Project Zomboid Code Stolen! (And what is to come)

I'm a little late on posting this, mostly because I've been busy + lazy, but figured I might as well post on it.

(Obvious joke is obvious)

A couple weeks ago, the leader of IndieStone was robbed, and the only two copies of the up to date code, was stolen with the two laptops in his house. Of course, it sucks to be robbed, but seriously? No off site back up for something you are making to feed yourself with? I'm not going to go and call him out and say bad words to them other than the obvious truth that they should have had an off-site backup.

Here we have a blog post from the devs, with a very cool and collected response to the community, letting the community know it is not the end as some have stated. I'm not a personal fan of business and personal life interconnecting, which is why I don't think it was a good idea for their lead dev to get drunk and post drunk twitter posts about it. Here is a screenshot of some of the things that were said. There were many more nasty things said, but if you want to find those, you'll have to look yourself because it really isn't that great to read when you want a game to progress.

Obviously, after that night, Project Zomboid looked grim. With the blog statement on their site though, it's clear they are not giving up, and honestly, that is all we should have seen. That statement from their writer about what is going on. Which is why I don't like it when companies use personal online profiles and talk about business, and vice versa.

Not too long after the original post from the IndieStone writer, they posted this update, stating that they had a little bit more backed up than they thought, but not nearly as much as they had hoped. At first they were stating they had to start back up from the last patch, but in that post they stated they had a bit more than they thought.

On top of that, the promised save on quit, and map changing features that were about to be released are now delayed even longer. As they stated, "We intend to pepper the NPC update with a few fun recipes and new items to compensate or, at least, compensate as much as we can." So, they're trying to work on something they can throw out faster as an update, compared to just doing what the had originally planned. Which is okay in my opinion. The community is very hungry for any update at the moment.

On top of all this, they were actually able to find someone else to help with the community. Hopefully they do their job nice and well, because honestly, the community face so far from IndieStone has not been the best. There are reasons why companies are very silent when things happen, and only post what needs to be known. Not everyone knows this, and it can take some painful lessons of community backlashes to learn it.

I still support Project Zomboid, and can't wait for more work to come out from it! =)

Project Zomboid small update!

First off, http://projectzomboid.com/blog/index.php/2011/09/zomboid-0-1-5c-released/
Edit- New post on another fix, http://projectzomboid.com/blog/index.php/2011/09/project-zomboid-0-1-5d-released/

It seems the team is actually pretty hard at work, and they have a changelog of what's been done this small update.

Optimizations

A lot of fps issues appeared with the last few updates, so this is nice

Less rain.

It rained too often in the update. Pretty much more than half the time it was raining. This is also nice.

Various bug fixes.

They didn't seem to specify anything about this, but hopefully I no longer have zombies spawning behind staircases.

NPC tweaks 

They are attempting to make npcs less "hostile" towards you, and tried to make what they do more varied. Not sure what else an NPC is going to do, but we'll have to see what they have in plan down the line.

Multi-stage barricades
I haven't really had enough time or supplies in a game to create "real" barricades instead of just barricading the doors and windows. It sounds interesting though.

Increased sound muffle effect of being in/out buildings or different rooms

Some more realism is always nice. Being immersed is a great thing about this game.

Slowed down horde movement.

I found that I died a lot faster than I used to in the demo since the update, I actually like this. Some people may not.

They then leave a comment at the end
"teehee I love my spiked baseball bat, SQUISH, SQUSH, hehehe SQUISH, SNAP oh…"

If I had to guess, this is hinting to Item Durability.

All in all, a nice quick update with a few additions and some nice fixes and tweaks. They stated they are working on implementing saving in the background while releasing these small updates and fixes. So hopefully new areas and save games aren't too far off.

Edit- It seems they have another update that just came up that fixes a bug where you would infi-sleep. Obviously a game breaker. They also changed some perks and how uncooked food works. All in all, another nice quick patch.

Project Zomboid Alpha re-released!

The people over at Indiestone have finally brought back out their paid version, and with many new features! From the character creator, to basic npcs, they are showing even more progress than before.

The first post came out yesterday evening letting people who have bought the game test the new alpha. Of course there were the few who felt entitled to a complete version, when they specifically stated that this was a buggy version. Even though some people had that mentality, most people actually provided useful bug reporting for the devs. As you can see here, within less than 24 hours, Indiestone has shown their dedication to creating the game and making it as enjoyable as possible by patching out a lot of the bugs and issues that were found.

Now, if you haven't bought the game yet, you can still play the out dated demo to see if you are at least interested (That demo itself was enough to make me drop the measly 5 Euros [About 8 US dollars]). If you are interested, you can still buy from google checkout and you are e-mailed your password to login. Should you not want to use google checkout, you can now use Desura and pay with paypal to purchase. If you've already bought it before, and now want to use Desura instead of the standalone downloads, you can activate your game on Desura. Steam support is currently not out, but they have stated multiple times you will eventually be able to activate your copy of Project Zomboid on Steam to receive updates.

Indiestone are currently using the same approach that Minecraft has, with the current price only for the time being, and then increasing the cost as more updates come out.

Here is my current character in the creator, I tried to give him the same attributes I would have (other than the job itself). Click for full size.

Project Zomboid!

(Image taken from Project Zomboid main site)

A game called "Project Zomboid" was brought to my attention a week or so ago from a friend on a forum website. The game takes old school style zombies (slow, dumb, and swarm you), and puts in rpg style survival elements. The game is currently only in alpha, but I'll be damned if what I've played in just the pre-alpha piece of beautiful crap demo isn't fun as hell.

I have a couple of minor playthroughs already done posted (although they are pretty informal, they show a little bit of how fun the game is, even in the extremely limited state the game is in now), so I'll just copy and paste them here for the sake of being lazy. One thing to note about the game, and one thing I actually kind of like, is how they setup how the game is supposed to play. You will die. There is no escaping death in this game. There is no secret magical cure. There is no rescue coming for you. You are going to die. No exceptions. The point of the game, is to try and live as long as possible, hoping for some way to continue life.

1st try -"I died before getting the soup, cuz when I was trying to make the soup zombies fucking PLOWED into the door. I only saw a few running around outside, when the door broke, fucking there were TONS. So I had a shoot out with a shotgun I found for a while, beat the shit out of zombies with a hammer, and then eventually died after I killed all the zombies. While holding a bowl of uncooked soup and a shit ton of other food."

2nd try - "I ended up not barricading the windows, but only the doors, so the zombies saw me while I was making soup and were banging on the doors hardcore. So I turned the oven off and went upstairs to listen to the radio. After that I just decided to barricade the room door and hope for the best. The trick that someone else said to stop the looter didn't work, and he still came in. I guess it's because I went to sleep. Either way, we had a quick draw, and he won."

3rd try - "When I was making the soup, I was standing in front of the stove to see the soup cook. The radio was going off upstairs, and then the wife talks to me as if I'm upstairs listening with her asking me if I turned off the stove.... I figured it wouldn't catch fire if I was there. So. Fire starts. I panic a bit, zombies start coming to the back door, I run up the stairs, start dragging my wife down the stairs to the front door. I un-barricade the front door, and zombies just PLOW in while I try to fight back with a hammer"

4th try - "Everything goes well. I turn off stove, go up, barricade door. Un barricade door, go back down, and the looter comes up. I put my hammer away cuz he tells me to. The long conversation goes by, and he starts talking about how my wife's leg looks like it was bit and is talking about killing her. I charge at him with the hammer and hit him out the window by the bed. I then spend the next 7 days running around town finding a bunch of food, pills, and whiskey. I also find an axe and a crap ton of shotgun shells. But I never found a shotgun. I go around town, I tried to make a molotov, but couldn't find any gas. I would of figured you could of just used the alcohol to make a little one at least. Maybe later. Either way, I end up going to the wrong side of town, because there are a bunch of zombies on the west side apparently. I try to fight a zombie with my axe, but he ends up injuring me (after I beat the shit out of 50 or something?). I try limping away to use painkillers and eat some food, but I just end up running into more and ended up dying in the yard where we were staying."

5th try - "My most recent playthrough, was pretty much the same, but when the radio was playing the news, I just went back downstairs halfway through, and was looking out the window for zombies in another room. I saw when the looter came in (I could see the front door open), and then I saw he opened the bathroom door next to me (all while still in the front room [it had a door but I didn't barricade it or anything]). Either way, he eventually walked up the stairs it seems, because he started talking with my wife. They have a little conversation that starts with him asking if there is anyone else, but she say's "Nope, just poor little old me" or something like that. It seemed like the conversation was leading towards him wanting to rape her, so I snuck into the room (I snuck up the stairs when they first started talking), and bashed the back of his head open with the hammer.
I end up dying pretty early in this run through, because I try to carry a lot of stuff back, but end up getting exhausted easily (since I'm carrying so much stuff). So I'm trying to run away from zombies, but I can only kinda power walk until I get tired. Then I start walking slow, and if I don't stop (because I'm carrying a lot), I end up walking even slower. So. I make it back to the house, but zombies start lining up outside and banging on the doors. I stay inside the house and the barricades hold for another day or so. I end up having a shoot out with the shotgun, but die a horrible death because there were just sooooooo many of them. I actually had another shoot out earlier in another house. I had attracted a lot of zombies with my flashlight (it was midnightish =/), and the house I went into didn't have a back door. That first shoot out was the beginning of the end though, because it just ended up attracting more zombies when I tried to book it home."

Needless to say, the game is really fun, even with the extremely limited alpha we can play now. I spent the measly 5 euros (~8 bucks in US Dollars) to pre-purchase the game, and have updates available to me when they come out (sort of like how minecraft works right now). They used to have a cloud server with the up to date game, but some crap happened with pirates and costing them server load money and they had to take the site down until they could implement a login feature for updating. Currently waiting on that to come out, but I honestly can't wait to see everything else in the game.

They have tons of features listed already in the game, as well as features they want to put in such as co-op multiplayer. I can't really say everything about the game here other than what I have, because otherwise I'm just going to end up copy pasta from their site here, so I'll just give the link to their site! I hope I made some other people interested in the great zombie game!

http://www.projectzomboid.com/