Project Zomboid

Project Zomboid is an open world survival horror video game in alpha stage development by independent developer The Indie Stone. The game is set in a post apocalyptic, zombie infested world where the player is challenged to survive for as long as possible before inevitably dying. It was also one of the first five games released on the alpha funding section of the gaming portal Desura. The Indie Stone were subject to a high profile downfall within the indie gaming community following the theft of two laptops containing code for Project Zomboid. Project Zomboid is The Indie Stones first commercially released game.

Gameplay

The aim of Project Zomboid is to survive as long as possible in the zombie ridden Knox Country, which has been quarantined by the government. The player has to manage such things as hunger, tiredness, pain and mental stability to stay alive. To do this, players must scavenge for supplies to keep themselves alive for another day, while avoiding the roaming zombies. The game uses the traditional, Romero style, slow moving zombies, though certain zombies are faster than others.

The game itself features two modes, story mode and sandbox. There is only one story under the story mode, used as a tutorial, with more planned in future updates. The sandbox mode allows the player to create a character, and then survive in Knox county with no missions or guidance. When creating a character the player must choose a profession, each with its own perks, and then choose the character's traits. Each trait has a points value assigned to it, either positive or negative, depending on if it's a good trait or a bad one. The player begins with zero trait points available and thus needs to choose a bad trait to gain points to use on good traits.

The current stable version of the game, 0.1.5.d, uses hand-drawn isometric sprites for the city and animations. However, as the game expanded, The Indie Stone team had trouble keeping up with the amount of hand drawn sprites required for the animations. To resolve this the team created a system that uses pre-rendered 3D models that are then rendered into sprites. This is the system used in the 0.2.0r RC2 future update to the game.

Work continues on 0.2.0r, the latest version of the game. This latest version is open for playing on The Indie Stones website. The 0.2.0r RC2.5 update includes many new features and upgrades to the current stable build of 0.1.5.d.

Problems

The Indie Stone have been notably plagued with large problems while creating Project Zomboid. For example, on October 15, 2011 one of the Indie Stone developer's home was broken into and two laptops, containing a considerable amount of work on the project, were stolen. Due to this they did a presentation at Rezzed entitled "How (not) to make a video game" going over some of the lessons they have learned since starting the project.

Piracy

Soon after its initial release as a paid pre-alpha tech demo, the game was leaked, and spread illegally to many other websites. The pirated copies enabled auto-updating from the Project Zomboids servers, and unable to bear the costs, The Indie Stone took the customer-only paid version offline, and instead, released a free "public tech-demo" for download.

Funds frozen by PayPal and Google Checkout

While working on Project Zomboid, The Indie Stone initially had their account frozen by PayPal, totalling around £4,454.47. This was due to the game only being in Alpha stage development and thus not "a finished good." This was bypassed however by negotiation with PayPal and The Indie Stone selling other games, with the Project Zomboid Alpha as a free bonus. This allowed them to continue distributing Project Zomboid, while receiving money for the finished goods. Following this the company decided to also open a Google Checkout site. A month after this was opened it was also frozen with 80% of their funds from transactions within Following this The Indie Stone were eventually contacted by a member of Google Checkout and their account unfrozen.

External links

• Vorlage:Official website
• The Indie Stone forums
• A fan-made wiki for the game