Project Zomboid developer The Indie Stone can't seem to catch a break lately. The company recently suffered a serious setback in the development of its browser-based game when thieves broke into the residence of two of its developers and stole two laptops containing a large portion of recent code. The game's developers say that the code that was stolen represents the majority of the work accomplished since the last update. On top of the theft, the code was never backed up, meaning that the team will have to start from scratch. Ultimately this means a massive delay until the game receives a proper update.
Will Porter, script writer for Project Zomboid, wrote about the incident on the game's official blog.
"I won't beat around the bush'" he writes. "The Indie Stone have just suffered a major set-back. The Newcastle flat where Lemmy and Binky live and work was burgled this evening, and so far the clearest things taken are two computers and Lemmy's credit card.
Project Zomboid was regularly backed up from machine to machine, but rarely - sadly and infuriatingly - externally. We have lost an awful lot of work. Mash and Binky don't even know this has happened yet. Chris (Lemmy) is quite distressed to be honest - we're still dealing with something that was discovered little over an hour ago. After his tweets on the subject we both agreed it'd be best if I wrote a blog here to calm fears. He clearly isn't able to currently. (It's also probably worth saying that there were no PZ player personal details etc. on the machines)."
"This will clearly severely delay the next update, which was very near completion," continues Porter. "I personally only just finished my work on it today (one of the final things on the 'to-do' list) and had it ready for input tomorrow."
This latest theft follows a number of problems for the game and its developers; earlier this month PayPal locked down its account for 180 days with no explanation and the game's source code was stolen from the company's network.
No word on if The Indie Stone has contacted local law enforcement yet. Thanks to Mr. Peacock for the tip.
Update: It turns out the most recent backup of the code wasn't as long ago as the development team had first thought. You can read more about that here.
Source: GI.biz
