As Natures Witness points out, it’s a community game, some of the contributors simply don’t have the coding chops to work on core gameplay stuff, but they can contribute new items and such, and in the process edge their way into contributing more involved stuff. Both are valuable in of themselves. Also it’s not a 0-sum equation, just because particular content got added doesn’t mean other content would have been added otherwise, often it’s the specific feature that gets someone interested, and they would never have even thought to do something else.
Speaking specifically for myself, as #1 bottleneck for the project, the new items don’t take up much of my time, since they’re generally straightforward to merge and don’t usually cause new bugs. They aren’t generally keeping me from doing other stuff. It’s the big mechanics stuff like inventory handling shennanicgans that do that, and there’s no way around them.
The default for the game IS “crazy apocalyptic potpourri”, but that’s what we have classic zombie mode and the (still pending) mod manager for, if bloggy goes in, it definitely won’t get marked “classic”, and in the future you’ll be able to excise elements you don’t like from the game in a straightforward way. So it shouldn’t be an issue.
I do think forging a weapon in the first few weeks of the cataclysm is a bit premature, but hey, it IS a game, and it’s something I could see a survivor doing eventually. Now martial arts… whew, if this stuff actually happened I’d be spending every moment I could practicing the martial arts forms I know, and looking for training material for others would be high on my list of things to do in the first few months. Even if your primary weapon is a gun and you have unlimited ammo, martial arts training would pay absolutely MASSIVE dividends down the road. From the trope pov, there’s definitely a more action-y subgenre of zombie movies that incorporates martial arts, just yesterday I watched the (terrible) movie “I am Omega”, it’s definitely in the genre.
