A Tribute to Zeppelin Wars

Imagine soaring through the skies, shooting down everything in your path, then jumping out onto an enemy Zeppelin, planting a bomb and watching the Zeppelin's fuel tank rupture? How about being a crew member of your Zeppelin, frantically running from spot to spot to prevent the dimise of the entire crew? Do you want to fight for or against the Pirates? THE CHOICE IS YOURS.

All of this is possible the Roblox game, Zeppelin Wars. Which is the topic of (most) of this site. Unfortunately, after just over 3 years, the game has been officially discontinued. There will be no new content or any improvements to gameplay, (including bug fixes) and will thus continue to bleed players for the forseeable future.

You may be asking:

>why are you making a tribute for a dying Roblox game? That's kinda GAY bR0

That's a SWAG question. It's a really fun game. Although it's not without some quirks and issues like poor balancing and Roblox's physics engine randomly breaking, there's still a ton to like. For example: It makes great use of Roblox's part system. The game's Zeppelin destruction system wouldn't work nearly as well without every Zeppelin in the game being made of breakable parts. And there's a variety of strategies (of which many weren't intended to be utilized) that require a deep understanding of how many mechanics play out to excecute effectively. Zeppelin Wars really stands out from Roblox's crowd of low effort slop as a unique, action-packed war game with a charming, retro '00s Roblox art style.

Sections

A Brief History
Famous and Notorious Players
Spiritual Successors and Fan Games
Closing Thoughts

A Brief History

Zeppelin Wars' in game news board

skipydog seems to be the only developer who's still maintaining the game.

Zeppelin Wars was first published on the 13th of May, 2020 by @lolkiller101. The in-game news shows a healthy stream of updates right up until September 2023, where news about updates for some reason stops. As well as that, between September 2023 and January 12th, 2024, the game's description was changed to include this notice:

Also around this time, The game's Roblox Studio source file was open sourced, which the retired developer Electrovio (Who has since left the ZW Discord) announced on the 12th of January, 2024, shortly followed by Vaxytopia. From now on, pretty much all the messages in the announcements channel were just shitposts.

This game hasn't been worked on since September 2023. IoIkiller101 (owner) hasn't worked on the game since 2021. Cadentopia has been the owner of ZW in his place up until now

The notice was later removed in late Feburary, 2024. On the official Zeppelin Wars Discord, update logs were still being posted by skipydog up to April 2024. Which shows that he may still be maintaining the game to this day

Famous and Notorious Players

Here's some Zeppelin Wars players that I feel are at least somewhat notable to list here.

@Vaxyppah - Owner of the Turtle Café, a fangame set on an island far away from the endless conflict of the pirates and patrol
Sharkie Sven - Apparently a pedophile but all I could find about him are these memes: 1, 2 and 3
@Mikedyne - A well proclaimed moderator who retired right as the golden era of ZW ended
@CogTheSuit- Sweaty player with a cool Lua (the scripting language Roblox utilizes) outfit
ghosthunter566 (Roblox) / SuperPosedGuy566 (YouTube) - A YouTuber who used to make mostly informational and tutorial content about the game but eventually got bored and stopped creating ZW content. He may or may not still occasionally play the game but there's really no way to know as to whether or not he does.

Spiritual Successors

Airmada

Airmada is pretty much going to be the premier spiritual successor of Zeppelin Wars. It intend to address all of the issues that Zeppelin Wars was plagued with (Like an ineffective team balancing system) and ZW's lag.

BattleBlox

A Roblox game created by @gregheffley2235 (Discord) / @Agrostophobic (Roblox) which bears many similarities to Zeppelin Wars' art style. Although not aiming to mimic the game's Battlefield mode, it takes heavy inspiration from it. Even then, it's gameplay is intended to be slower-paced and more focused on traditional army classes (Like Medics and Infrantry) as opposed to Zeppelin Wars' simple Pilot and Crew class system. As of July 2024, the game is on a hiatus until the creator can find scripters or learn to script himself. Although my hopes aren't high, I do really hope this game's development continues.

Battletriton / Battle of Attrition

A Roblox game created by L4ncer (Discord) with a semi-realistic art style. The game's lore is basically L4nce's own headcannon of the ZW universe, with a focus on world building beyond PIRATES AND POLICE KILL EACHOTHER AND DESTROY ZEPPELINS IN OHIO. It takes inspiration from both Zeppelin Wars' Battlefield mode and Centaura. Development is quite slow and seems to be quite scattered, with a bunch of random assets being made for the game which haven't even been used for anything yet, but it may eventually be released.

Closing Thoughts

Zeppelin Wars has been open sourced as most of the development team has moved on from the game and likely would like to leave it's plethora of assets and scripts for the Roblox community to dig through and utilize. You can find an archived version of the Roblox Studio project file here if you'd like to look through it's assets and absolutely horrendous scripting.