These last couple of days we’ve been doing a fair bit of work replacing the placeholder UI we’ve had since the start (that we all hated), with something swankier and easier to use.

It’s work-in-progress, so there’s a few things not in the correct place or unlabelled – there’s no scroll buttons for the inventory or any indication of capacity for a start, but we thought you’d all like to see it anyway.

So here it is:

We’ve dropped the concept of literal left and right hands in favour of the more general main and secondary hand slots because otherwise things get a little confusing depending on whether you’re left or right handed.

The inventory panel swishes in from the left-hand side which means that there’s much less screen-space obstructed when running in lower resolutions. We’ve also tidied up the mechanic of actually transferring items between containers and your inventory so that there’s less clicking and dragging required.

You can also see the crafting panel here (currently without a title in its title bar). This is only on-screen during the actual crafting process, but we kept it as small as we could without it becoming cumbersome.

In a game where you need to scavenge for supplies pretty often, having a nice tactile and easy to use interface is of primary importance, so it was definitely something to improve before we go live with the demo taster version.

Please continue to discuss this (or anything else) in our forums, just as long as you don’t hate the new interface

Oh my, there’s at least two puns in that blog post title. That is why I should not have lead writing responsibilities on Project Zomboid. That is why we’re more than happy to hand all that over to the extremely amazing The Will Porter.

Yep, The Will Porter – of editor of PC Zone fame, various commercial games words fame, and some of the words from smashing Channel 4 series Skins fame.

Swoon <3

You can follow him on Twitter @Batsphinx.

Whoops, well we’ve not posted any updates for a few days now. There’s some structural stuff happening which, while essential and hugely beneficial to the game does not, alas, yield much in the way of exciting screenshots.

Some of this is engine-related – the game runs significantly faster now, uses less memory, and is generally about 400% more funkeriffic. Some of this is to do with character moods and mental states which, although it needs doing, will probably not feature in the demo unfortunately. Unless it does, of course. But it probably won’t.

Nickenstein’s also been beavering away with his fire code making it generally nicer, and slotting some updated graphics in. I could post a screenshot of that, but at the moment it looks pretty much the same as the last screenshot when in a static image

Also, it’s his birthday today.

So anyhoo, I just wanted to say something about what’s going on. Hopefully there’ll be a new screenshot or two later on this week.

In the meantime, the splendid mmmicrophone – one of our active forum posters – has set up a Wiki for the game. There’s not much to see at the moment, but with any luck it will build into an awesome companion to Project Zomboid.

www.pzwiki.net

And finally, as always, please drop by our forums to get involved in the development.

“Oh woe is me!”, the programmer laments, “Art is so immediate, coding can be so dull. There’s so much less to show off. Sulk sulk sulk sulk – OH HERE IS A SCREENSHOT I HAVE JUST TAKEN BECAUSE I’M THE ONE WITH THE WORKING BUILD I CAN FIRE UP ON A WHIM”.

So you’ll just have to go to Lemmy’s blog if you want to see the picture. Perhaps in the future I’ll snaffle one or two of the rejected ones to post here.

Sulk

Below is a short video demoing shotgun combat. Obviously in the final game, combat will represent only a small fraction of the gameplay but given that up until this point we had only released a couple of screenshots, we figured people might actually want to see a few things in motion.

And if you’re a fan of words, the lovely David Brown has interviewed us over at Plughead.net. This is the first interview we’ve given since Nickenstein joined.

Anyhoo, without further ado:

This weekend’s exciting Project Zomboid updates include:

Fire! (doo doo doo – I swear I’m going to have that song stuck in my head for weeks now)
Bloody Mess! (this looks great in motion as the lumps of gore are projected back from the force of impact. There’s also the occasional eyeball spawned for ultimate Fallout homage!)

Next on the list to take those two features to funky new heights, is get the zomboids to be set alight by this spreadable fire and have the heads removed from the sprite when you blast them with a sufficiently high powered weapon. Also, more blood splat variation because you can’t have too much blood in a zombie game!

Clicky the linkies because there’s pictures there, and that.

Update: You can see the blood effect in action over at Plughead.net, where we’ve released the first ever in-game footage! Slightly scary doing that – earlier than we intended, but given the lovely responses we’ve been getting it seemed only fair to show something actually moving rather than just screenshots.

Werner and Walter Randelshofe have a website, part of which is dedicated to Deluxe Paint Animation (and equivalents across MS-DOS, Amiga, and Atari ST platforms). A whole heap of files are there to be browsed, sorted by platform and artist. It’s really quite the treasure-trove

But best of all, on their site they have downloadable viewers and web applets for playing these program’s file formats directly!

The ANIMApplet plays Amiga IFF ANIM files using a Quicktime-style embedded video player.

Features:

• Plays files of type IFF ANIM, IFF ANIM+SLA, IFF ANIM+ANFI, IFF ILBM, IFF PBM
• Supports all Amiga display modes (OCS, ECS and AGA)
• Supports Amiga 4 channel stereo sound (requires Java 1.3 or above)
• CRNG and DRNG color cycling
• Supports discrete and blended (soft) CRNG cycling
• QuickTime-like user interface
• ANIM files can be zipped to reduce loading time

MS-DOS .ANM files would need to be converted to IFF ANIM format to play, of course. And there’s still the Windows Media Player codec for playing these DOS files.

Browse their library of animations here!

http://www.randelshofer.ch

Simon Pegg once wrote a brillopops article on why zombies should never run. It’s something that seems to have happened with zombie films and, since Left4Dead, zombie games too.

I suspect that a lot of this is due to the zombie genre meeting head-first with the FPS game. Arm the player with a machine gun and throw waves of useless shuffling idiots at them and, well, it’s probably not going to be the hardest game on the planet.

Of course, chuck super fast zombies into an FPS and another thing has to go as well – if a scratch from a zed means death the game would be utterly impossible, and so another modern zombie game cliché is born: the conveniently immune player character.

But Left4Dead was a glorious game and even if running zombies and immunity irritates the hell out of you, it’s difficult to criticize it for that when the game’s so beautifully crafted. Left4Dead even went one step further: by including a versus mode and having human players take on the role of the “special infected”, the zombies suddenly became smart – planning and executing ambushes and generally co-operating. But it’s just a game, the versus mode was incredible fun, and it’s their game and therefore their rules on how the zombie virus works.

So the trouble is essentially, slow useless enemies don’t lend themselves to a fast-paced action FPS. They do, however, suit a slow-paced survival RPG – the sort of game which is to Left4Dead what “The Last Man on Earth” (the Vincent Price adaptation of “I am Legend”) is to the Resident Evil movie. Except where black and white film has become retro pixel graphics. Or something. I haven’t really thought this comparison through, if I’m honest.

The beauty of “The Last Man on Earth” is that the problem isn’t so much that there are (well, they’re really sort of a zombie / vampire hybrid but I’m going to call them zombies because it’s easier) zombies everywhere, but that there aren’t any other humans. The zombies are pretty much ineffectual for the entire film – Price as Robert Morgan is quite safe in his house as long as he boards up the door and windows, and hangs up some garlic. Instead, they serve as a constant reminder of his loneliness – every night, shuffling around outside moaning. It’s enough to drive anyone mad.

Of course, this level of isolation would make for a pretty repetitive game – but there’s a lot to look at for inspiration. The day to day life of Richard Morgan involves travelling outside by day, clearing areas of the city of zombies, taking the bodies to the pit to be burned, fetching supplies and then at night returning to his house, checking the defences and then having dinner and putting some music on to stop himself going insane. It’s the basic blueprint of the survival RPG.

If zombies were to run about in this sort of game, not only would it make it impossible to survive but it also wouldn’t really suit the atmosphere. Finding yourself surrounded by the horde because you broke into a house, set a burglar alarm off, and failed to check if you had another escape route is a much more exciting turn of events (to me, at least) than finding yourself surrounded by the horde because they can run as fast as you but have no stamina limits to worry about.

In every good zombie film, it’s the slip-up which leads to death. I went to bed without checking the back door was locked. I came home from a supply run without checking that no zombies had followed me. I failed to keep my comrades sane, so one has walked out in the middle of the night leaving the front door wide open. Those sorts of things.

The other final beauty of the slow zombie, is that you can never be entirely sure you weren’t followed. You’ve arrived home, the streets are empty – you’re safe! But who’s to say that hours and hours ago a zombie didn’t look up and see you creeping past and begin his slow relentless trudge after you, alerting more and more zombies as he does? Who’s to say that somewhere out there, there isn’t a hundred zombies all stumbling ceaselessly in your direction? Are you really certain? Sweet dreams.

More info on Project Zomboid

Two has become three in a sort of backwards version of that Spice Girls song. Nickenstein is a talented and horribly jaded ex-commercial developer who we’ve known and worked with for the best part of twelve years.

He’s moved into our flat and that, so he comes at the whopping expense of 29p for some extra beans a week – so there was really no good reason not to immediately rescue him and plop him headfirst into Indie development.

Lemmy’s gone into much more detail here.

And you can read Nick’s all-new blog here.

So hooray and all that!

Woo! The lovely James Keating has posted an article on “the Indie ethos” over at Push-Start featuring Lemmy and I, and Project Zomboid.

It’s pretty long because er… well, as anyone who has ever met us can attest to, we do rather ramble on and rant when somebody asks us questions about the games industry.

Clickitty-click the link for the article:

The Indie Ethos – An Interview with Project Zomboid’s Developers