Project Zomboid's Tale

skavenhorde

skavenhorde

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There are two reasons I'm posting this. First is, of course, to share info about the Indie Stone's game Project Zomboid. The second is that this dev, The Indie Stone, has got to have the worst luck and had to share the absurdity of it all.

So first the info:

The focus is on desperate survival in a sandbox post-apocalypse world.

Looting, building, running, hiding, fighting, trading, boozing: all these will apparently be possible. Also planned are the likes of depression, drug addiction, sickness and the gradual collapse of societal necessities such as electricity. This is a game of mighty scope beneath the lo-fi, isometric aesthetic. Oh, and death will come to your door: this is about just how you spend your last days.
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That's the info from RPS. Go here for a more detailed introduction from their homepage.

Here is a combat trailer of the game.

Now that's that you know a little about the game, let's find out about their woes(link to the article from RPS):

Are you an indie developer who’s set up to receive money without going through either Paypal or Google Checkout? How do you fancy helping The Indie Stone, who couldn’t be having more bad luck and misfortune in the run up to the release of Project Zomboid if they all fell down drains and their trousers caught fire. The last disaster was when they had their money frozen by Google. The latest madness to happen to the fledgling indie studio is an email from Paypal announcing that they’re closing their account because of “bad customer experiences”, none of which The Indie Stone has ever heard of, nor has been proven by Paypal. The developers, planning to release the demo for Zomboid in only three days, now have accounts with both companies either frozen or closing (with their funds unobtainable) despite neither company offering any helpful explanation. They need help.

Paypal’s email says,

“This measure is necessary to protect against the risk of bad customer experiences and financial losses, in view of certain activity related to your account that we have reason to believe has taken place.”
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The team have yet to call Paypal to try to sort out this latest setback. Because, extraordinarily, their offices were evacuated today after a car exploded, and were then quarantined. They are officially the unluckiest developers in the world. Their lives are being written by the authors of The Brittas Empire. But this is the latest blow in a series of appeals, and their time has run out.
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Not only did Paypal and Google go bad, but A CAR EXPLODED outside their office. A freaking car exploded……If this wasn't from RPS I may have a hard time believing this, but they have links ;)

So now the good news (link to RPS article):

The Indie Stone, creators of upcoming apocalypse RPG Project Zomboid, have been barred from selling Project Zomboid by Google Checkout. This seems egregiously unfair, but part of the big G’s reason for this smackdown is that they’re asking money for something that doesn’t yet exist. Indie Stone, for whom this is now the second time they’ve been denied a big pile of money which they claim to desperately need to fund Zomboid’s development, have devised a possible way around this.

Now, they’re asking you to buy games that do exist – which will be accompanied by a ‘free’ copy of Zomboid once it is available. Proceeds from this trio of games will fund Zomboid’s development, presuming that cash doesn’t also get locked away from them. What are these games? Ah, that’s the thing…

How does ‘Stand On Top Of The Other Guy But Be Bigger’ sound to you? Or ‘Droids’? Or text-based grammar-abusing vignette ‘Rock Paper Scizzorz?’

I cannot attest to the quality of these titles, but note that £10 seems rather a high price for each of them. It’s probably a fair price for Project Zomboid though. What a shame you can’t pre-order that for £10, eh? There’s just no way to do that. All you can do is buy one of these other games for £10 and get a free copy of the Zomboid alpha (plus all future updates) down the line. Which, you’ll agree, is nothing at all like paying £10 to pre-order Project Zomboid. If only there was a way to do that.

There isn’t. But you can buy the other games, with a free copy of Project Zomboid, from here. Advise The Indie Stone, “just remember that Project Zomboid will only be a cut-down alpha when first released, and expanded upon in subsequent updates.”
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So if you want to get some "exciting" games like Rock, Paper, Scizzorz or Droids or Stand On Top Of The Other Guy But Be Bigger (a classic in the making ;)) with the added bonus of getting Project Zombies free for life then head on over to their website. Droid is 5 pounds, SOTOTOGBBB is 10 pounds and RPS is 15 pounds.

In case there is a lost in translation moment, I can also not vouch for the quality of RPS, SOTOTOGBB or Droids. I would assume they are about as exciting as such games as "watching the paint dry" and "watching the grass grow". Good times. :p
 
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Much changed since and it seem to a better side,what I am not understanding why no one posts about this game on News Comments section, as this game as they are describing on their site is Zombie Survival RPG, I just simply don't understand why as this game enhances more and more its rpg experience with each of its update.
 
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Yea, I know I should, but when I posted this it was barely an alpha and a browser game to boot. We normally don't cover browsers. So I posted here first to test the waters on just how much interest there would be in this game. As you can see since you are the first post in nearly 4 months there hasn't been any interest at all. Which is unfortunate.

I bought the game back when they had those "fake" games for sale to get some money and decided once they are in beta I'll start posting it in the news section no matter how many people are interested in it :p
 
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skavenhorde said:
Yea, I know I should, but when I posted this it was barely an alpha and a browser game to boot. We normally don't cover browsers. So I posted here first to test the waters on just how much interest there would be in this game. As you can see since you are the first post in nearly 4 months there hasn't been any interest at all. Which is unfortunate.
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Well the indie forums don't seem to have much activity in general. I love indie games but I barely check here myself because there are rarely any posts. So I'm not sure that this is such a great place to gauge interest.

I'm interested in this game, but I don't like to buy games that are in beta just for an early crack at them. I prefer to wait until they are done so I can get the full experience. Is this game close to a full release? Or is it more like minecraft where it will probably always describe itself as a beta?
 
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Full release? I say you got yourself quite a wait. You can go here and check out the latest update, but I wouldn't expect it to be completed for quite a while.

That said, I think the game is more like Minecraft. It's quite playable now (to a certain extent), but it's raw. Really raw. Needs a lot more cooking in the oven to be done.

They already have a demo you can play if you want. You can download the demo here. The demo is version 0.1.4c.

EDIT: I haven't played Project Zomboid since pretty much the beginnning, but this thread got me in a mood and tried it out.

My god it has changed a lot. There is a sandbox mode now, more items than ever before, more items to craft and the zombies still scare the bejesus out of me if I don't hear them when opening a door and then there is one standing right outside. Not fair that they blast the zombie groan right when I open the door. I can't play this game with earphones on. Sounds too creepy.

It's a lot of fun even though it's a pretty difficult game and there is no chance of winning. I really don't like that part, but it looks like they're going to have different campaigns available. I would like one of them to be where they escape somewhere or at least have an end goal of having a heavily fortified, self-sustaining area that you call home. Something along the lines of Walking Dead's prison (even though that didn't last).

This whole "survive for as long as possible" doesn't really sit right with me.
 
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And I was feeling the same way, although they stated that the game will have this raw and cruel end of lives of the characters, but there seem to be already some volunteers that will mod out and implement a tiny of hope to survive this apocalypse.
 
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They seriously need to read Walking Dead or World War Z. It's not about surviving as long as possible. It's about surviving and learning to live in this zompocalypse. At least I need that because highest score doesn't work for me.

Game still rocks though and if it can be modded for some kind of survivable ending then I'm happy.
 
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I'm a big fan of roguelikes so I don't mind the whole inevitable death thing. Although I suppose it is possible to win a roguelike, even if it's very unlikely, and that may be an important distinction.
 
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Also a HUGE fan of roguelikes. I still would love this hobby of ours if every AAA business went belly up and there were only roguelikes and indies left.

But yes I couldn't agree more. There is a huge distinction, imo, between a game you play for a high score and one where the ending is very difficult to achieve, but it can be done eventually.

That said, I still like this game. I'm just glad there will be some mods out there that will give me that will give me some sort of goal other than surviving.
 
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Yea, Lemmy had a meltdown on twitter. Can't blame the poor bastard really. The things they were saying on Reddit was unbelievable. Dude needs to seriously stop reading reddit. I never understood the appeal of that site anyways.

In any event, if they folded up shop tomorrow I still would be happy. I got more than my 10 pounds worth out of this game, but they're not closing down. It was just a drunken outburst after having his home robbed. It might take awhile to get back to where they were before the laptops were stolen with all the latest Project Zomboid data on it, but it's not the end of the world.

It's funny, I saw all these indie devs post on twitter that they have now backed up their games because of this and a lot of them mentioned that they didn't have offsite backups of their games for a long time. Notch said that he went a whole year without an offsite backup at times and now he's backing it up :p

Well, it's a lesson learned the hard way. All that matters is that Project Zomboid lives and the old saying where any news is good news hopefully applies here as well. At the very least it got people talking about PZ and made me decide to start posting newsbits whenever they finish the next upgrade.
 
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Just wanted to point out that I look intrigued with the changes that should come soon, leaving more decisions in the characterisation of your character wich will have consequences,counting how the world physics where.
 
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