I haven’t talked about Zafehouse: Diaries for a while. But don’t worry, I’m still slaving away as an indie developer. While we haven’t managed to score a review on a major gaming site just yet, we have popped up in few interesting places. Oh… and there’s a 4000-post long thread on the internet dedicated to co-operative playthroughs of the game.
Firstly, those interesting places. We actually got a mention in a Kotaku US article (link goes to the local version) where we somehow ended up in the same sentence as Minecraft and FTL. It was extremely humbling.
We were then mentioned in a Project Zomboid podcast — the folks were even kind enough to link directly to us. It was crazy-good to hear those guys rave about the game for five minutes or so. So we know, at the very least, other developers think the game is grouse.
Now, onto that mammoth thread…
One of the game’s core features is the ability to add yourself to the game and customise your vital statistics, including age, occupation, education and ancestry. Using this capability transforms the game into a post-apocalyptic RPG, where you can watch yourself — and friends and family — kill zombies, fight each other and in the case of the poor woman above, perhaps lose a limb to that pesky infection.
While Zafehouse: Diaries has spawned a number of co-operative gaming threads, also known as “Let’s plays”, it’s this ongoing one over at a place called Broken Forums that has surprised us the most.
Right now, it’s almost 100 pages long, has close to 4000 posts and has been viewed nearly 50,000 times. To me, that’s a staggering amount of fun and interaction derived from our little game. Even if we never make it onto Steam, we can feel good about the fact that there are gamers out there who absolutely adore what we’ve built.
As a creator, that’s a great feeling to have.
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