Recently,
Project Zomboid, a game that has been in development for about a year now (I think) was attacked by hackers. Unfortunately somebody untrustworthy in the pre-alpha testing team gave a copy of the game to the public, which forced the company (Indie Stone) to have to release a rushed, unpolished version in order to mitigate the damage.
Fortunately, even the pre-alpha version of the game has been met with unbridled success. Set in a 2D/3D isometric style (somewhat like AVWW originally was), the game does an incredible job, with the environment, artwork, music, and situation, of giving you a very surreal and unpleasant feeling throughout the demo. I suppose it's what I would suspect a post-apocalyptic zombie world to feel like, always instilling a sense of not necessarily fear, but foreboding, that the end is eventually coming. That's another wonderful thing about the game, that it's designed from the ground-up to be a no-win scenario. The company has adopted the Dwarven Fortress motto of "it's fun to lose!" (but in this case, they've altered it slightly to "it's fun to die!")
The goal of the game is to survive as long as possible, and even though you may do pretty well while the electricity is still running and have plenty of supplies, things tend to take a turn for the worse when you begin to be attacked by looters, the power goes out, you are hit with bouts of depression, and even the people around you start going insane. I have to admit that the game looks like a gem, and has huge potential for being the best zombie-survival game ever made, with plenty of depth and difficult decision making. I swear it almost seems like Arcen could have made this game themselves.
The thing I really like about this company (aside from how potentially good the game seems), is that they have a very unique method of community-relations.
Quoting an excerpt directly from the FAQs section of their website:
Question: Indie Stone are unprofessional.
-You bet your arse we are. We’ve all worked in the commercial games industry for over a decade a piece, and we hated it. Loathed it. We’re sick of the commercial industry, and the last thing we want to be is the new generation of the corporate machine. What you get here is honesty, pure open game development where we are just us. A bunch of guys and a gal making a game they love who want to be a genuine part of the community that surrounds the game they are making.
People seem to love this about us, that we’re real human beings who respond with love or frustration, tell people the honest truth about how things are going and how it feels. We want to connect with our customers, and we try to show how loved up with them we are, how excited we are, how stressed we are, how happy we are, how sad we are. Of course the other side of the coin is when someone attacks us maliciously we don’t have a PR department and lawyers that forbid the dev staff any contact with such people, so if these things get to us we might occasionally reply with frustration.
Sorry about that, we genuinely try not to. If you don’t like this, we apologize. But that’s just two sides of the same coin, and it’s hard to have one without the other, as the only way to avoid getting that emotionally involved is to distance ourselves completely from the community, and I doubt the majority of the community would want that.
That all said we do try to refrain from letting such comments get to us, but when it’s a labour of love, the most important thing you’ve ever done, and people say vicious things about it when it’s 5am and you’ve been stressed to hell trying to get it out there for the past 30 hours straight, it gets to you and it’s very easy to cave and reply to these people. Just like when people say lovely things they can be sure of a loved up appreciative internet hug from us.
If we ever become stony faced emotionless ‘professionals’ then we’ve lost something very dear to us, and we’d like to believe a lot of those who support us would feel the same way.
This is by far, the most wonderful, most groundbreaking answer I've ever heard in response to this question. I absolutely adore that they aren't pretending to be something they're not, and aren't afraid to challenge the status quo when it comes to the accepted practice of community-relations. I'm just as sick of the commercial industry as they are, and I'm glad that even as developers, they don't hide try to hide it.
Judging from this, and everything else I've seen, I think their game could be a massive success, and change the way we view zombie-survival games forever.
Here are some postive reviews for the game: http://projectzomboid.com/blog/index.php/2011/06/press-round-up-zomboid-very-not-shit-say-people/
Grab the pre-alpha tech demo here: http://projectzomboid.com/blog/index.php/2011/06/free-public-demo-released/
On a final note, I had such a deep emotional connection with the game that playing it for extended periods of time became difficult for me. When I died I got a very
real sense of sadness, something that has never happened to me in a video game before. If the pre-alpha version of the game can evoke this kind of emotion from me, I can't imagine how the final product will affect me.
