Zeverland Game Designer Discusses Its Unique Take on the Zombie Apocalypse

Survival crafting game Zeverland puts a unique spin on the genre by making its zombie apocalypse deceptively cute and allowing you to modify just about everything you can find.

That means you can duct tape a clothes iron to a tennis racket to turn it into a deadly weapon, or weld a camera to a baseball bat to electrify your attacks. You also have a vehicle you can customize however you want by welding other things to it and turning it into a mobile base. Attach a bed to give yourself somewhere to rest, or put ramming spikes on the front of your vehicle to mow down hordes of zombies.

After its most recent playtest in June, Zeverland underwent significant design changes based on player feedback. Originally announced as an open-world MMO where you could sabotage other players, it’s now shifted to focus on PvE co-op where you build, explore, and survive together with your friends, though solo play is also possible.

At gamescom, we got the chance to talk to Zeverland’s lead game designer Cecilia Pan about its focus on players helping each other, the creativity of players, the different gameplay systems it offers, and lots more.

Cecilia Pan: The game takes place a few months after a zombie apocalypse. The cities are still there, and you can enter all kinds of buildings, like police stations, hospitals, and convenience stores. You can interact with the objects inside in ways that feel natural, whether that means picking them up, putting them in your backpack, or combining them into weapons. We've already held two playtests, and we're currently planning to launch into Steam Early Access as early as Q1 next year.

Cecilia: Well, it's like this: When a natural disaster strikes, humanity ultimately always chooses to stand together and fight against it. We've played a lot of survival games ourselves, so we really wanted to make a game where, after disaster strikes, people use their own knowledge and creativity to solve survival problems, and eventually work together to take the world back from the zombies.

In most cases, co-op gameplay is designed around fixed storylines or specific bosses set by developers, which players must team up to conquer. What we want is a sandbox-style form of cooperation. There are endless ways to play the game, so players can choose whether or not they want to help each other. For example, vehicles need fuel. If you're driving down the road and come across another survivor, you can choose to stop and give them a can of gas so they can keep going. Of course, you can also choose not to. We want cooperation to come from the player's own choice.

And we don't want cooperation to stop once players have solved the basic problems of survival. We want to see whether they can work together to do something even bigger. Maybe they build a bridge across a river, set up ziplines between tall buildings, or find a way to restore power to a big city. Those are the kinds of experiences that require more players to come together and try something as a group.

سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/zeverland-game-designer-discusses-its-unique-take-on-the-zombie-apocalypse