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Mondoid Feb 04, 2013 4:34 pm It’s Monday. It’s Project Zomboid. It’s your Mondoid development update – this week featuring a cosy fireside chat with our returning symphonic genius the lovely, lovely Zach Beever. This week’s primary focus has been on NPC safehouse AI and events. Having the NPC metagame is all well and good, but if you can only view it in-game as resting survivors staring blankly at brick walls then it’s not much fun. Lemmy’s task, then, has been to encourage NPCs to take up activities like sitting on sofas, lying in beds and wandering from room to room whenever they’re are restless. On top of that there’s also NPC activities like standing guard at windows (looking for zombies or other NPCs approaching) or patrolling the safehouse for those poor uninfected people to contend with. All this already exists in the meta-game, but this week’s challenge has been implementing the AI activity that’ll actually occur when you’re there to witness it – making the characters’ locations consistent with the meta-game whenever you approach an occupied building. Of course, though, with all this fresh safehouse hustle and bustle comes the need for a fresh assault on building-based animations – the safe delivery of which has been entrusted to Binky. Pray bear witness, then, to a bald and near-naked man doing some mimes. From left to right, our hero survivor is: a) TERRIFYINGLY sat in a chair B) RIP-ROARINGLY climbing up a rope and c) DRAMATICALLY climbing out of a window. [image broken] Romain meanwhile is currently planning out a redesign of the skill system – perhaps for RC3, or perhaps for updates beyond. The one that is currently in the game is rather bolted on, and mixes physical things with intellectual things that really need to be represented differently. In the now trait-crazy world of Zomboid we’ll have physical stuff like how strong or sneaky you are represented by traits (that’ll also affect people’s opinions of you). A character may start out as strong, but spend months lazing about in the safehouse, losing the strong trait, and perhaps gaining an overweight trait. We feel this is a much more natural system for the game’s direction. Skills will be anything genuinely skill-like: the knowledge and practical skill required for carpentry, farming, firing a handgun will be changed to leverage the importance of books and NPCs in levelling up. While it’ll still be possible to level up through repetition this, as in real life, will take too long to be practical. Each skill level, then, will now be labelled at different points between Beginner and Master – and for each skill level there will be a book that’ll give a character a substantial bonus to the speed they learn that level. Likewise, an NPC that’s very friendly toward you may be willing to teach you, again providing a substantial bonus to the speed you level up. This, in turn, will make professions much more important and difficult choices. After the levelling up speed has been rebalanced, generally, if you start off as level 0 in a skill you shouldn’t expect to rely on ever becoming a master of it. Instead the way to go will be in relying on NPCs who spent their pre-apocalypse years honing their skills. Every skill will have a profession that starts with a large degree of experience with it (but never the top level) and professions will therefore massively influence the play-style of any bout of survival you go through. That’s the primary development work covered, then, but we also want to turn the spotlight on some of our beloved contributors in our Monday blog coverage – so step forward lovely, lovely Zach Beever. His amazing music was sadly cut out of later RC builds (just one of the development casualties that we discussed last week that prompted a great deal of the recent rebuilding work) but he’ll be back with a vengeance once RC3 hits… Hey Zach! What kind of crazy schemes have you been up to since we last spoke? I’ve been focusing on music now more than ever! Piano and composition are two incredibly important areas of my life. I spend a huge part of my day practicing and writing. I had a fantastic opportunity last summer to study in Prague with an amazing composer. While my focus on that trip was my contemporary compositions, everything I learned helped me improve as a musician, and I think that improvement is definitely shown in the latest Project Zomboid tracks. So your last batch of music was sadly disabled halfway through the RC2 builds. If people didn’t hear them, what did they miss out on? Was it very different to what people will knew from the 0.1.5 release? The last set of tracks was a diverse group, covering all types of different moods. There were as many ambient pieces in it as there were dramatic, tense tracks. I also started to experiment with different instrumentation. In fact, one of my favourites from the set, Fight or Flight, has a rain stick in it. Besides the obvious differences from previous sets, such as the quality of mixing, I feel that the individual tracks of the last set have more direction to them as well. It may not seem important, but I feel it makes a difference. Sample You’ve been back at your keyboard for fresh tunes for RC3 as well. What’s been your focus for your more recent contributions? How much have you recorded? The biggest suggestion from the team has been to include recurring motifs in different tracks. It’s something I wanted to do for a while, and it’s in this iteration of tracks that I’ve finally been able to make it work. Aside from that, I’m trying to fill out the soundtrack, balancing the dramatic moments with the ordinary ones and vice versa. As far as new music goes, I’ve completed two new tracks so far. The lower output is a result of the extra attention to detail. Have you been experimenting with any new influences, tempos or sounds? Yes! As well as finding new ways to use the orchestra, I’ve been experimenting with electronic and flamenco music. That’s not to say you’ll be hearing a guitar ensemble or dance synths in the next update, but I’ve kept those genres in mind during the writing process. Sample So how many tracks will that all add up to? What timings will the overall PZ soundtrack run to? I can’t say for certain, but it will be anywhere from 30 to 40 tracks. (For those interested, the current count is 25.) For timing, the in-game soundtrack will be over an hour of music. Where would you like to take PZ music in future? Keeping in line with recurring motifs, I’d like to make sure the final product is cohesive. Someone should be able to play the game, hear two tracks and then be able to recognize all other tracks as Project Zomboid – no matter where they hear them. I also intend to put in the time to revisit older tracks and improve their sound quality: paying more attention to mixing, the balance of the instruments and other such things. Finally, the album! I’ve begun work on extending the main tracks (all the non-ambient ones). It’s kind of a musical face lift. The soundtrack is going to stay a soundtrack, you don’t have to worry about obscure classical references breaking through, but the standalone, extended versions are a lot more musically interesting. I know not everyone likes a soundtrack that’s different, though, and I want those who like the original tracks to be able to listen to high quality versions of them – not just the small .ogg files they are now. I’m not sure how all this music will be organized, but I know it will be released. I can’t really promise a date, but I’ll work to the best of my abilities – this year will be extremely busy for me. In the meantime, keep enjoying Project Zomboid! Cheers lovely Zach! *heart image* So that’s about it for this Monday, although we’ll likely reappear sooner than usual for a rundown on what RC3 will bring in terms of modding and the modding tools EasyPickins has created for us. More casual PZ-ers might find it a little dry, thus us not talking about it on a Monday, but it’s nevertheless of vital importance to the game’s future – and we want to make sure everyone has the skinny on it. So stay tuned for later in the week for a bonus blog. Cheers all!

Second January Mondoid 2013 Hello everybody! It’s Monday blog time once again, and this week we’re going to look at the new construction system Romain has been working on, as well as some information on where we are going beyond RC3 and how we’re planning on plugging up a few of the cracks in the development and release process. Firstly a little team update: Andy and Mash continue their urban development project in Muldraugh, expanding the core fully developed inner-town to 4 cells, as well as providing some interesting areas to discover in the outskirts of town to reward those explorer types out there. RingoD continues on his mission to scriptify the mountain of dialogue that Will has written, and Chris continues to integrate these into the meta-game. Clue: What would you do if you discovered a spot of blood on a fellow survivor’s arm? Carpentry Romain’s new carpentry system integrates building fortresses into the new UI system, as well as fixes some of the fundamental issues with the old system and expands it with some tasty extras. We’ll let his video do the talking. The most fundamental change is that now the player’s carpentry skill vastly affects the quality of what is built. Level 0 walls are full of gaps, not only making them weak, but meaning zombies are more likely to attempt to walk through them. Even top level wall construction will not be completely zombie proof, balancing the safety player built fortresses provide and avoiding situations where the player is completely safe from zombies. And who knows, perhaps sky bridges will be a little more dangerous too. Also, new item types are now constructable, such as tables and chairs (NPCs and players alike will be able to sit in the next build, to provide more natural behaviours when ‘waiting around in safehouse’ than standing there looking at a wall for 12 hours straight. This will factor into gameplay more heavily in future, with players sitting down to read a book or listen to the radio. It’s uncertain whether these will make it into RC3 however. And of course, with new features such as plaster and paint, it allows you to decorate your safehouse so you’re no longer looking at wooden planks the whole time! It’s vital to point out at this point, that all Romain’s work is running concurrently to the crucial work that’s actually holding RC3 back. Since a lot of that work would be much too difficult to share between two coders working remotely in separate countries, it is specifically picked to play to Romain’s strengths in game system design, to be modular and exciting improvements and features that do not impact the areas of the game under heavy restructuring, and in no way is impacting the release date of RC3. It’s a way of making RC3 as feature rich as possible during this delay, but any incompleted features could be easily taken out and completed in a post-RC3 version should we complete the necessary work in the meantime. We do not want anyone to misunderstand this as wanton feature creep pushing the release back or taking development time off work that’s required for the release. Now for some more updates on what is going on, as well as our future plans, all of which have been addressed at great length on the forums in the past month or so, but we wanted to reiterate on the blog here for those who do not delve into the forums. Multiplayer Plans We’ve finally gone and done it, and are publicly committing to starting development on multiplayer as soon as RC3 is out the door. Yes, it’s official. That all said, the work involved in getting multiplayer working is by no means trivial, especially considering we’re committed to single player and will not allow multiplayer development to deprive the single player experience of the time and attention it deserves. Don’t expect it any time soon, but be comforted in the knowledge that it’s very much on its way. You can read more on what’s involved here, and if you like, have a look at this speculative thread where Lemmy gets all overexcited about what multiplayer could bring to Zomboid in the far future. Development / Release Process Changes This is of huge importance, and although we’ve mentioned it in previous blogs it seems the implications have not been as clear as they might be. Once RC3 finally ships, we’ll be radically changing the development process to take advantage of two concurrent versions of the game. A development project where all development of Zomboid will be undertaken, and a release project that all completed additions and fixes are merged into after they are completed. While this will add a non-trivial amount of extra work for everything we do, it will mean we can commit to releasing weekly snapshots of the game. ‘Yes, we’ve heard all this before’, I’m sure you’re all saying. Well it’s true. Since in the past delays have been in a large part caused by large-scale changes breaking the development build of the game, rendering it unplayable until the work is completed, now since we maintain two versions of the game and only transfer completed work across to the second, it means that second build will always remain completely functional and ready for release. From map additions, extra NPC meta-game scenes, to critical bug fixes, there will never be a circumstance where we need to wait on a release until things are fixed or completed, so delays will be at worst a case of days, and not the frankly ridiculous delays you lovely people have had to endure. Bugs can be fixed and released in the next snapshot, regardless of how disruptive any current development work may be. We should have done this much earlier, and that’s entirely our fault. However, unfortunately this system cannot come into action until RC3 is out the door. It does mean we can say the following, and mean it sincerely with solid plans to back it up: After this release, we can promise, you will never, ever, ever have to put up with months of waiting for a new version of the game ever again. More info here. So When is RC3 Coming? Sadly, the above in no way helps with the wait for the current build. The fact of the matter is, the old cell system, where 300×300 maps were loaded in in entirety, as well as the windows version of the game requiring using the 32bit version of Java at the time, meant in some cases even people with 2gb machines were unable to play the game properly because of out of memory crashes when changing cells. This needed to be sorted. And the changes and consequences were massive and far-reaching. The streaming system that went in, and as well as improving the immersion of the world dramatically, means the memory used by the game is now much lower. Unfortunately this fundamentally broke the NPC and zombies completely, since they could not function only knowing about the area of the world around the player. The need to fix this gave birth to the meta-game, which was designed to give the world back its solidity and persistence despite the limited load distance. After last week’s blog, hopefully everyone’s in agreement that the meta-game may turn out to be one of the best things we ever added to the game. It has come at a cost though, and that is the delay in this version. Nothing can be released until all of this has been dealt with, as until it’s all dealt with there isn’t really a game to release. Of course, if we’d implemented the new release system prior to this, the delay may not have had to be so severe, but hindsight is 20/20. As well as this, and in some respects more importantly, we have been gutting out the tangled roots of the game’s source code. The fact of the matter is that with the horrible events of late 2011, the fog of depression and the panicked rush to get back on track and get enough features in there to justify the wait people had had, and the aggressive efforts to optimize the game to run on lower spec computers, all took its toll on the stability of the game. It had gotten bad to the point that fixing one thing led to breaking 5 others. We released test build after test build, all broken in some unique way, and this had begun to take its toll on the reputation of the game. Instead of positive comments about pillows and hordes spilling in to rip people limb from limb, comments instead focused on the bugginess of the builds and this was damaging the prospects of Zomboid surviving in the long term. Especially after getting Greenlit, it became clear we need to get back on track, fundamentally fix all the big gaping issues with the game. Despite the many extra features the 0.2.0 builds had, they had lost something fundamental that 0.1.5d had that led to a lot of the positive attention we received in the first place, and the feedback around the internet reflected this. We understand people are frustrated at the delays, and many feel let down that the game no longer feels an alpha-funded title where the community get to test versions and feel involved with the development process. This is not permanent. Hopefully our planned development changes detailed above show we are committed to fixing this, and know the wait people have had is not acceptable. This last delay is for the best of reasons though, and we’re steadfast in our belief it’s not only the best thing for the game’s long term future, but necessary to avoid Zomboid’s reputation going down the toilet as a buggy mess. Especially with Steam on the horizon, Zomboid has to grow up and become a solid, polished game, with no gaping holes signposted with ‘stuff will go here’ and big ugly cracks signposted with ‘mind the gap’. We need to stop using the word ‘alpha’ as a crutch and provide a polished and fun game, but also one that can be updated frequently and safely without introducing additional problems. Recent history has shown the perils of releasing too early, and we want to get this right. The release will be as soon as humanly possible, and we want it out as much as, if not more than, everyone else. But of paramount importance is that RC3 will not surface until we know it to be the best version of Project Zomboid to date, in terms of fun, atmosphere, polish and stability. Especially with the delays we’ve had, releasing anything less would not only be letting people down, but damaging Zomboid’s name irreparably. Once that release hits, we’ll have a stable foundation to build from, and a new release system that allows us to build on it with no significant delays, and the ability to address bugs quickly. We will announce when RC3 goes into closed small scale testing (extra long to weed out the biggest issues, and a longer period more critical for this version than it will be in versions after that) and it will likely remain in testing for a couple of weeks. For those who are frustrated at the lack of an ETAs can use this as an indicator. It’s apparent that the worst part of not knowing when it’ll be is the assumption it might be tomorrow, or the day after. We’ll make sure everyone is informed when the game goes into testing, which means you can be secure in the knowledge that it’s not in the next couple of weeks until that happens. Apologies we cannot be more specific than that, but there are way too many factors that would throw any ETA guess out the window, so it’s better not to offer one we’ll likely miss and frustrate our community any further. In short though, we love and live for our community and our game, and want this next version out more than anything in the world. Everything we do, or don’t, has been carefully considered to give Zomboid the best shot possible of being all we hope it will be. Thanks for your patience, and we promise we’ll never need to ask this again once we finally deliver RC3. But until then, we hope people understand our reasons.

First Mondoid in January 2013 For the second Monday blog penned while Will tends to his budding QPR supporter offspring — and tries to remember what REM sleep feels like — we will talk a little more about the meta-game. What it is, what it will do and why it excites the pants off us. For the uninitiated, the meta-game is a high-level simulation of the game world that allows for much more in-depth character interactions in the game, linked together by story events scripted for certain circumstances, and allowing us to have these in-depth character interactions across the entire game world, way beyond the loaded area of the map around the player, without the game slowing to a crawl. Some of this may overlap earlier blog posts, and some of the conversations in our podcast on RingoD’s channel, but what the hell. While we’re still not quite at the stage we can show the in-game workings, we have some shots of the meta-game in action and explain in detail what the ramifications will be in the game. We’re tantalizingly close to being able to grab some awesome uninterrupted footage of it working in-game, and in the run up to release we hope to do several videos showing it off. To start, we’ll do a little make believe story involving some random characters. These are NPC characters within a game of Project Zomboid, and everything you read is taken directly from the functionality of the current meta-game system as it stands now. ————– Jack is a police officer. He’s been thrust into the role of leader to a bunch of survivors in Muldraugh. With him is his wife, Lisa. Others include two brothers, Bobby and Darren, and Shawn, Jack’s best friend, also a police officer. Our characters are situated in a farmhouse north-west of Muldraugh, and exist purely in the meta-game, along with numerous other survivor groups all around Muldraugh. The first day is rather uneventful. Darren and Bobby exchange a few insults, Shawn gets to know Lisa better (not like that) while Jack spends the day patrolling around the farmhouse to keep an eye out for zombies or other survivors. Jack decides to call a meeting. The group gather in the living room. Low on food supplies, he plans a looting mission, telling Shawn and Bobby to come with him. Jack, Shawn and Bobby leave and make their way south-east into Muldraugh. Jack decides they should head to Spiffos as they are low on food and a fast-food chain seems like a valuable target. They make their way to the restaurant, picking off zombies as they go. Spotting movement inside, Jack forms a plan. “I’m thinking that me and Shawn can make a frontal assault. Bobby – flank ‘em. Windows and back doors.” – Bobby begrudgingly heads around the corner to the back door. After a moment, Jack and Shawn quietly push open the door and step inside. At the far side of the restaurant they hear glass smashing, and Bobby shout “Who the fuck chose this place to loot?” and notice a sea of the undead swarming in front of them. Bobby is surrounded. Back to the farmhouse, Darren is sitting guard at the window when Jack and Shawn burst frantically through the door. “They got him. Christ. They got him. I’m so sorry Darren.” – Darren isn’t happy, to say the least. That night, while Jack continues his tireless patrols of the farmhouse, Shawn spends more time with Lisa, becoming closer to her. He starts to get jealous, growing resentful of Jack being Lisa’s husband, and being leader of their group. He has a quiet word with Darren, who now blames Jack for his brother’s death. Together they decide to dispose of him. Day 4 – Everyone is hungry. Jack plans another trip into town. Darren and Lisa will stay back and help protect the farm in their absence. Shawn goes with Jack. Arriving at a small grocery store, Jack thinks on what to do, and turns around to find Shawn pointing a shotgun in his face. Shawn pulls the trigger, and heads back – head full of lies to tell Jack’s widow. ———— It should be noted that in some circumstances we don’t currently have all the dialogue to represent some of the meta events. stuff like the conspiring may be more ‘gameified’ in the initial release, though this depends how much time we have and if there is scope for additional dialogue to be written once Will returneth. Where looting missions, characters reactions to zombies, and others already have a ton of variation depending on the traits of the characters. Either way, the goal is to expand all conversation related character interactions with actual dialogue in future updates, having characters insulting, bonding and confronting each other based on their traits and the situation.. What you read above is directly possible with the new meta-game system. Completely emergent story-telling using events and relationship modifiers. The player will also have the option of interacting with other NPCs in the same way as they can with each other, right clicking them to insult, befriend, order or plot with anyone they choose. Initially this may merely result in a gamey ‘you insulted Joe, he sadface‘ and opinion modifier until we get a whole array of insulting comments for your character to spout. But that aside, the story above could have involved the player as any of the roles. So how would the story above evolve naturally in the gameplay? Each character has various personality traits, and a calculated opinion of every other character. Weak and Aggressive people don’t get on. Trusting people like everyone more than they should. Brothers, sisters, husbands and wives get a substantial bonus to relationship between each-other. Envious people, like Shawn, covet leadership, as well as dislike people more if they envy their friends, lovers or possessions. Insubordinate people have a severe opinion penalty for a leader, no matter who it is. This leads to some characters having an inherent like or dislike for other characters, which can be altered over time with events. Characters deemed responsible for a beloved or friend’s death will have a severe penalty, where a character who saves another’s life could become a lifelong friend. A character with exceptionally low opinions of another may start conspiring to either take leadership away from them, or quietly get them killed. Devious characters are more likely to involve themselves in such plans. In the future this could expand to many other things, spreading rumours and poisoning relationships, getting them thrown out the group for misdeeds they are or are not guilty of. As characters get more touched by the desperate world around them, they may become unstable, depressed, and a variety of other maladies that will further drive a wedge between your group. No longer will the emotional traits and moodles (which will themselves be getting a UI and conceptual makeover post RC3, before Steam) impact on the game be mild, the emotional states of characters could cause massive rifts that tear apart a group, or end in piles of bodies and bitter rivalries. This system is being built upon, adding events that occur when one survivor group meets another, or zombies attack a safehouse, and numerous others. And each one added provides more power to make future events quicker and easier to add, which will enable a massive swell in game content over future releases. Meta-Bob and Meta-Kate With the necessary transplantation of the Kate and Baldspot story into the new map, we’ve also redesigned it to fit within the meta-game. If Bob is told to go to the shed, as a player this will appear as a quest. As an NPC, Bob would just run to the shed. Does he leave the cooker on? If it’s a player, it’s up to them. If he’s an NPC, it’s probably 50/50. Playing Survival mode after completing the K&B story will mean, like any completed story (mod or official) it will be transplanted into the world’s meta-game. These characters are now real citizens of Muldraugh. If you travel to the tutorial house, will you find it in flames? Will you find a zombified Bob and Kate trying to munch on your face? A dead Bobby Collins, killed by a hammer to the head and a distraught widowed Bob to team up with? As we expand the K&B story, and add other stories into the mix, eventually Survival mode (Sandbox will be able to disable these, do not fear) will be more and more populated with real recognizable Muldraugh citizens whose stories start in one place, but can branch off into the meta-game at any point. Beyond RC3 The plan is, ultimately and beyond this update, to allow the meta events that occur to a group to be logged by the individuals experience them as a first person recounting of the events, to allow the player to query characters on their histories before they met, or to get feedback on the events of a looting mission. Not only this, but further to allow for events to be fabricated in place of others, so ‘I blew his brains out with a shotgun’ would mysteriously transform into ‘I was cornered and he saved my life, but got overrun in the process. He’s a hero’. This would open a fundamentally different play-style to the game, where the player may opt to send other survivors out to do their bidding, and focus more on the management of the group and security of the safehouse, rather than looting and fighting zombies themselves, trying to keep everyone happy and sane, commanding your group to gather resources to build, to recruit new NPCs with skills you need, and to look for warning signs of conspiracies and lies. As more and more events are added to the game, linked to dialogue scenes and tied into character traits existing and new, particularly when the modders get a hand on it, will allow for such rich, involved, emergent and persistent stories to form from the web of character relationships, events, grudges. That NPC you team up with will no longer just be a blank face with a name, but a character with a history as long as the time you have played in the world. Maybe he brutally killed a group of six helpless survivors, one escaping and vowing vengeance. What will happen if they meet up again? It’s perhaps cliche to say the possibilities are endless, but with this system in place, the potential for extra content to be quickly injected into the game is very exciting. Each additional event, or chain of events, triggered in the right circumstances, will exponentially multiply the variety of story events a player can have in Survival or Sandbox modes. Our ultimate goal is for people to be able to watch a Lets Play of a Sandbox game and assume it to be part of a story mode. It’ll take a good while to get there, but with this system in-place, the work required to add quite involved character events into the game has shrunk dramatically, and require little coding time at all. Hopefully to the point that, especially with mods, there will be so many variations of events that could occur that no two games will be even remotely alike, and truly reach the emergent story-telling we feel the game requires to be fully realized.

New Years Mondoid 2013. This is also known as the Mondoid where Mash and Binky were both incredibly drunk. They will deny it. Happy New Year to you all from all of us at The Indie Stone. Will is currently indisposed with the birth of his sprog – no word as yet on whether he has a little Willie… or a baby girl, but until then I’m afraid you’ll have to settle with a blog post written by me (Binky) and Mash. So sit back, lower those expectations, and we shall begin. Right then. Er… what shall we talk about? And also, how are we going to identify who’s saying what? “Andy: Mash: ”, proposed Marina as she delicately typed away in a Skype window, “though I suppose I’ll need to use capitalization and proper punctuation if that’s the case”. “Marvellous”, replied Andy although in reality he didn’t and simply typed that response into the ‘add new blog’ page on WordPress while Marina was typing stuff in Skype about how my format is a stupid idea and really we should be doing it interview style – like all the other blog posts. “Sadface”, said Andy using an emoticon suddenly realising that he ought to have clarified that “Andy” is “Binky” and “Marina” is “Mash” just in case it wasn’t apparent. Sorry about this – this all goes so much better when Will does it. Let’s move straight onto something about the new map. Over to you, Mash. “Well, I think one of the modern facts of North American life is that we’re surrounded by brands and all of these brands are advertised. It clutters things up.” *Andy nods, like a proper interviewer* “In Project Zomboid, part of how we create a full world is to create its own brands. In previous updates players have already seen Spiffo’s and Seahorse cafes but in the future, players can look forward to visiting their local pizza chain franchise, Pizza Whirled. Or stopping in for a Slurp-Burp at Zippee Market convenience stores” Wait, what? “Slurp-Burp”? Uhhh… “I’ve just made that up. Making up this stuff is one of my favourites bits of PZ world-building. Another aspect of…” Woah, slow down there. I’ve got to put the picture in to accompany this bit… “Another aspect of branding is advertising - we’re surrounded by them”, (adverts I think she means), “in real life, and I think part of the reason the PZ world looks a bit too clean is that there aren’t advertisements littered around, blaring their messages at you.” Can I just take a moment to say that “Pizza Whirled” is a brilliant name for a Pizza chain? Tell me about the process of coming up with the brands. “I think this situation would call for a clever pun, but I’m afraid I’ve used up all my punning powers on names for shops/restaurants in the game. If the internet has taught me anything, it’s that EVERYONE (yes, EVERYONE) loves puns” You could have said that we just hap-pun across the… oh wait you’ve literally just made exactly the same joke in Skype and now it’s going to look like I’ve ripped you off. Um. Companeeebody knows where the — no, that’s awful. So. Anyway. Armed with this dizzying array of incredible brand names, what sort of thing are you doing with them? Oh cool – an advertising billboard. And “Citr-8″ is a lot more believable as far as a fizzy drink brand is concerned than the original “pop” and “fizz” branded cans that I made back at the start. So basically, lots more of this sort of thing? “We just can’t get punough.” Really, Mash? Really? “…I have a feeling I’m coming across as insane.” Don’t worry, I’m not including all this stuff – I’m restructuring it all so it sounds dead professional and that. “Puns aside, I think things like running to a local Zippee Market, rather than a generic corner store, for supplies is one of those things that add flavour to the game without the player really noticing. It may not be cars, or multi-player, or any of the other most-requested features, but it helps create the Zomboid world… and so maybe, just a little, makes that world just a little more immersive and rich.” I completely agree – Muldraugh (and the surrounding areas as we expand) needs to feel like a real place, not just a collection of buildings sprayed into a world. One of the reasons we wanted a designed world as opposed to a random map was for precisely this sort of reason. You’re spending time in a real place that we’ve put together ourselves. We want the world to have personality in just the same way that we want characters to. “Of course, not all the personalities will be as silly as the ones we’ve mentioned, it’s just that those are the most pun. I mean, fun.” Oh dear.

Another December Mondoid, 2012 Hello survivor! So we’re trying something a bit different this week. Will, Lemmy and RingoD have got together to have a chat about the NPCs, their meta game, what to expect in RC3 and what the system will mean to Project Zomboid in the long-term. There’s a lot of content waiting to appear in Muldraugh, but it’s the development of this system that’s the crux of the update – and the one that needs the firmest foundation before we release. We also chat about the difference between Sandbox and Survival mode, what the rest of the team have been up to and all manner of other fun stuff besides. To have a listen simply head on over to RingoD123’s YouTube channel and get stuck in. (The awesome game we mention in our chat, by the way, is Zafehouse Diaries, and you can buy it over on the Desura mothership. Well worth a punt.) Elsewhere, meanwhile, Mash has been further developing tilesets for map expansion beyond RC3. These let her create artworks with pipes like the following: And alsoconjure up exciting new places to be turned into a zombie like this: On top of that Binks has been knocking bugs out of enshrinkulation – meaning that the way 3D models are rendered as sprites is a hell of a lot slicker, and crisper, than you will have found in RC 2.5. Or lovable gallic friend Romain ‘RobertJohnson’ Dron, meanwhile, has turned his mind to carpentry – and specifically on the ways your carpentry level will govern the appearance of the furniture and barricades you create. The details of this are currently being debated internally, but we’ll probably be able to explain a little more next week. In more community-orientated news, meanwhile, or new website is very nearly complete. In the chat above we mention that we’re going to give you a sneak peek in this blog, but sadly the test build we have access to isn’t really in a super-screenshottable state. We’ll have to leave that one for next week too. So that’s what’s happening. Let us know what you think about the Monday (Well, Monday plus forty minutes) blog’s departure into sound on the forums. More of it? Less of it? Just let us know. Cheers all!

The Mondoid after the first one in December 2012 Good evening survivor. Do not be afraid. We come bearing PZ videos, and this suspicious looking wound was from falling over a log and DEFINITELY not a zombie biting us. No sirree. Not us. We’re as uninfected as the day is long. The closer we get to RC3’s release the more fun videos we can show you and, in general, the less cool new ‘stuff’ we can tell you about that you don’t know about already. This said, here’s some info on some cool ‘new’ stuff you probably didn’t know about already! These two nuggets of fun have made their way into the PZ build while Chris’ climactic work on making the NPCs behave is being fed into the mainframe. Before we delve too deeply, however, a quick note for Binky’s sake to underline that these vids were taken prior to his crisp-ifing enshrinkulation work on the sprites (first word mine, second word his). Annoyingly a fair amount of time this week has been lost to developer injuries, and nightmare sprite export lua bugs – but all is fixed now! Huzzah! First up, then – strafing in-game, and the sad demise of Baldspot’s trademark moonwalk. All combat now works using left mouse button and WASD. Holding the left mouse button will start you aiming toward the mouse cursor, and WASD will then strafe pointing in that direction until you release the mouse button to swing. This means that aiming beyond the heads of zombies is back, since we now don’t have to rely on that old mouse click position to ensure that combat against a throng of deadheads is nightmarishly difficult. Clicking on zombies will still work though, obviously. Oh, and if you play with mouse-control alone then right-click will still move you around – though we’re still working on how to let you strafe at the same time. It all looks a little like this: All this means the cramp-inducing ‘holding ctrl clench’ that was once integral to combat is no longer necessary, and you’ll have a lot more precision and tactical movement during combat. All this said, the old system will still work if you decide that your bread is buttered that way. Next video to rattle to a halt deep within the Zomboid tombola, meanwhile, is a WIP peek at the integration of Romain’s excellent camping mod into the RC3 build. As well as showing off his system a smidge, it’s also a great way for everyone to get an understanding of how the new UI will make everyone’s survival in Muldraugh a little more efficient – if not necessarily easier. It’s worth noting that we will have a specific crafting panel at some point as well, however. (Please note any slow-down in the vid is down to Romain’s Fraps playing up, not the game code!) Okay, so that’s the main orders of business over with for one Monday. Elsewhere Mash is busying designing new maps, Will’s doing fresh writing, RingoD’s scripting that writing and Romain is busying himself with a few features that’ll aid our budding gang of modders once RC3 hits. A few nuggets of housekeeping to close – after RC3 hits we’ll be unveiling a new website (not built by us don’t worry!) and we’d like to have a spangly new forum to match it. We’ve hit on a few snags with the latter, so if you’re a forumite we’d quite like to hear your opinion on what’s going on in this thread. Finally, we’ll be doing a full mod blog on it soon (if that’s okay Thuztor!) but the first rendition of the Vacation Island map has recently hit the boards. We love it. Please, please give it a whirl!

Mondoid from...some time in December 2012 Hey survivors. Monday always used to be the most depressing day of the week, what with the walking dead getting in the way of your commute to the office and the destruction of society as you know it. That’s why we chose this day to deposit fresh Project Zomboid news just outside your safehouse, knock on the door three times in sharp succession and run away. Binky’s Enshrinkulator (see here for technical deets) is about 95% complete, and as I type is in testing to make sure the files it spits out are all present and correct. Lemmy’s putting together a LUA script to test it, and then we can see whether everything’s correct in-game and that we don’t have floating baseball bats and pairs of glasses everywhere – before finally getting a few of those promised RC3 videos direct to your screen. Elsewhere Mash continues to beaver away at map tiles for future map expansion, and Romain has been developing the front-end UI (story screen, map selection etc.), putting camping and farming’s through their final test and experimenting with easy ways to create walls, doors, fences and traps into Lua. Lemmy’s work on NPCs meanwhile, very much the most vital remaining cog required in the RC3 machine, continues apace. Indeed, once it’s done we’ll hopefully be at the tipping point at which all of the content RingoD discusses below can be plugged into place. So, without much further ado, here’s Newcastle’s finest: Mister Paul Ring. Hey RingoD – why doncha introduce yourself a bit, and tell us how you got involved with Zomboid? I first got involved with PZ after I first decided to make YouTube videos after being told about it by a friend at work. After seeing the planned features and Paul Soares Jr’s first test drive I just knew I wanted to start making Lets Plays of the game. After my first couple of videos I started getting some comments off Lemmy, Binky and Nickenstein thanking me for them, and saying it was great to hear someone with a similar accent to theirs making videos of their game! Well this was news to me. I didn’t have a clue at the time that they were even from the UK, nevermind just down the road. After a few more messages backwards and forwards, we met for drinks and nerdy chats, and became fast friends. A few months later Lemmy realised the scale of what was to come with the amount of scripting that would be needed for the story modes and various NPC stuff and, after conferring with the rest of the gang, asked if i would like to join the PZ team, I obviously instantly said yes. What sort of scenarios and dialogue has Will been sending over that are destined to be a part of RC3? One of the major scenarios, if you like, is the expansion of the Kate and Baldspot story mode, giving Bob more quests to help his beloved Kate to get back on her feet and also introducing more characters from Knox County. It still needs to be ported over to the new map, and Kate needs a couple of new animations before it will be complete, but story mode should be back in. Certainly to the point it was at in 0.1.5d, and perhaps beyond. The other exciting things Will has been sending over have been various NPC encounters to go along side the new map streaming mechanic. In RC3 you’re going to have the chance to come across NPC’s in many different ways, which can then play out in different ways with reams of potential different dialogue. As well as that I’m scripting up all of the group dialogue stuff for arranging a looting party, with all the various random chit chat for NPCs seeing zombies, fighting zombies, being bitten, being healed and other various chit chat. What do you have to do to the raw copy that’s sent over? I get all of Will’s brilliant dialogue in a screenplay format, telling me the nature of the scene and the nature of the player and the NPCs involved – then the character lines themselves. I then wrap all of these up in Lemmy’s scripting language, the same one we first saw in 0.1.5, and make sure they all connect up where they should. I also add in any extra actions that need to be performed and can be handled by the scripting language. Everything is then passed on to Lemmy who creates the more complicated parts of the scenes around the dialogue using the Sadastic AI director and LUA. The scripting up of the story mode is a bit more involved, as I also script up all of the mission pop-ups and stuff outside of pure dialogue. I believe that stuff like tool tips will also be making an appearance in the next update. What’s your favourite exchanges that have come over so far? What do you think people will enjoy the most when it’s finally in-game? Wow, what a question. I could honestly spend all day answering this one. For starters there’s a brilliant random scene that has the chance to play out in a Spiffo’s Restaurant, but I’m not saying any more on that! I don’t want to spoil the surprise too much! There’s also a possible psychopath you can walk in on, or is he just a friendly guy you met at a bad time? There really is so many more great scenarios I could talk about but I know, as a player, it’s going to be better for everyone to experience them first hand than read them here. I have to say though, most of my favourite bits of dialogue so far have been some of the random one line comments – some of which are great tongue-in-cheek movie quotes. I think the thing people will enjoy the most isn’t just going to be having functioning and capable NPCs, but also how much more alive and real they feel – what with all the dialogue they can spout given various different situations. There’s already dialogue for different personality types going in, with tons more to be added in the future. How much content would you say you’ve processed so far? We have 15 different NPC-meeting scenarios – where you could, say, meet an NPC outsidem inside, in the dark or in the rain. Many of these then have branching NPC dialogue depending on your actions. Conversations hinge on whether characters are friendly, neutral or aggressive – but increasingly Will is also creating even more work for himself by providing different dialogue according to whether they have largely ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ traits. I lose count of how many variations there could be. There’s also random dialogue for player characters or groups when put into seven or eight different situations – including when you ask to group, which again has all those different random dialogue options. All these are ready to go and be dropped into the code, so if they’re not in RC3 – then they’ll certainly be a part of a build that comes quickly after. Then of course, there’s what I’m working on now – the NPC looting missions that Lemmy is currently working on. Those have twenty possible openings for dialogue as each one proceeds, code-wise, so the possible variations are going to be HUGE. So far I’ve done the full set of dialogue for the friendly (positive trait) characters, and am in the middle of all the others right now. You’ve also got your YouTube channel that introduced you to us all, of course. What are your plans for that? I love making videos for my channel. It’s something I would never have done if it hadn’t been for PZ. I’ve started to upload videos more often recently, and have started doing videos for various other games – even if I tend to try and stick to indie titles. I’ve just uploaded my first VLog last week where I talk to my subscribers about my thoughts and plans for it all. My ultimate aim is to be the premium YT channel for Project Zomboid videos, and to try and get there I‘ve decided to try and upload 2 PZ videos every week, with uploads for other great indie games i’m currently playing and enjoying coming in between. Hopefully I can get at least 7 videos a week out – people seem to like my content and constantly ask me for more. Maybe if I can get as popular with PZ as Yogscast got with Minecraft I’ll be able to do 7 a day Do you reckon that your involvement makes Project Zomboid the most Geordie zombie game of all time? Definitely the most Geordie zombie game of all time, and in my eyes certainly the best! I say most Geordie ‘zombie’ game as I seem to remember the original Driver game being made in Newcastle, and even better, you could get a special cheat code that let you drive around a section of Newcastle City Centre itself. That was probably the true greatest Geordie game of all time.

Mondoid...from...some monday in November I assume. 2012 Evening all. Another hectic week at the Zomboid Ranch – albeit one that was spent largely working on stuff we told you about last week. Binky has been obsessed with what he calls ‘enshrinkulation’ – the process by which sprites are crisply represented in the Zomboid engine. You can read into the process over on his blog. Chris, meanwhile, has been continuing his work on NPC behaviours in the up-close and meta-game. Will has been scribbling their dialogue. Then, Romain has been doing final farming tests and Mash has been continuing work on the new maps – with locations that look a bit like this. We’ll do those promised vids as soon as the fruits of Binky’s enshrinkulation are in the game. Until then, though, we thought it might be an idea to have a chat with your good selves about the map proper. The uber-map that covers our chosen slice of Kentucky. In this bright new age of map streaming we thought it high time that we met up with you to discuss Muldraugh, and beyond. The map in the current RC2 public test builds is comprised of two 300×300 cells, not including incidental connecting cells – one of which contains the town, and another with a farm. The map we’re currently constructing for RC3 though? Well that’s a 15 by 15 grid of these cells – so 225 of them in all. Cripes, but that sounds a lot doesn’t it? How on earth will we fill it all in? “At the moment, there are around four cells that myself and Mash have finished our specific building placements on” explained Andy ‘Binky’ Hodgetts when I msn-ed him this morning for Monday blog content. “That’s twice as large as RC2 already, albeit with more a lot more content since the farm cell was just one building with a well and some fields. The big difference is that in a huge chunk of the over-arching map we’ve actually now pre-designed all the currently unfilled cells – so instead of just being filled with random trees there are roads and paths, and that sort of thing. So if you wanted to, you could wander off and find spaces where we’ll be building new map content in future updates. We’re already amassing quite a catalogue of buildings still not present in the world.” In fact, it looks just a little bit like this: “The new map is designed from a sort of satellite perspective,” continues Binky. “The layout is done first, and then it’s chopped up into cells and then filled with content. So all the cells fit together seamlessly, and you can wander around with the map streaming. In the future, it’ll just be a case of filling the spaces we’ve already laid out. We know what goes in the gaps – we just need to put the stuff in there! Eventually, we hope to expand the world even further taking us to other towns nearby. ” As such when you spawn in the new map you’ll only hit entirely random wilderness after walking seven or eight cells in any direction – so seven or eight times the width of the RC2 map. There won’t be much to see outside of the Muldraugh we’ve designed so far – but it will be there. Is that a little… too big? “Nah. Big is good.” types Binky, presumably one-handedly while he gurgles his morning latte. “Big means more stuff that you’re unlikely to find, more of a feeling of isolation when you trek off to the middle of no-where to camp out in the wilderness.” Not everyone realises it, meanwhile, but we’re also using the real-world town of Muldraugh in Kentucky as our model. What was once randomly selected on Google Earth due to its proximity to Fort Knox and Will’s love of Goldfinger, is now something like our actual design target. “We’ve been reeeeasonably faithful to Muldraugh.” Explains Binks. “We’ve taken some liberties with it, and obviously Zomboid is an isometric game so we’re confined somewhat by the shapes of things. Then again, while we haven’t gone so nuts as to do a 1:1 correlation of buildings – the layout is roughly accurate. We’ve made sure that there’s the same sorts of buildings present. People could, for example, find it on Google maps and recognise certain features and also, if they wished, have a scroll around and make some fairly accurate predictions about things to come.” With map streaming and the potential for epic strolls through the wilderness, then, we’re making sure that we’re giving Project Zomboid room to breathe. Future updates will see us building new areas by hand and adding them to the map, rather than just haphazardly bolting them onto the side. We’ve given ourselves a massive canvas, and will be building forever outwards – although of course when we release all our modding tools there’ll be absolutely nothing to stop PZ survivors from adding their own creations to the sprawling map too. Death will always be inevitable, of course, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to find somewhere interesting to actually perish…

Mondoid Dec 03, 2012 Evening all. Here’s your Monday slice of blog love, but first a spot of housekeeping. The Indie Stone forums are in the process of switching hosts, so some users might experience unpleasant down-time over the next day or so. Don’t worry though, we still love you and are assured that all gremlins will be removed through the inevitable forward march of time. That’s the boring stuff out of the way. There’s heaps of stuff to talk about this week – and there’ll likely be a few extra videos we were hoping to share today appearing soon too. For the past few days Lemmy and Binky have been fiddling with the way our sprite models are (in their words) ‘enshrunkulated’ – to make sure they’re as crisp as we can muster when RC3 is finally unleashed. Unfortunately they take forever to export and get in the game, meaning we haven’t been able to grab one of the planned videos today. What we do have however (fanfare) is the first video appearance of Romain’s farming system – which is now a fully operational part of the Zomboid mainframe. Some aspects of it are still WIP, and some text will change, but it looks a little something like this: Romain explains: “In this video, you see only a few aspects of farming. We’re starting with seven plants, three diseases and all my statistics and calculations are based on the climate of real world Muldraugh, Kentucky. Every plant has a health stat that determines your vegetable and seed harvest – if it’s sunny it’ll grow, but cold weather and over-watering will see it drop. The healthier your plants – the more your farming XP will rise, and then the more bounteous your future plants will be” Other risks to your crop will be extreme temperatures, sowing seeds at the wrong time of year, idiot zombies trampling your fields or (of course) callous NPCs stealing your freshly grown produce. “I forgot to show off the fertilizer in the video” adds Romain. “And it’s worth bearing in mind that in future we will be introducing gameplay like making compost, foraging wild berries and mushrooms and allowing friendly NPCs to look after your crops in your absence. I’ve also pretty much got tents and campfires integrated with the main game too.” Possibly the biggest notch we’ve carved into the RC3 bedpost this week, meanwhile, is the integration of nearby NPC behaviour with the statistical metagame that tracks them as they explore the wider map. Alongside map streaming (that made it necessary in the first place) this was one of the biggest jobs that needed doing for the update – and finally lets us tie a lot of the fun stuff we’ve been concocting together. Lemmy describes the system in detail on the forums but we should have a video to show it all off in the not-to-distant future. Mash and Binky, meanwhile, have continued beavering away on the new maps – with Binks also investing time into mixing things up in terms of zombie and NPC appearances. There’s beards in there, spectacles and different haircuts – meaning that we’ve got more than 300,000 frames of animation floating around now. That decision to stop hand-drawing sprites seems to have been a good one! There’s other stuff to share, but it’ll all be best explained with accompanying videos. So we’ll be chiming in as and when they happen. Until then, fair Zomboidateers!

Mondoid Nov 12, 2012 Hello! It’s just another Muldraugh Monday so here’s your latest dollop of Zomboid related development news, alongside the last of the current run of developer interviews. This time it’s Mash in the limelight – and alongside some serious Sea Lion and Guinea Pig chit-chat we cover the new trait icons, menu art and mappage of the upcoming RC3 build. The rest of the team have been super-busy too, though. Binky fr’instance, has been working on some of the animations currently missing from the game – a notable one being leaping through windows, or hanging off them. Whether they’ll be part of RC3 remains to be seen – but there are a couple of other new animations ready to be fed into the current build that we should be able to show off very soon. We’ll keep schtum on what they are for now so we can surprise you with the video. Romain’s farming system has also been receiving a lot of love amidst the design of the new map. As well as his own work topping and tailing the gameplay, Will has been helping with anglification of its descriptions and Mash has helping to extending it out into the natural world around Muldraugh. These icons are an example of her toil. NPC work, meanwhile, continues apace. Will and RingoD are still conspiring to create in-game dialogue (most recently the words that spill out when you vocally assign a building to be your safehouse in front of your NPC followers). On top of refining the off-screen NPC meta-game and helping Andy integrate animations, Lemmy has done a lot of NPC combat work. They’ve been fixed up to remove ‘standing still and getting munched’ stupidity, and can now handle crowds of zombies without dying. Now we know that they’re capable in a fight the next job will be to dial back their effectiveness according to their skill and personality trait modifiers. A team of 4, or so, NPCs can now pretty much tear through zombies – which means we can now cruelly make them less effective and balance them nicely. It’s also good to know that when Kate finally becomes mobile in the Tutorial story she’ll be able to hold her own! Anyway, without further ado… here’s our very own Marina Siu-Chong to fill you in on what else she’s up to in the realm of Zomboid RC3. Hello Mash! How on earth did you get bitten by a sea lion? Was it scary? Hello Will! There I was, strolling down the street, minding my own business… nah, I got it in Mexico, while on a snorkelling tour near a sea lion colony. I was too near, as it turned out. It hurt a bit when it happened, but I continued snorkelling and didn’t realize I was bleeding until I got back on the boat. Totally worth it to swim with sea lions, though! So, what are you up to at the moment on PZ? I’m currently switching between working on new environment tiles and creating trait icons for the NPCs. The trait icons are being used to quickly summarize traits, so people can remember what a NPC in their party is like with a glance (the icons will update as new information becomes available and experiences happen). As they need to appear next to names, the icons are just 18×18 pixels, which is a challenge for readability… but that challenge is part of what I love about pixelling! Since you can’t pack in too much information in such a small area, the icons are consequently pretty abstract in some cases. Here are two of them as an example: You can use a brain to indicate ‘intelligence’ pretty easily, but a concept like ‘resilience’ is tougher. We’ll see how people respond to them, and make changes where necessary. People have seen a glimpse of the new menu art in the new front-end video. What can you tell people about it? How did you draw it, and why have you created a new one? While we all liked the atmosphere of the old title screen, it was always intended to be a placeholder. Since we’ve had this long period without an update, I thought it would be a good time to have a new title screen; with the upcoming release being a new beginning, and all that. We wanted a picture that would emphasize the more emotional aspects of PZ, and I went for a quiet moment between Bob and Kate. It was painted digitally in Photoshop. How do you work the map design with Andy? Do you do different sections? Andy (aka Binky) creates the landscape and gives me the layout, and I make the buildings, create new tiles if necessary, and add the detail. We generally work on different sections at the same time, but there will be some crossover where I create a lot that he’ll place on his map, and vice versa. What is the ‘Inappropriately Placed Riding Stable’ that keeps appearing in Dropbox? That always confuses me. THAT is why I have Andy give me the layout! In one of the maps I was working on, there was a big empty field, so I put a farmhouse-like building there. Then, I thought, “why not have a small barn?” It kind of turned into a stable. Then I put a big fence around it and turned it into a riding farm. Then Andy asked me, “Why is there a riding farm in the middle of a residential area?” And I said: “…” So it’s saved it out as a separate lot for later inclusion now. Where did Spiffo come from, and why is he the heart of The Indie Stone? He’s otherwise known as Mr. Spiffo, and he’s from PAWS. The first Indie Stone game. PAWS was a 2D multiplayer battle game in which adorable woodland creatures played tag and threw acorns at each other. It was quite a different game from PZ! The game was loosely set in the English countryside, so we had animals that were endemic to England, like hedgehogs and red squirrels… but I wanted a Canadian character in there too, so we added a raccoon. Mr. Spiffo (a temporary name that stuck, much like ‘Project Zomboid’) soon became the favourite with his sly looks and attitude, and became wildly overpowered (he could steal items, dig, climb, had a tail spin attack, and in the least biologically realistic feature of all, could use his tail to glide across the screen). There’s a few references to other games that Lemmy, Binky, and I have worked on together scattered in PZ (some might recognize the character on the cover of the inventory magazine), but Spiffo is the most overt one. When I was creating tiles for a fastfood restaurant chain, I wanted something that could have a cute mascot, and suddenly thought “Spiffo’s”! Will fell in love with him (I’m not exaggerating, he has said this on several occasions), and he’s become more and more intertwined with our company as a result. What’s your artistic background? Do you have work online that other people could check out? While I’ve always been interested in drawing, my official artistic background is relatively new. I went to university for sciences, graduated, and was working somewhat in that field as a scientific art editor, then as a project manager. However, I wasn’t happy with my job, and decided to back to school for art. Yup, I had my mid-life crisis in my twenties! I had started getting a little interested in game development during my time at university, using AGS. While there I met lots of cool and encouraging people, but it was my buddy Buloght in particular who was the one who inspired my love for pixels and helped me get better at it. Who knew that I would be using it in my job in the future! You can find my art blog and games work here. How are the Guinea Pigs? Lola’s good, but Hugo continues packing on the grams. Is there anything else the PZ community needs to know? I bought a mini sombrero for Hugo in Mexico. A photo of him wearing it will be taken. It will be tweeted. You will follow @mashpotassium and not miss it!

Mondoid Nov 05, 2012 (Note: Due to a later website redesign the display of the list is kind of effed on the blog post) Good afternoon, good evening or good night to you, hearty and healthy Muldraugh Survivor! We’re here with a few slices of development news. Huzzah! There’s still some NPC work to be done, dialogue to be bound into the game and some front-end work that’ll be needed before we can release RC3, but this week we’re really chuffed to be able to show you a video of what’s been worked on over the past few days from the cumulative efforts of Lemmy and Binky. We’ll let the video do the talking – which also showcases some of the new map (still WIP), as well as some of Romain’s fine weather work. This gameplay vid shows some of the various changes we’ve decided to make to combat and zombie-kind in RC3 so that fighting is more fluid and danger is rebalanced. Here’s a grab-bag of what’s been done: There’s a new downward floor swing/stab and shoot. Your chosen weapons and skills will now combine for a critical hit chance (a solid head shot, essentially) – this will be doubled when a zombie is down on the floor as they won’t be moving and melee attacks can be given some extra gravitational welly.Without a chopping weapon like an axe it’s now very difficult as a starting non-combat character to flat out kill a zombie that’s still on its feet. The focus for survival will be to get them on the floor to deliver some ‘fatal’ blows to the head. Getting one zombie down and gifted with a leaky brain will be relatively easy (though not without risk) but multiple zombies will cause issues. These new mechanisms would probably prove frustrating in the current test build, with its massively mobile and unpredictable hordes, but should work absolutely fine in RC3. Zombie populations now make more sense depending on where they’re located – in this video the character is travelling deeper and deeper into town, which is a better area for loot but simultaneously more densely populated with deadheads. As such, with the new combat we’re driving up the danger of looting missions, while keeping lone straggler confrontations as more of an inconvenience – as long as if you’re careful. (And, in case you’re wondering, there will still be occasional Sadistic AI driven migrations to keep you on your toes!)We’ve changed ‘aim’ so that it triggers when you’re holding the left mouse button (we’ve made sure that it won’t detect clicks on the UI, or swing your weapon when opening doors) and it already feels a lot better. It essentially means that you’ll have far better strafe mobility, and that you’ll only needing to worry about the mouse and WASD.If people are still in love with the old ‘hold shift’ routine, however, then they’ll be able to toggle it in the options menu. While we’re on that subject, we’ve also made ‘mouse only’ play possible once again, and it’s now much easier. Clearly, however, implementing strafing when people play with the mouse alone will be a difficult design challenge for us in future – if, indeed, it’s possible at all.Zombies are now far more likely to spread out when they approach you, meaning that they’ll be less of a shuffling death-train and more of an all-encompassing circle of soon-to-be screwed-ness.You can now step over zombies, so if you’ve knocked them onto their back then your chances of escape aren’t quite as slim. Then again, zombies can step over those self-same downed zombies – so they’ve simultaneously become a little more dangerous when they’re in crowds.In earlier versions of the game you could only shove when were holding a weapon. This wasn’t ideal, so now you can shove away with your raw bleeding arms to your heart’s content.That’s the meat of the Monday update then, but be assured that dialogue, map-work, RingoD’s scripting, tile creation and whatnot are also ongoing. We’ll be back very soon with a chat with the amazing Mash ‘Marina’ Potato to talk Sea-Lion bites, trait icons, inappropriately placed riding stables and sombrero-wearing Guinea Pigs. There’ll also be a Community of the Dead post to reveal the winners of our Halloween costume competition. Exciting times! We can’t wait for you to (finally) sink your teeth into what we’re working on. Sorry, as ever, for being coy – but as you can see in the video things are really coming together at the moment. Love you lots x The Indie Stone x

Mondoid Oct 29, 2012 Greetings gentle survivor. This week we’re going to have a cup of tea, a Nice biscuit (note to non-UK readers, there is actually a sort of biscuit called a ‘Nice’ biscuit) and a cosy fireside chat with our writer Will. He’s the one who puts the cuss-words into the dirty-bird mouths of Muldraugh survivors, and he wants to share his thoughts on RC3 with y’all. Let’s update you on what’s happening elsewhere first though. Last week we caught up with Lemmy and his work on the NPC survivor ‘metagame’ – and that’s taken up most of this week too. We’ve now got a good lump of code that transforms walky-talky NPC groups into ‘meta groups’ when they wander away from your direct vicinity, still retaining the same goals and paths but in disembodied form. This is still very much the focus of his work – but NPC raids, item distribution and optimizating the game whenever he sees an opportunity are also in his PZ-style line of sight cone. Map-wise Binky is still deeply buried in the lay-out of the map cells, dropping placeholders into areas to make sure everything looks okay and will play well – before diving in with a hammer and chisel to make new buildings permanent. His most exciting moment this week came with the selection and construction of Kate and Baldspot’s new tutorial home. It looks like this! Without wanting to add too much drama to our cosy Monday development post, Mash had some trauma while she was on holiday in Mexico. She got bitten by a Sea lion. (We know!). Formerly, when pressed, she used to say that the most incredible thing she’d ever been attacked by was birds – on two separate occasions. Now, however, she can add Mexican marine mammals to the list. She’s back now in any case – safe, sound and starting preliminary work on a brand new map cell for later on down the line. Finally Romain has been balancing his seasons, researching agriculture for the implementation of farming and streamlining the UI. For example, to barricade a window, you don’t need to have all the items equipped if everything is in already in your inventory. ‘Barricade’ will pop up as a UI option, items (hammer, plank) will be auto-equipped and a nailing you will go… Anyway, here’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for. It’s… well… it’s me… Why is that picture of you dressed as Batman? I lead a double life. Sometimes I write for games, like Project Zomboid, and sometimes I write about the games themselves. Sometimes, when you go to write about said games there’s a Batman costume there. I don’t know why, but that photo really was from a special moment in my life. Well, okay. So what are you up to at the moment in terms of Zomboid and RC3? While Andy and Mash busy themselves with the new map and Chris and Romain tackle Java coding that’s beyond my ken, right now I’m sketching out the NPC dialogue that’ll crop up whenever you send a follower (or a few of them) off on a looting mission. It’s probably one of the biggest jobs I’ve had so far, since we need player requests that are Friendly, Neutral and Aggressive – and responses from NPCs that reflect their mood state too. On top of that we need streamlined ways for your chosen foragers to report how they got on, who died and who was injured. In the fullness of time we’ll also have cool stuff like your followers recognising former comrades, who’ve turned into zombies on away missions, banging on the door. There’s an epic amount of material to cover! Will the new NPC trait system have any effect on your writing? Yep, certainly. The traits will be really useful ways to label the various different NPCs and their individual characters – so I’ll be able to create some custom dialogue for more cowardly or foolhardy followers to mutter at opportune moments. A lot of this will be written and implemented post-RC3, but for this build something I will be doing is using followers flagged with more ‘negative’ traits to respond to you in a more desperate fashion when they’re sent off to loot supplies – and to whinge more when they return with flesh wounds. The major feedback I get from Lemmy, Binky and Mash is that I need to inject NPCs with a much greater sense of doom – which is tricky to balance with the more functional ‘go here!’, ‘yes boss!’ dialogue. With the new traits, however, I can present a certain slice of the Muldraugh community as maudlin, suicidal and desperate people – meaning that the tragedy quota will always be topped up. I’ve also written a few scenarios where you’ll meet people who’ve taken overdoses, or have quite simply lost the plot as the zombie apocalypse has developed. They won’t be people who can join you, but they will give a stronger flavour of the breakdown in society. You’ll be able to steal their stuff, or just put them out of their misery – if you so choose. Any other scenarios you’d care to share? Well, we’re trying to engineer a few ways to meet other survivors – other than just bumping into them while you’re exploring the town. As such I’m creating a few meetings with NPCs who’ll want to trade supplies (for example, a character who wants to swap a weapon for a certain number of bottles of booze) – so simple fetch quests, with the possibility of grouping to follow. When can we expect all this? The joys of Lua and the new UI system mean that everything I’m doing is quick and easy to code into the game. As such, there’s no reason to suppose that what I’ve already written won’t be packed in RC3. What I will say, however, is that I’m even keener to get my hands on the new code than the PZ community! I’m desperate to see my stuff in the game – to find out what works, and what doesn’t. As such, beyond RC3, I think people can expect to see a lot of editing and fine-tuning in the dialogue systems while we try to strike the right balance between chit-chat and ominous silence. Everyone’s feedback will be more than appreciated at that point. What’s happening with Kate and Baldspot these days? The Kate and Baldspot tutorial storyline is currently scripted quite a bit beyond what people first played in the demo – there’s a new character that joins proceedings, and a fair degree of medical activity. It’s all been in the can, and ready for distribution in the code, for a really long time – but we need RC3 finalised before it can be put into action. My current working relationship with RingoD is that I do my scribbles, then fire it all over to him for processing. Once the game build has stabilised, however, we’ll be able to work together a lot more closely when creating new PZ Stories and developing the one we already have. I already know the two new characters we’ll be introducing next, but I’ll keep them under wraps until we’ve actually got to the stage when they’re in active development. As well as character dialogue, there’s a more general world story going on. Will you also expand on stuff like the radio broadcast in the tutorial? Right back at the very start I wrote out emergency radio broadcasts that would splutter into action as every in-game day went passed. A small slice of this is what ended up in the demo. I definitely want to get that into future builds to expand on what’s happening in the world beyond Muldraugh – and also maybe to flag up game-changing stuff like the water and electricity supplies running out. Again, that’s something that’ll be going into the game beyond RC3. So what other stuff are you up to other than PZ? Like I said before with the Batman stuff – unlike Lemmy, Andy and Mash I don’t work full-time on Zomboid. I still do a lot of writing about games for websites, and recently won a Games Media Award for a website called Hookshot Inc. I occasionally do a smidge of writing for other games that are in development too, but nothing I’ve worked on recently has been announced yet – so I’d better keep schtum on them!

Mondoid Oct 22, 2012 If it’s Monday, then it must be time to open the curtains, take down the barricade and worriedly scan the horizon. Yes, survivors of Muldraugh – it’s time for an update on The Indie Stone’s slow, yet relentless and inevitable, march to the front door of your safe house. This week we’re chatting with Chris ‘Lemmy’ Simpson about all manner of mischief – including streaming, NPCs and how to care for whippet puppies. Before he gets his moment in the sun, however, we should say that things are still coming together. It’s likely, for example, that the code and map deliveries will coincide for the update – although we still need to play with item distribution, create a new tutorial house and get RingoD transplanting the action into K&B’s new home. We know that people are chomping at the bit for the new update, and we know that reading about the new stuff we’re introducing is a bit of a tease when people have gone without for so long. We’re aware that stuff like the improved NPCS sound a bit feature-creepy, but assure you that the work spent in fiddling around with them is a necessity brought on by the necessity of introducing map streaming. There’s a lot of necessary stuff going down, basically. In terms of polish, too, at the moment we’re systematically going through the game and trying to fix and polish as many of PZ’s gaping holes as possible. NPCs and the UI were two of the biggest holes that needed quickly barricading shut ASAP. Lemmy will explain a little bit more about all this, and our plans for thicker and faster future updates, after we plaster a picture of his big stupid face all over your computer screen. First things first, how’s Cally the Wonder-Dog? She’s doing great! Though she’s teething so is leaving nice sharp presents for us to stand on along with nice soft smelly squishy presents – though she’s finally getting the hang of doing the latter outside. That’s a clever nickname you came up with for her there, because we certainly do wonder about her. Huzzah! So, anyway, how has the recently-added map streaming changed the game, and the way you code it? Well the main difference is obviously there’s a lack of any loading screens when walking around the map. The impact this has is on the immersion – you never see that black border and you’re never aware of, say, being in the ‘top left corner’ of here or the ‘bottom end’ of there. It’s just one big seamless world. From a coding perspective it’s saved a ton of memory since we’ve been able to go back to only having the 0.1.5d map-size loaded into memory. That memory save is what made the streaming a necessity – many people would have struggled with the code in its former state. It’s also brought a few challenges with it – but they’ve been welcome ones really. We now need to think about how to deal with NPCs in a more meaningful way, for instance. So what are you currently doing with those hardy Muldraugh NPC-types? This has been the subject of many a four-way Skype design chat, and even more latte-supping with Binky. Will (who is the one asking these questions, but never mind let’s not confuse things) has written a mountain of NPC chat that’s yet to go into the game, and we want to use that to its fullest. The thing is, with streaming potentially making the ultimate persistence of the NPCs more difficult, we had to rethink how they work on a fundamental level. As such, we’ve been looking at quick design ways to get most ‘bang for your buck’ with NPCs. Trying to make them the HAL 9000 of zombie survival seems to be a fool’s errand, especially when one day in the far-flung future only 1/1000th of the map will be loaded into memory. So right now I’m working on a ‘meta-game’ that extends across the entire map that has virtual survivor groups moving between buildings, looting and surviving according to statistics that’ll let us trigger infinitely more interesting NPC encounters. I’m also implementing more information to the player on NPC survivors, including traits in the form of ‘observations’ and a few more group commands for them. Here’s a screenshot from the current build, where I’m printing out a debug overview of the world with survivor groups (red = aggressive, green = friendly, white = mixed) to see how the survivors get on. With the new meta-game survivor groups can now last for weeks, even months, without dying. When people play the update, what will they notice as being different about fellow survivors? NPC meetings should be infinitely more interesting. Instead of running around from one vague X, Y coordinate to another – and telling you to ‘fuck off’ – they could be say… running to their safehouse and invite you to come along. Alternatively they may be ambushing you at your safehouse to steal your stuff, or perhaps be in the middle of an altercation with one of their teammates. NPC meetings will still be driven by a sandbox environment, but will be more like story points when you meet them. Also they’ll be massively more useful since you can tell them (or they might decide independently) to go on looting missions. You’ll be able to ask them to go get food, and then see them wander off for a day or so. They may come back, they turn into a shambling corpse somewhere, they may bring those supplies – and if they do return they might’ve taken a bite in the process. Here’s the unfinished ‘send characters on looting mission’ selection screen, where you can choose (by observing the character’s personalities and traits) who to send to get supplies (or die horribly in the attempt). And here’s the WIP character info screen. Please note a stupid illiterate programmer wrote those descriptions as placeholders, and not our resident writer…: So, if an NPCs is capable of bringing in more food than he/she can eat, then they could well suddenly prove to be an asset and not a liability. Finding tough, survivable NPCs will be a big help to surviving longer. Since the NPCs will have such relevance now – you’ll be able to check a character sheet of sorts which will describe observations that you’ve picked up from them. In fact Will has just sent these over, so you can have a sneak peek. Lastly, to make survival harder and to make NPCs ever more necessary we’re going to be a lot stricter with item distribution. You can expect it to be a lot tougher to scavenge food and resources to survive – since the high loot area will be mid-town where all the zombies are. So a lone wolf without good survivalist skills will find it tough, so might need to look to others for support. Sweet. We’ll probably expand on all that the NPC stuff when Will (who’s me) gets his slot in the spotlight next week. Is there anything else you’ve added that would interest the PZ community? Well primarily all the new NPC stuff, from the UI to the meta-game, is completely written in Lua. As such it’s fully moddable, expandable or even replaceable. Speaking of which you were posting enthusiastically on the forums about the work of one EasyPickins. Who is he, what’s he done and what does it mean for the PZ community? We approached EasyPickins a month or so ago because, quite frankly, even with his awesome awesome improvements to TileZed, our map production was just way too slow. We came with a few ideas and some rough prototypes we’d put together and he quickly transformed them into WorldEd (which he’d actually been working on for the existing map system), and made some exciting improvements to TileZed on top of what we’ve already shown off in our recent video. He’s also made TileZed about a hundred times more polished and nicer to use. He’s made a mechanism for converting a big BMP (say 3000×3000 for 10×10 cells) into grass, trees, sand, gravel and so it’s all blended together with intermediate tiles, and then spits it out 0_0 to 9_9.tmx. So then you’re ready to start creating buildings with BuildingEd, and to simply drag them into place in WorldEd or TileZed. A click of ‘Export’ will then create files to simply drag into a new Maps folder, meaning that your new map will be selectable as a new game along in the new front-end. EasyPickins has been astoundingly fast, and everything he produces is really polished and professional. He’s continuing working with us and we’re very excited at what the future will bring with map production speeds to both us and the modders. Over on the Desura boards you recently explained why we couldn’t release early versions of what we’re currently working on. You used quite a good Scrapheap Challenge analogy. Could you possibly cut and paste that here for a wider audience? “If anyone’s seen Scrapheap Challenge or a 3 day time-limit DIY show or something. That’s alpha funded dev. You have a pile of garbage for weeks, then it all comes together within the last few minutes. We can’t just arbitrarily ‘release something’.” It’s completely understandable, but frustrating to read ‘just release it damn it!’ when what you’ve currently got is a version of the game where all the zombies are zipping around at 1000mph (Romaaaain!) or there’s only food getting spawned in the map (meeeeeeee!). You just know that releasing what you’ve got in front of you is the worst thing you could possibly do! We’ve often ended up releasing earlier than we planned to just because we were worried it’d been too long, and we reached a point where we felt we could ‘just release something damnit!’ and thought, well our community want it, we’ll give it to them. Sadly this has resulted in a lot of our community still playing an older release of the game, and people elsewhere who perhaps weren’t aware of their ‘test release status’ who assume Zomboid is shoddy buggy stuff. This is the last thing the game, or the community need. So all of us made a pact this time that the next version of the game would be ‘right’. A few quick patch bugs aside, we’re just going to remain steadfast and release the best version of Zomboid there has been since day one. And also, finally, get those poor (yet awesome) souls at Desura an auto-updating version of the game. What’s it like working with our new recruit Romain? What’s he beavering away on? Will all his work be present when we update? Romain has been great! After getting the new weather system in, he’s currently implementing farming, after which he’ll be looking to implement the campfire stuff (since, as the Starks say, ‘Winter is Coming’). It’s such a massive relief to me to know that if I’m ever stuck guts-deep in something that the game’s code isn’t at a standstill, and that someone is still getting stuff in there. I’m sure people have noticed a sharp drop in the number of stressed coding tweets since he joined! I’m sure farming will be in the next update. We’ll see about campfires after that. Something else that it sounds Romain has brought to the Indie Stone’s table is a potential new approach to bug-fix builds. Could you elaborate? It’s the system Romain uses where he works, and basically involves maintaining two concurrent builds of the game. There’s one that’s frozen from the last update, and one development build that new features are implemented into. This means that if a bug is reported, we can fix it in the development build and them merge the changes across to the frozen build. Once we’ve fixed enough, we can simply release that frozen build as a bug fix release – without people needing to wait for the development work to get to completion. It should have a dramatic effect on both our ability to approach bigger development tasks freely, as well as our ability to quickly fix problems with the game after an update – and to speed up the frequency of the updates. Anything else that you’d like to mention? XCOM! Can we have a photo of Cally the Wonder Dog please? Yes! Oh, and while we’re at it here’s a quick screen of the new map cultivated from Binky’s work-station. We’ll be back mid-week with the next instalment of Community of the Dead. Thanks all!

Jus tnoticed, posting youtube links converts them into embedded videos automatically. HOORAY

Mondoid Oct 15, 2012

Mondoid Oct 08, 2012

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Mondoid Sep 24, 2012 Hello! Here's your Monday status update - slightly copied and pasted from the front page blog, but here nonetheless. Work on RC3 continues apace. This includes something rather unexpected. While Lemmy and RobertJohnson/Romain were busying themselves with the code it became increasingly evident that memory was again becoming more and more of an issue. Memory demands were dangerously high, and it was looking increasingly likely that people with lower-end systems would suffer come release. Cometh the hour, then cometh the streaming… Through this new system we’ve saved 400 meg of memory demands, because we no longer need the entire 300×300 map loaded up. It’s something of a relief to have working, in all honesty, and we feel like we’ve dodged something of a bullet. In terms of the update proper Chris is currently Chris is fixing a few issues so that Knox County will react cogently to the new streaming system, while Romain is rejigging NPC interaction to use the new context menus – as well as mopping up a few remaining issues in the game. Will and RingoD are conjuring up some fun new NPC encounters, while Mash and Andy continue in their quest to expand the borders of Muldraugh for a future update. More as it happens. The head of steam we built up post-Greenlight hasn't faded yet

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