Project Zomboid developer, The Indie Stone has been screwed by fate – and the criminal element – yet again. A break-in at the company’s UK studio has claimed two laptops, and the majority of the Project Zomboid code.
I consider myself a scientific man, one not prone to blaming the supernatural for life’s many hiccups, but at this point I think it’s fair to say that the indie developers behind the excellent zombie-apocalypse-survival-simulator Project Zomboid are, in fact, cursed.
First, the project had to be taken offline for a brief period after pirates started stealing the game directly from the game servers, using bandwidth the developer had to pay for. Then Paypal decided to lock the company’s account for some cryptic reason, cutting off the company’s sole source of income for an outrageous 180 days. Now a break-in at its Newcastle upon Tyne studio has claimed two laptops used to develop the game, forcing the developer to revert to out-of-date backups. Very out-of-date backups.
The Indie Stone’s initial response was not optimistic: “We’re fucked basically,” wrote developer Chris “Lemmy” Simpson on his now closed Twitter feed. “We still have code but it’s basically before the last update. This will probably finish us. Sorry [sic] let everyone down.”
Apparently, The Indie Stone has been somewhat lax when it comes to backing up its data offsite. “I expect I’ll either get a lot of disbelief or a lot of flak for no regular offsite backup,” wrote Simpson. “I deserve both.”
Now that the developers have had some time to compose themselves, and presumably scream at the sky for a bit about how unfair the universe is, they’ve promised that Project Zomboid will “come back stronger.”
“In the cold light of day Project Zomboid is not ‘fucked’, no-one has been run over by a bus-we’ve simply been knocked back a few steps. With the support of the community we will get our groove back,” The Indie Stone’s Will Porter told Kotaku. He also added that no personal information about Project Zomboid’s players, who have paid for the final version of the game in advance, was compromised.
“This will clearly severely delay the next update, which was very near completion,” said Porter. “During this time we will clearly be asking for the understanding and patience of our community. We are gutted, we are despondent and – most of all – we are sorry that this has thrown yet another bump into the road towards PZ completion.”
“We also REALLY want to wring the neck of the arsehole that did this to us,” he added.
Source: Kotaku
Published: Oct 16, 2011 10:50 pm