Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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.
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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 actually a test-build of the public build that’s being worked on, with a full, working release incoming in ‘a week or so’ – that’ll have story-based content reinstated and a working launcher. As such 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!
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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,” a new AI system and 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.
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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.
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Here’s a spot of good news for the world’s unluckiest indie developer, The Indie Stone: It’s looking as though Project Zomboid – their really very good zombie survival game – may be coming to Steam. Using the same technology that brought the news that TF2 was going free, keen eyes on our forum have spotted the Magical Box Thing that says what’s being added soon listing Project Zomboid as a retail product. Which is fabbo, because it deserves to be played, and those poor bastards deserve some luck. So just give your best guesses as to how this will go spectacularly wrong. (Cheers to Will and SilverSilence.)

And thus continued the saga of sadness known as poor Project Zomboid.  Over the weekend, developer The Indie Stone removed the game from their website after they discovered that pirates had developed a version that can update itself. This means trouble. Here are some words that they said in a blog post:

“These ‘auto updating’ versions of the game could screw us completely. We have a cloud based distribution model, where the files are copied all over the world and are served to players on request, which means we are charged money for people downloading the game.”

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