed with unexpected surprises, whiplash-inducing twists, and sudden bursts of lava-like sensuality. Unfortunately, hardly any of it has been related to actual, you know, games. Instead, Greenlight itself and its (in some cases, not-so-well-explained) policies have hogged the spotlight, with Valve doing its best to tweak and modify the system as it goes along. Now, though, the first batch of community-tested, Valve-approved games is getting its chance to shine. Also, one of them is Half-Life.

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The Project Zomboid session at Rezzed was right at the beginning of the first day and yet it still managed to be extremely busy. Despite the (approximately) seven million people in attendance, if there’s even the slightest chance that one person reading this didn’t see the people of The Indie Stone talking about ‘How (not) to make a game’, I suggest you do so now. With Will Porter guiding the journey from the safety of a podium, the team talk about the origins of the game, copying Notch, living on beans and bread, and a series of extremely unfortunate events. There’s plenty of humour but also memories of robbery, death and the internet being a bastard. Then, for good measure, a trailer for the next version of the game.

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Here’s the first sentence: Project Zomboid is great. The sandbox zombie survival game is one of the most intelligent and interesting indie projects out there, and reports like this one from John should make you pay attention. More importantly: “This is how you died” should tell you what you need to know about the mood of this somber excellence. If you’ve not had a look at this game yet – and you can get access to it from the site right here – then you owe it to yourself to take a look. Anyway, to news, and this update, which explains how the animation system is being overhauled for the new build. Techie stuff, and not that interesting to everyone, I suspect. But the treat is at the end. Indie Stone say this: “The next build, R, should (fingers crossed) be released in around two days time – Lemmy is currently fixing the wheelie bin issue and a few save bugs that have cropped up with the changes. The new animation system will be present in the R build, as well as a tweaked approach to combat.” A video details the animation changes below, while Zomboid fans just have to sit back and wait for a fresh build.(more…)

Released when I was distracted by something that wasn’t the internet over the weekend, Deadly 30 is a side-scrolling game of zombie killing, home building and exploration. More killing than building, granted, but while each of the 30 days that must be survived allow for scavenging, and the discovery and recruitment of other survivors, the nights are given over to barricade building and defense, as the hordes of dead knock on the doors and windows, possibly asking to borrow some sugar or tea. Judging by the trailer below, there’s not a great deal of depth to the construction side of things so hopefully the exploration is a little more fleshed out. Fleshy enough for a zombie to feast on.

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Project Zomboid developers The Indie Stone aren’t have-and-have-not types. They’re more egalitarian in their views, and have just released a newly updated public version of the Project Zomboid alpha for everyone. This is a somewhat crippled version of the game, as the lengthy list of troubles you can expect demonstrates, but they’re releasing it in the knowledge that a) you know this to be the case, and b) zombies!(more…)

#fineart French artist Remi, aka Afekay, has landed a rather pleasant little gig doing the concept art for work-in-progress zombie survival sim Project Zomboid. More »

It’s been a while since we looked in on Project Zomboid, the disaster-prone survival RPG that, fingers crossed, now hopefully seems to be back on an even keel. During their time hiding and rebuilding, devs The Indie Stone have given the game “a radical engine overhaul,” as well as adding assorted extra bits. The latest new feature on show is carpentry, which sounds like a minor, dull thing on paper, but in practice you can see just how crucial erecting ruddy great pieces of wood all over the place is to defending yourself against hungry deadheads. Also, there’s a new lighting system on the cards. Cos light is also quite handy for the whole not being dead thing. Unless you’re an earthworm, in which case a lack of light is probably more useful.(more…)

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…)

The homebase of Project Zomboid developer The Indie Stone was broken into last night, and two computers containing much of the code for the latest update were stolen -- this wouldn't be as serious a problem had the code been backed up externally. Unfortunately it wasn't, and The Indie Stone has been set back months. Many Project Zomboid fans, some of whom have invested personally in the game's development, were miffed at The Indie Stone's "unprofessional" approach to managing its code, and how it publicly handled the break-in.

"Homebase" is the apartment where Chris Simpson and Andy Hodgetts, two of The Indie Stone devs, live and work, making the burglary personal on a deep level. Intense emotional stress is not the time to turn to Twitter, but Simpson did, expressing his fears and sense of violation openly. It didn't end well and Simpson has since removed his account from Twitter and has written a formal apology.

Writer Will Porter has explained the situation in full on the Project Zomboid blog, saying the game will "come back stronger."

"During this time we will clearly be asking for the understanding and patience of our community," Porter wrote. "We are gutted, we are despondent and -- most of all -- we are sorry that this has thrown yet another bump into the road towards PZ completion. We also REALLY want to wring the neck of the arsehole that did this to us."

If you have any information that could help The Indie Stone wring some necks, contact the Northumbria Police. If you don't, remember what mommy always said: If you don't have anything nice to say....

[Thanks, @unff!]

#projectzomboid The Indie Stone, the U.K.-based team behind the survival-horror game Project Zomboid might have the worst and hardest luck in independent games development. They've battled piracy—the kind that actually does cost a developer money—and had preorders cut off when PayPal suddenly shut down their account for bogus reasons. Still like the undead, they always managed to shamble back from adversity. It will be a lot tougher to rally this time. More »

The Indie Stone have announced that the first update for Project Zomboid is now available for download. And that’s not all! They’ve also answered some questions regarding Steam availability and the frequency and girth of future updates. If you’ve already pre-purchased the game and have access to the in development version, the update is available now. The free demo, however, will not be updated so if you want to see the changes in action, it’s time to hand over the clams. Fortunately, that just got easier because the game is now available through Desura. Not Steam though. Not yet.

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In video games, there are some premises that never seem to get old. The survival horror genre arguably went mainstream with the original Resident Evil, and since then, we simply haven't been able to get enough zombies. For a new zombie game to truly stand out from the crowd, it needs to showcase something special, something other than pure slaughtering action and enough zombie guts to fill an Olympic swimming pool...