Survivalist - First Patch Released! news

The first Survivalist patch is now out! Here's the list of major changes:

• The "out of memory crash" that you got after playing for a long time should now be fixed.
• Insulin lasts 50% longer and is cheaper. You can also ask Clay Parker and Sam Deetz (the doctors) to give you clues as to where more insulin might be found. Hopefully this will stop it being so frustrating.
• The file size is smaller. Don't be scared by this - it turns out there was an option do some compression that forgot to tick the first time round.
• Fixes for a couple of other occasional crashes people reported.
• Fix for the game not progressing if you killed Alice's zombie sister in the water tower before talking to Alice.
• Moved a late-game quest called Alliance to a bit earlier - this improved some things I vaguely disliked about the way things played out later on, plus it makes some insulin available a bit earlier.

Based on what people told me about their struggles with finding enough insulin since I submitted the patch I did start to wonder if I was still being too harsh, and maybe I should have made it last twice as long as before. If you are new to the game I'd like to hear from you - how did you find the insulin situation. Is it well balanced now, or is it still too hard? (Of course, it's not supposed to be too easy...)

I'm already planning a second patch, to fix a couple of rarer crash bugs people reported after I submitted the first patch, and to fix a quest called "The Architect" which could not be completed. I think I'm also going to give buildings some kind of healthbar, so you can more easily see how many molotov cocktails it takes to burn them down. And I'm going to try and clear up some possible sources of confusion in the early missions.

I have to wait a week before I'm allowed to submit a new patch, and if it's anything like the first it'll take a week in review, so it'll be two weeks before it's out. In the meantime if you find any more bugs please report them to me.

One last thing - I've lowered the price to $2.99 USD. I haven't decided yet if this will be a temporary or permanent state of affairs, but it seems like every review or video of the game that I've seen has
mentioned the price as being unusually high for an XBox Live Indie Game. People who've played the game always say that it's worth it due to the large amount of content - it'll take you 15-20 hours to play through all the quests, plus the game took me a long time to develop, a lot of work went into it. Even so, there's a feeling that the higher price might put people off, as it's an indie game by an unknown developer and you don't really get a sense of how much content there is in the 8 minutes that we're allowed for a trial mode. Besides which, there are still those occasional bugs I mentioned. So I'm going to keep the price at this lower level at least until I'm sure there's no more
bugs in it.

So if you're on the fence - get it while it's cheap! Here's some screenshots to show you what you're missing:

What is it?
Survivalist is an open-world zombie survival RPG where you can build a base, recruit people to join your community, go on quests and interact with other communities. It's currently available on XBox 360 through the Indie Games channel.

In their review, thexblig.com described it as "one of the most impressive XBLIGs ever produced" and said "Survivalist is an intense experience, one of the most content-packed, feature-rich games on the indie channel. It is not to be missed."