Hello Survivors! Christian “Serellan” Allen here, your new Design Director on Project Zomboid. As we mentioned in the December blog, 2025 was a time of big changes in the organization on Project Zomboid, bringing new leadership roles in the realms of Art, Production, and Code; and I joined the team last fall to focus on Design elements. Alongside the steady stream of updates to B42, we have been building new design pipelines, code repositories, task management systems, and all those fun “behind the curtain” game dev pipelines.
I myself have had my head down, focusing on leveling up my skill level on the inner workings of PZ’s many game systems, and so have been relatively quiet publicly. I figured that should change, so this is my introduction to you, the amazing PZ community, along with a little update on the State of The Game.
So sharpen your machetes and take some beta-blockers; let’s dive into it!
Who I Am – From Alaska to Knox Country
A little bit of my background first, not for bragging purposes, but to give some context to my new role. I grew up on a mountain overlooking Eagle River, Alaska, where my family homestead in the early 1900’s. Along with a childhood with plenty of outdoor life (trapping, hunting, chopping firewood, etc), I got into games pretty early on, with my first computer being an Apple IIe, and wrote my first game in Basic way back then. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’ve always been a game designer: rewriting board game rules, editing video game files, MacGyvering toys into games to play with my friends.
Fast forward, and after spending time in the US Marines as a Military Policeman, I started making mods for Rainbow Six, and eventually spun that into a role in the games industry. I’ve had the honor of working with amazing people on some amazing titles, starting at Red Storm on the Ghost Recon franchise, then Bungie on Halo, WB Games on movie IP’s and Middle Earth, and even spinning up my own studio focused on tactical shooters, which while not ultimately successful, taught me a huge amount of hard-learned lessons about independent game development. I then had the opportunity to apply those lessons over six years at Epic as an Evangelist, with my primary focus on mentoring indie studios transitioning onto the Unreal Engine.
Outside of games I’m a dad, husband, and active outdoorsman and shooting sports aficionado (with a focus on Cold War era-firearms). As a Marine and Alaskan, you can probably guess I’m also a bit of a prepper, delving into food storage, alternative power solutions, and bushcrafting skills.
All of this provides a foundation of real-world background that helps inform my approach to PZ design, and having an expert in firearms and experience in survival skills gives our more cultured European devs a solid resource on the coarser points of post-apocalyptic preparedness.
Of course, it should also be a given that I am a huge connoisseur of Post-Apocalyptic fiction, with a specific love of the Zombie genre.
I purchased my first copy of Project Zomboid back on May 31st, 2011. Since then I had touched base with the team several times, both to ask advice and give feedback, and played the game off and on, but in 2023 I picked up COVID on a work trip for Epic and ended up spending 5 weeks isolated in a hotel room in North Carolina. With not a lot to do, I opened up PZ again in B41.
I was instantly enamored with PZ again, racking up thousands of hours and lots and lots of dead characters in my wake, and pretty soon was making a series of mods in my spare time as a nice game design break from Unreal Engine and Fortnite. After I left Epic and was doing design consulting, Will reached out to me about providing some design feedback to the team, and the rest, as they say, is history.
My Design Philosophy
If you are familiar with TIS, you know that traditionally PZ has never had a formal “Designer,” and Design has always been credited to the team, but as the game has grown both in scope and complexity, that need became apparent.
My role is to focus on the player experience, working alongside the awesome artists, coders, QA folks, and others on the team. My focus in the short term has been identifying friction points on various UI and player-facing systems, some improvements of which you've already seen coming online, such as the revamp of the Right-Click Menu for streamlined Crafting, Barricading, and more consistent Tile and Inventory interactions.
That is informed by playing the game a lot, but of course also reading and listening to your feedback. Whether it’s on the discord, reddit, youtube, the TIS forums, and all the other channels, there is a good chance that either I am reading it directly or getting it passed on from our awesome community team, so I am VERY likely seeing that thread you are posting about Discomfort, and when you see updates in the future they are VERY likely be influenced by your feedback.
Project Zomboid is hands-down the most complicated game I have ever worked on. The amount of interconnected gameplay systems can be daunting as a developer, and challenging when changes can lead to unintended ripple effects (or just straight up bugs), but this complexity also builds the foundation that has allowed the team to create such an expansive, interconnected, customizable, and in-depth world that has allowed players to spend thousands of hours and years of IRL time delving into the world. The structural devotion to exposing the underlying systems to the community is what allows such a robust and amazing modding ecosystem and also gives the players the tools to customize their experience to play PZ the way THEY want to play.
Balance is a big focus, as often systems have been implemented to prove out the functionality, but then left to “defaults” after implementation by a coder. An example of this you will be seeing in one of our upcoming updates are balance passes on default Game Modes, and this will mean changes to the base “canon” settings, as well as new tailored pre-sets for players looking for a more hardcore mode, a more cozy style, and one respectful of players who have less gaming time available to them.
This approach applies to other upcoming content updates as well, such as Crafting/Building recipes, Skill progression, Traits, Occupations, and more. Oh, and guns. You don’t think I wasn’t going to want to add a few guns, did you? 1993 appropriate, of course.
One topic I wanted to hit on in this introduction is the term “realism,”. I know - yes, I’ve seen the memes about it, and the phrase “realism only if it makes it harder for the player” or that TIS uses realism as “an excuse.”
One of my first expectations I set internally is that while “realism” obviously informs decisions, it isn't the final deciding factor when looking at the player experience. I’ve learned with my background in tactical shooters that “realism” as a foundation: 1. Isn’t a real standard, since we are talking about video games here, and 2. Realism is a setting, not a vision.
My focus isn’t on “realism;” it’s on authenticity, consistency, and verisimilitude within the setting of the realistic world of 1993 Knox Country overrun with the undead.
Sometimes, “realism” is a good guideline, such as increasing the number of firearms existing in 1993 Kentucky, or ensuring the propane tank design is American, not European. But we also don’t want to add “realism” for realism’s sake when it’s just a pain in the butt, for example your generator pull cord randomly breaking would be realistic (mine has a few times), but doesn’t add much to the “fun.” This may seem like minor wordplay, but it is an important foundation to set.
Moving forward, one of my big priorities will be consistency across both the game world and how the player interacts with it. There are a lot of very rewarding and complex game systems in PZ, but many of those systems were developed by different people and at different times, and this has led to disparate presentations which creates frustrations for players. This will be a long-term process focusing on unifying systems, UI, terminology, and more; always keeping in mind that PZ is a game about experiencing the story of ‘How You Died.’
The State of The Game
I recognize that the community is unhappy with the length of development for B42 Unstable, and are eager for it to move into Stable so they can play long-term runs in MP and SP without fear of a save no longer working, mods being disrupted, or having to reboot servers.
Conversely, I also know that players want certain features implemented or some systems changed, updated, expanded, or fixed. And I understand that players should have several out-of-the-box polished and balanced gameplay experiences, while maintaining PZ’s unique tradition of allowing players to highly customize most aspects of the game as they choose.
All of these elements are a balancing act, and as you may have noticed, making a game this complex is not a simple challenge. Everything is generally a balance between time, quality, and depth, and oftentimes developers are making a call to try to anticipate the best possible outcome for the player with the lowest risk of breaking other features or going down a massive time-sync of implementation.
B42 Unstable launched with an extremely ambitious set of feature goals, and as those features came into contact with the community, some went well, others needed a lot more work than anticipated, and some needed major changes based on player feedback. Some new features will not end up being as fleshed out as hoped in B42 but build a foundation for future development and modding, some will necessarily be pushed to future development, and some will be streamlined based on the extensive playtesting and feedback over the past year. And of course, as we saw recently with 42.14.1, a lot of the coders are currently focused in the short term on MP bug stomping, but the ongoing balance and QOL polish is intended to benefit both SP and MP players.
I also recognize that many in the community feel that communication has dropped off. While we often hope that update notes can speak for themselves, without context that can lead to confusion for the community (‘Is this a fix, the final change, or foundational work for future expansion?’). While I don’t want to commit to a specific posting schedule, I DO want to work to provide some more of that context of where things are and where they are heading. Like me, I know that the other new(ish) Directors are excited to share their philosophy as well, so we’ll be exploring different ways to share with the community beyond blog posts and massive lists of update notes.
We are in the final charge of B42 Unstable, which means there are still a lot of bug fixes, game balancing, polish, and a bunch of new content that is in our internal pipeline awaiting final implementation and testing, but the team is working hard to Barricade the Windows and shore up the food supplies. Moving out of Unstable doesn’t mean that there will not be continued support, refactoring, modding improvements and balance for B42 in the future, just in a Stable environment.
I and the other Directors, as well as many of the team, are actively seeing your discussions, both big and small, while also PLAYING the game and experiencing many of the same blockers and frustrations as you and working to prioritise those into our production schedule.
Your feedback through the Unstable process is essential and valued, and has driven adjustments and prioritization, serving as our Cat’s Eyes as we prep for the launch of B42 Stable to the broader shambling masses. So keep it up!
Thank you for supporting this team and this project that has provided me this amazing opportunity to contribute to a game I truly love. Now let’s go stomp some Zeds.
Christian “Serellan” Allen
P.S. I’m on Twitter and BlueSky as @Serellan. Don’t expect any PZ secrets there, but feel free to give me a follow, and drop me your thoughts!