So yes, okay? You can run in Project Zomboid.

A while back when we released the videos of Project Zomboid in action, we didn’t have any player running frames. Instead, the walking animation was sped up depending on how fast you were moving.

This, as I’m sure you can imagine, looks very silly when you’re moving relatively quickly. So instead of ruining the video by having “Benny Hill”-style comedy walking, we elected instead to only walk while we were capturing the footage.

This resulted in far too many reactions like, “I think it’s a little rubbish that you can’t run. Why can’t you run? Seems like poor design to me”, etc.

The same logic applies to everything else a human ought to be able to do, and the same answer applies to nearly all of them:

“How come you can’t climb out of windows?”
Answer: Because the art hasn’t been done yet.

“How come you can’t climb over obstacles?”
Answer: Because the art hasn’t been done yet.

“Why are the zombies bald?”
Answer: Because the art hasn’t been done yet.

Actually, this last one requires a slightly longer answer. Characters in the game will ultimately be assembled out of component parts – head, headwear, shirt, trousers, etc. So you’ll be able to customise your character to your heart’s content. The same goes for the NPCs which will use the same system. And since any NPC or, indeed, you the player can become a zombie, the zombies need to reflect the look of the character from which they turned.

So the zombies will have a head that matches the character. Because there are no other heads in the game yet, rather than having all the zombies use a head that looks like the player, I instead made them completely generic and bald – a template, essentially, to work on top of – adding hair, gruesome zombie effects, and whatnot as relevant. But since you can only work on one thing at a time, all this stuff has been left for post demo.

There we go then – now that I’ve finished the sprite frames, in the demo release you will be able to run. The zombies can’t though. 😉