Editor’s note: This is a mature game, and the interview has some mature words. Parental discretion is advised for our younger readers.
We first noticed the Project Zomboid team, Indie Stone Studios, when a leak went up for their game. Since then they have put in a ton of hard work and made a lot of connections. You can now get their game on Desura. We’re happy to get a chance to talk with another new indie game team:
Nerd Age’s Scholar: We’ve been following you since Project Zomboid was leaked ages ago. Tell us a little about how you got to where you are today.
Will: We work as a four-piece these days, but the story really begins with Lemmy and Binky. They’ve had a long and brutal career in various development workhouses in the North of England, which abruptly ended with redundancy and/or the opportunity to go indie. After a spell with the lovely Dan Marshall at Size Five games (née Zombie Cow) working on infamous ‘vagina game’ Privates they found themselves without a project and, truth be told, much income at all.
It was at this point that Project Zomboid was born. I wasn’t involved until quite a way down the line, although fellow Indie Stoner Mash certainly was – as indeed she was with a former, unfortunately ditched, PAWS project. They conjured up a basic engine, some screens and a video and invited the internet to take a peek.
The internet took a peek and seemed to like what it saw – initial funding was secured Minecraft-style and the Zomboid wagon began to roll. We’ve gone over a few road-bumps since then, sometimes through our own business naivety with Paypal and GoogleCheckout and sometimes due to pirates abusing our former cloud distribution and forcing us offline, but people seem to like what we’re doing still.
Desura swept in to save the day in terms of a viable platform to launch and sell the game from, a version that’ll run on Valve’s Steam servers is in the works and Fileplanet has made some very positive noises about supporting update and mod downloads. We’ve also had a lot of support from Notch.
Essentially the good guys of the internet, which includes the support of sites like yourselves, have stepped in and been great to us. At the start of this project Lemmy and Binky genuinely didn’t know where the money for the next meal would be coming from.
NA: Tell us a little about your team, how did you form and decide to create Project Zomboid?
Will: The primary Indie Stoners are currently Lemmy (coding and whatnot), Binky (art and whanot), Mash (lovely art and whatnot) and me (writing and whatnot). The ‘whatnot’ is essentially collaborative design concepts and ideas that we all throw into the mix – we don’t necessarily have fixed job roles.
Away from the mothership we also have the amazing Zach Beever doing our music, Afekay doing fun concept art and occasionally clever people like Caspian Prince of Puppy Games coming over to tidy up what Lemmy laughably calls his ‘game code’. Finally Johnathon Tinsley, candidate for nicest and most helpful guy on the planet, who has saved us from more server related disasters than we care to count.
We’re making Project Zomboid because we’d been waiting for a game like it since forever, and if no other bugger was going to develop it we thought that we probably should instead.
NA: Project Zomboid employs a style similar to some very old and excellent Shadowrun games. Where did you draw your inspiration from?
Lemmy: I personally have never played a Shadowrun game. The primary inspiration though is, of course, ‘proper’ George Romero zombies – shambling hordes and none of that ‘fast’ zombie nonsense.
In terms of other games that we drew inspiration from, certainly X-Com was a big influence in the visual style. In terms of gameplay, The Sims has influenced a lot of our design decisions. Also there was a rather awesome flash game called ‘One Chance’ which we think may have tweaked our brains toward such hopeless pessimism the and finality of death in the game. The fact that your decisions have real consequences that can’t be solved with a quick load.
NA: Why did you decide to not make your main character immune to the plague in Project Zomboid?
Will: Simply because infection is a real and viable threat during any zombie end-time. The feeling of being infected, then going for one last hurrah with a Molotov into a crowd of the walking dead is probably the best one that our game provides. We like to think that we’re making death fun. Because, in general, it usually isn’t.
NA: Tell us a little about what you are doing with sound to enhance the fear.
Will: Well there’s the ambient rain effects and that neat panicky alert noise when a crowd of zombies are piling through a doorway towards you – but the biggest aural trick is undoubtedly Zach Beever’s music. Zach is a young lad, but a certifiable genius – we reckon he’s the next Hans Zimmer and we’re stupidly lucky to have him on board. His moody strings and haunting piano turn Project Zomboid from a fun indie title into something else entirely. There’s more to come too, the next update has got some great new tracks in it.
NA: We do our homework here, you mentioned something about co-op in the future for Project Zomboid. Could you tell us a little about that?
Lemmy: We’re saying very little about co-op and multiplayer, apart from the fact that at some point they will be part of the game. And, actually, the fact that they will be part of the game right at the tail-end of the game’s development. We need to get a lock on the solo game – both in sandbox and PZ stories before we even start to consider it I’m afraid. It’s easily the most lusted after feature, but also one we can’t start developing for at least a year.
NA: For people who haven’t played it, tell us how your crafting system sets Project Zomboid apart from other games.
Will: It isn’t a million miles away from Minecraft in all honesty, although it’s a system that’s currently limited by a lack of recipes overall. Foraging some rags, some glass bottles and some petrol and combining them will present you with a petrol bomb for example. While a baseball bat and some nails will magic up PZ’s famed nail-bat. We’re going for a degree of realism here: of you want to open a tin of soup you’ll have to be sure to combine it with a tin opener…
NA: We recently did a piece on Desura’s alpha funding. How has being involved with Desura helped your development of Project Zomboid?
Lemmy: Desura have been nothing short of fantastic. We’ve been amazed at how much they have been willing to support us, to the point of helping us with authentication issues outside Desura itself, and providing a mechanism for people to use the game outside Desura itself. For a digital distribution platform whose best interests are to keep people locked into their client, they have been nothing short of remarkable in supporting us and our customers in however they want to play the game, and we hope they make it really big.
NA: Some of our readers are likely unfamiliar with the concept of “it’s fun to lose”. Could you explain how that relates to Project Zomboid?
Will: Project Zomboid tells the story of how you, or Baldspot if you’re playing our current (unfinished) PZ story, died a horrible death. Death is inevitable – it’s all about how you evade it and how you eventually succumb to it. It’s fun to lose in Project Zomboid because it’s an end-point, and because you try to fend off death for so long – it becomes something of a climax to the tale that you’re telling. It turns it into a story you can tell your mates in the pub rather than an irritation and a jab of a quickload button.
NA: Just how big do you plan on making the in-game world of Project Zomboid?
Will: Right now it’s impossible to say. ‘Big enough, and then a little bit more’ is probably the best reply to plump for. We’ve opened up mod tools to the community extremely early on in the process too, so it’s doubtful that punters will be running out of fresh cupboards to rummage through and interesting environs for those cupboards to fit snugly within.
NA: What advice can you give to development teams similar to yours?
Will: Good question. I think our first advice would be to look at our own troubles with payment, and do your utmost not to walk straight into a situation where Donationware-phobic monoliths like Paypal and GoogleCheckout don’t freeze all your cash.
After that we’d advise everyone to make a lot of friends. The success (well, hopeful success) of PZ has not only come from within the team – it’s been more to do with the lovely people and organizations that we’ve met on this journey and have supported us so much.
Finally, we’d ask similar development teams to do their utmost not to fuck everything up. We live in fear of fucking everything up every single solitary day. For any crowd-funded project following in the path of Minecraft, as we surely are, there’s always a danger of the system breaking down and customers not being happy with the product they pumped money into.
This is a wonderful, wonderful way to make video-games – but all it will take is one nightmare scenario and a bad taste could be left in consumer mouths. We’re doing our utmost to not fuck it all up, so that’d be our advice: ‘Don’t fuck everything up’. We might even get matching tattoos saying it, or something.
Once again we want to thank the team members for their time. Be sure to check out their official Project Zomboid site and stick with us for more information later on.
