We’ve often wondered whether a game or studio can
somehow be institutionalised by being in early access, that there’s perhaps a fear of leaving it as it changes the perception of the state of the game, and perhaps the dynamic between a developer and a community it has come to rely on for open feedback and support. “I think we get infinitely more crap for being in early
access than we would leaving it,” says Simpson, who feels that to leave it now would be to renege on features and a level of polish that hasn’t yet been delivered. “We don’t rest on the early access-ness. It’s not a crutch. Zomboid is our magnum opus, in the sense that we’re never gonna make something as big as this again. So we just want it to be something that can stand the test of time, and that people remember fondly.” The Indie Stone team say that it will be a couple of years
“‘Be lovely’ is our number one rule on all of our
channels. We don’t allow people to be nasty and that’s the kind of image we try to propagate within the communities and the people in them have tended to start promoting that themselves. I think that’s our biggest strength to how we’ve grown, to have a community that we can communicate with and try to keep positive.”
LEAVING EARLY ACCESS Starting off as a team of four, The Indie Stone now numbers 16 people, with a further eight working through codev studios. With such a small team (comparative to Star Citizen’s) working on the same project for so long, how do they stay motivated? “We leave it in early access,” says Simpson. “Because if it
was v1.0, it would be so tempting to start thinking about new ideas, because obviously, you’re going to get fatigued and you’re going to get frustrated, and you’re gonna have these little ideas for other games you could be working on that you just can’t afford to. Marina has got a particular game she’s wanted to make for years, but you just can’t allow yourself to think about them too much, otherwise it’s too tempting to play about. While we’re in early access we’re held to account, so it just sticks us. Don’t get us wrong, we still have a lot of passion for the game. But obviously that’s a long time for fatigue not to set in.”
22 | MCV/DEVELOP May 2022
until Project Zomboid is considered complete, or ready to hit that 1.0 that players are so eager to see the game get to. Will that be another similarity the game shares with Star Citizen, or another aspect that divides them? The race is on. Slow and steady, obviously.
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