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.
Welcome, Cecilia. We know that Zeverland is a co-op survival game where you can smash, stash, and craft everything. But can you tell us a bit more about it?
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.
Now one thing that stands out to me about Zeverland in general is this emphasis on assisting others versus, you know, fighting enemies. It seems like you’re much more incentivizing people to work together. Can you talk to me about that?
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.
That’s really cool. I love the idea that you are kind of creating a bunch of different systems that, depending on how the players interact with them, you kind of incentivize that creativity. Now, you’ve talked about doing two public alpha play tests earlier, and I’m just curious: Are there any interesting stories, any favorite stories that you might have had during those alpha play tests?
Cecilia: During Playtest 2, I had a pretty interesting experience myself. I was driving down the road when I came across another player whose vehicle had broken down. I stopped and asked if they needed help. They told me they hadn’t brought enough fuel, so their vehicle couldn’t go any farther. I gave them some of the fuel I had saved, and we ended up becoming friends.
My second story goes like this: I once ran into a player who had built his entire home, including a personal bar, right on top of his vehicle. As the sun was setting, he parked on the side of the road and opened up a little mobile roadside bar. He and his NPC companion were playing music together, looking absolutely joyful, and I ended up joining them halfway through.
Lots of devs in our team really love this post-apocalyptic theme. While we were designing the game, teammates would often ask me things like, “Can I bring my screaming chicken?” or “Can I bring my little rubber duck?” In most cases, devs will tell players: “You need to complete a great mission.” But we want our world to be filled with small, familiar things from everyday life. Those little objects and little moments can remind players how valuable ordinary life is, and hopefully make them naturally want to come together and solve these survival problems.
Now, you talk a lot about how you kind of iterate on these different design decisions and things like that. You say Zeverland is a game with no limits. What are the kind of gameplay mechanics that you think best express that player creativity and freedom?
Cecilia: We currently have more than 6,000 interactive objects in the game. We use an ECS-based interaction system to make sure each object responds in a way that feels natural. Every object has its own material properties. Wood can burn, while metal can conduct electricity, and when it rains, that electricity can potentially spread even farther. An object’s size and weight also determine whether it can fit in your backpack. If it can’t, maybe you can pick it up and throw it instead, and that can deal damage. Once players understand these systems, they can use common sense and their own creativity to solve survival problems and overcome challenges in the game.
Yeah, I mean, let’s just get right into weapon customization then. You kind of alluded to a lot of different systems, whether it be how they interact with elements, how they interact with the environment. How many different weapon customization options are there? And you’ve already been watching player behavior, so what are some of the weirdest weapons players have made?
Cecilia: For example, you can attach a little rubber duck to a weapon, and it’ll make a weird noise when you hit a zombie. If you knock a zombie’s head off, you can also attach that head to a weapon, and it might give the weapon a stun effect. You can also find everyday objects in houses, like an iron, and attach those to weapons. An iron, for example, might let you set zombies on fire. So there are a lot of fun combinations like that.
Do those kinds of customization options and player creativity also extend to the vehicles? Are there ways of customizing vehicles, and how do you kind of check out exploration in that regard?
Cecilia: We have a lot of different types of vehicles in the game, from bicycles that don’t need fuel, to four-wheelers and pickup trucks. A pickup has space in the back where you can place furniture and basically turn it into a mobile base. You can also place objects on every surface of the containers, so you can decorate them almost like the walls of your own house. And if you want your vehicle to have more combat capability, you can also place traps or other defensive items on it.
Then I have one request, if it’s not already in the game: Can you put a zombie head as a hood ornament on the tip of your truck?
Cecilia Pan: Absolutely.
I love that. Now let’s move on to some of the key features. We’ve seen footage of players becoming infected and turning into a zombie. Can you walk me through that system? How does it work? Can you ever return to a normal human?
Cecilia: The idea of becoming a zombie came from a question our core team asks a lot during design discussions: “What if?” We started asking, what if getting infected didn’t mean you simply died? What if you actually turned into a zombie instead? What would that experience look like? That’s really how this system was born.
After you turn into a zombie, you still keep a lot of the combat abilities you had as a human, but your time may be limited. During that time, you need to find a way to turn back into a human. If time runs out, you may lose control, and the world will be left with a zombie carrying your previous character’s name. Of course, you can also choose to spend those 15 minutes helping your friends with whatever you want to do together.
That’s certainly one of the most clever examples I’ve seen of the kind of Souls-like “run back to your body and try and reclaim what you’ve lost.” That’s really cool. Tell me about the different varieties: Is it just going to be four zombie types? Is there a plan to include different types of zombies in the future that you can kind of build on? And also, can I infect other humans?
Cecilia: Since we’re targeting Early Access next year, our priority right now is to make the human experience as strong as possible. So for the moment, players only have these four options. In the future, we’d like to expand this system and make the zombie experience much richer. That could include some of the things you mentioned, but those would probably come sometime after Early Access.
We’re nearly out of time, but I’ve got to know, especially with people who are interested in how this game is going to evolve, if there’s anything you had to tell your community there, what do you have to say about the future of Zeverland?
Cecilia: After Playtest 2 ended, we gathered a lot of player feedback showing that players really want their own dedicated worlds with friends. In response, we are launching private servers. However, we remain fully committed to our public servers. Our public servers will offer a larger map, and in the future, we will release different themed seasonal servers, hoping players can create their own stories and destinies there.
Zeverland is available to wishlist now on Steam, where you can also find more information about the game and its dangerously cute world. For the latest news and info, you can follow the game on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook. What are you most excited about in Zeverland? Let us know in the comments.