Hi all, we do hope you’re well and surviving okay.
This is a quick blog to update you with what’s been going on in the back rooms on Project Zomboid over the past twelve months. Which is quite a lot – and what we hope you agree is good and exciting news.
The first thing to mention, and the reason for the timing of this blog, is our new Design Director.
Christian Allen (aka Serellan in the community and on the Workshop) has been a Lead Designer on many and various games – with Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and Halo: Reach perhaps the biggest names on his CV.
More importantly, however, he also has over 5000 hours in Project Zomboid both as a player and a modder – which makes him firmly one of us. Or, perhaps even more importantly, it firmly makes him one of you.
He has been with us for a month now, and his first mission has been to muck in with the team and work on the bits of Build 42 where long-established players have been banging their heads on the moved furniture.
Christian’s new role, however, is only one recent part of a period of reorganisation and new faces being introduced.
Given the growth of game, team and audience – last year it became clear: we needed fresh, experienced, blood mixed into Project Zomboid development and production.
As such one Max Brode joined us in the October of last year from Ballistic Moon as Lead Producer, and has now become our Production Director.
This has led to us being a more organised beast through all our departments, though externally it might have been most noticeable in our QA and build release processes. Updates have been far more regular and consistent than anything B41, or anything previous to it, ever received. Our recently promoted Producer, Yana Marszalkowska-Duncan, has also been a big part of this.
To name all the promotions and reshuffles is perhaps a bit too ‘inside baseball’ for a blog like this. However, it still gives us the opportunity to publicly welcome Max Nuttall (Production), Matt Sullivan (Community), plus Daniel Heelan and Matthew Harber (QA).
Next up, we move onto the movers and the shakers of the code department.
Patrick Brott, the amazing creator of B42’s ragdoll physics, is now our Technical Director with a burning passion for cleaning up the more elderly areas of our codebase and making life easier for the modding community.
He is aided and abetted by our newly crowned Lead Gameplay Programmer Romain ‘RJ’ Dron, who will be familiar to so many of you as one of our most longstanding contributors and most recently introduced animals to The Knox Event.
This pairing are now also joined by our Lead Engine Programmer Erik ‘Grum’ Broes who we were delighted to have join us from Mojang at the start of the year. This also means that, alongside Thomas ‘ProfMobius’ Guimbretiere, we now have two of the early Minecraft guys on our team – which makes us both proud and grateful.
Clearly the prime and absolute focus of the code department is currently working alongside our friends at Vertex Break to bring you the MP aspect of Build 42 which, while we don’t want to put a date on it and raise anticipation, is going well.
There’s also been plenty of activity in the Art department this year.
Longstanding contributor and mapper Ayrton Orio is now Project Art Director – and as part of his new remit has been bulking up our map team significantly and bringing new realms of cohesion and town planning to our next raft of improvements to the Knox Event Exclusion Zone.
As such this year we have been delighted to welcome much-loved community mappers Melo, Erika and Dylan to the TIS stable – as well as our newfound friend Nikola (aka Alokin).
Also joining us for an elongated spell (this week actually) is the famed Filibuster Rhymes who will be working to improve our vanilla cars – although the fruits of his labour are unlikely to be a part of Build 42.
There are plenty of other folk both old and new (business-side and dev-side) who have gone unmentioned in this blog yet are doing amazing things. It’s also important to note that all of our previous folks in code and art remain active and involved.
However, given the aforementioned growth of game, team and audience we clearly needed to find new ways to operate and organize in our mission to create what we feel could one day be the best zombie game of all time.
NEW CHARITY MERCH
Oh and also while we have your attention!
A happy coincidence with this blog is that we can also mention that alongside our friends at Makeship we can announce a new range of Project Zomboid charity merchandise – for which all TIS proceeds will be donated to the charity Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).
This time round in the Spiffo shop are…
- Brawler Spiffo
- Project Zomboid Hoodie – complete with claw marks
- Collection of PZ pin badges
As mentioned above, all TIS profits from this will go to charity – and Makeship have been kind enough to donate 5% of the net retail sales too. Our heartfelt thanks to them for this.
So if you’re interested in supporting and getting some of this cool gear then just visit our Makeship store page for more details.
LAST THING
Build 42 players: the shove bug has been tracked down and a fix is now in testing. We should have a hotfix patch out early next week.
