O
n the cover of the January issue you may remember we featured Star Citizen,
Cloud Imperium Games’ massively ambitious space adventure, which as of the end of April has managed to amass $453 million in crowdfunding (an increase of more than $50 million since we wrote about it). I mention it because Star Citizen and Project Zomboid have much in common. Both have been in continuous development for more than a decade – predominantly in the UK, neither would exist without early access funding, and they have, by and large, succeeded on their own terms, without having to rely too heavily on the norms and structures of the mainstream games industry. Project Zomboid even more so; it has no publisher, sends out no press releases (unless they’ve all ended up in my spam folder) and requires no recruitment agencies – preferring instead to focus its attention and recruit largely from the game’s community. There are some differences between the two games of course, one is aiming to create a sci-fi universe on an unprecedented breadth of scale and fidelity. The other is an isometric zombie survival sandbox that’s as brutal and bleak as it is irreverent. Project Zomboid also receives rather more positive feedback from the gaming community at large. “That much is true” nods Chris Simpson, one of the
founding members of The Indie Stone and the original programmer of Project Zomboid. “I would argue that for the team size we’ve delivered a bit more.” Not many spaceships though. “No. We’ve thought about it, but it’s hard to fit them in with the lore.”
TALKING DEAD Work on Project Zomboid started in 2010, in the wake of the inaugural Call of Duty zombie mode and at around the time when the original DayZ mod became an online phenomenon. There was also the first season of The Walking Dead, which must’ve been an influence? “Actually we very much modelled Zomboid on George
Romero’s Dawn of the Dead” says Simpson, “but it was around the time of The Walking Dead that we started, so, yeah, that probably had more of an impact than we probably thought at the time.” “Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide was also a big
inspiration” adds co-founder and artist Marina Siu- Chong. “A lot of other games have a specific way that a
zombie apocalypse goes, like in Left 4 Dead you shoot your way out. How we approached it is that whatever you wanted to do to try to survive is what you could do, right?” “Yeah, it’s like a more realistic survival advice-type
angle, where it’s actual problems a real human would face should a zombie apocalypse start. That’s the interesting element that we had from the start.” Simpson relays a story about the night the seed for
Project Zomboid was sown, when after drinking at a friend’s house, discussion turned to what they would do if one of them fell down the stairs and woke up with an insatiable desire to chow down on their brains. “We were going through all the scenarios and we came to the conclusion that we would die no matter what. That was the genesis.” Simpson admits it was not the most original idea,“anyone who’s ever been into zombies has had that discussion, but it wasn’t something [in games] that had been done to satisfaction.”
ZOMBIE CROSSING While it was of course Minecraft that popularised the modern survival game and undoubtedly influenced Project Zomboid to a degree, what characterises The Indie Stone’s game is its bleakness. When you start the game, there is no “new” game option, presumably because new infers hope. Every game, solo or multiplayer, is only new because there is no way to survive. The game is explicit in its opening lines after you’ve set up a character (mechanic, security guard, burger flipper) in that what follows is a chronicle of their last days and hours. ‘These are the end times,’ it says. ‘There was no hope of survival. This is how you died.’ “Yes, that pretty much sets the tone,” chuckles Siu-Chong. “That’s exactly what the game is about.”
May 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 19
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64
