For the project zomboid development. How do you guys meet each other in the beginning? There could be a lot of zombie fans in the world but it's not easy to come across someone who can work together on a zombie game development project. There is not many zombie fans in my country. Need suggestions.
Unfortunately I don't think my answer would help you very much. Chris and I were colleagues at a commercial games studio - he was employed as a programmer, I was a technical artist. We were both interested in games design, shared many design philosophies and we worked really well together, so the two of us had always planned to do some sort of game together eventually. Marina, we met on the internet on an Adventure Games forum and we got on really well and she rapidly became somebody we wanted to work with should we get the opportunity. Will was a journalist for a British PC magasine called PC Zone, which we were fans of. We got to know him through a mutual acquaintance, so when we were looking for a writer he was someone we would have loved to work with and for some unfathomable reason, he agreed :D So that was that, four of us - all our other contributors were people who were fans of the game. Most of the time, their involvement with the game started with some modding work they'd done which impressed us.
I guess the only thing in all of this which might be somewhat useful is that me and Chris didn't originally set out to make a zombie game in particular. We wanted to do indie games, but we were open to *any* idea we thought was strong enough. We considered a few different ideas along the way and when we came up with the idea for Zomboid, that idea came from the fact we were both big fans of the early Romero zombie films but this wasn't the reason for us doing a zombie game in the first place. Same with Marina, she didn't come on to this project initially because of anything specific to zombies - she's an artist, she can work with any concept. So I guess the advice from all this is, good artists, good designers, good programmers, good musicians and writers... they're not bound by any particular concept - if the idea is good they can get excited by the idea. They don't have to be fans to begin with.
I guess the only thing in all of this which might be somewhat useful is that me and Chris didn't originally set out to make a zombie game in particular. We wanted to do indie games, but we were open to *any* idea we thought was strong enough. We considered a few different ideas along the way and when we came up with the idea for Zomboid, that idea came from the fact we were both big fans of the early Romero zombie films but this wasn't the reason for us doing a zombie game in the first place. Same with Marina, she didn't come on to this project initially because of anything specific to zombies - she's an artist, she can work with any concept. So I guess the advice from all this is, good artists, good designers, good programmers, good musicians and writers... they're not bound by any particular concept - if the idea is good they can get excited by the idea. They don't have to be fans to begin with.