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[Brayzen]

Overview
An RTS survival game where you must construct a small base from collected scrap and help your survivors hold out until they're rescued!

Core elements

• Base building and maintenance
• Resource management
• Enemy destroying (bit like tower defense)
• Weather-affected gameplay

Gameplay
You will first select a scenario to play. Completing one scenario unlocks the next and so on. Scenarios vary on resource scarcity (survivors and scrap), enemy spawn rate and spawn type (faster, stronger variants for example), availability of buildings and the environment (size, obstacles on ground and weather).

Having selected a scenario, you will be given the power to build structures for your small "base" as you see fit. This will cost scrap and sometimes survivors to occupy it (e.g. lookout tower).

Enemies will continually appear from the surroundings and attack your buildings. They must be taken out before they destroy all of your buildings!

Every day the number of enemies spawning will increase, meaning you will constantly have to plan and replan your base to account for the swelling numbers!

Buildings cost scrap. Any survivors not occupying a building will collect scrap at regular intervals. Therefore the more survivors you have not occupying buildings, the more scrap you'll collect.

You can repair damaged buildings with scrap, or scrap them completely to recuperate some of their initial scrap cost (accounting for any damage).

Increase your survivor capacity to allow more survivors to move in. If you have capacity, survivors will randomly show up to your base and join you.

All buildings do different things. As a sample:

• Tent - increase survivor capacity by one
• Lookout Tower - attacks enemies within range
• Radio Tower - increased survivor spawn rate but also increased enemy spawn rate

(There are more planned but that'd be spoiling things!)

There is a basic day night cycle. At night the lookout towers have a lower chance of critical hits, making it slightly more difficult. Also considering increasing spawn rate at night.

Weather affects the game in a number of ways and changes constantly. For example, heavy rain slows enemy movement but also decreasing the likelihood of your lookouts getting critical hits. Depending on the scenario, the available weather effects will change.

Session Length
Gameplay sessions will last up to half an hour. As an inexperienced game developer I figure this allows me to reel in the scope a little.

Why I'm Making It
I've been developing games for around 4 years in my spare time now and have only completed one project. I'd like to make it a career one day and am trying to start small once again to get something done.

The target is to make it marketable, probably looking at itch.io. This gives me a bit of a benchmark to work towards and will hopefully mean I spend a bit more time polishing than I usually do.

The Team (...me)
I work full time as a software developer, which is my primary skill when it comes to making games too.

I'll be using Unity which I've become familiar with over the last 4 years, doing a stint full time for 9 months last year.

I'd like to do all art and sound myself too, though may consider contracting this out for the sake of quality (especially the sound).

I try to do an hour before work every day on the game and any time I have after work and at weekends, probably averaging 10-15 hours a week.

All input welcome!

[Pickledtezcat]

It looks interesting, but I've seen a couple of projects quite similar to this.
Here's an example.
Do you have any thing special to set this apart from competitors or are you going to do the same but better?
Most of the examples I've seen were on PC only, so putting it on Android might be enough.

Some ideas:
Hero units with special abilities,
Army supply drops by helicopter (get to them before the mutants do),
Vehicles which need to be kept in good order for zooming out and getting better salvage,
Traps,
Artillery (mortars) to give support to your scavenging citizens,
finding rare parts for different kinds of victory (radio parts, helicopter parts, boat parts, time machine parts, medical lab parts, etc...) or which can be turned in to resources.

[Brayzen]

It looks interesting, but I've seen a couple of projects quite similar to this.
Here's an example.
Do you have any thing special to set this apart from competitors or are you going to do the same but better?
Most of the examples I've seen were on PC only, so putting it on Android might be enough.

Some ideas:
Hero units with special abilities,
Army supply drops by helicopter (get to them before the mutants do),
Vehicles which need to be kept in good order for zooming out and getting better salvage,
Traps,
Artillery (mortars) to give support to your scavenging citizens,
finding rare parts for different kinds of victory (radio parts, helicopter parts, boat parts, time machine parts, medical lab parts, etc...) or which can be turned in to resources.

I played the game you linked a while back; I quite like it, but I felt it lacked an objective.

The focus with this game is away from the survivors; they're almost completely abstracted out. It's more about building and resource management, a friend of mine said it was quite "tower-defensey". There are loads of things I could add and prototypes of this game with different mechanics (some of which you've listed!) but they never got far, most likely due to scope.

I'll put a video or GIF up soon as your ideas would suit a game where you manage individual survivors, so I think I've given the wrong impression for the game. Thanks for them though!

[Pickledtezcat]

OK, it's clearer with the video. More of a base building game than one where you control agents.
I think lack of a clear objective can be a problem with survival games, as survival itself is often seen as the main objective.

[Brayzen]

I think lack of a clear objective can be a problem with survival games, as survival itself is often seen as the main objective.

I agree with this. That coupled with some often obvious optimal strategies makes can make it difficult to make a "game" out of it rather than a simulation.

Something I wanted to avoid!

[Brayzen]

I've decided to change things up a bit.

Through playtesting, I've changed the way the game works a little:

• Survivors now automatically repair buildings. This can no longer be done manually. Given they automatically gather resources I figured this made sense.
• You can place walls, which just slow enemies down.

Because survivors are now responsible for micro-management, I want to change the way the game works a little to give the player a little more power over just deciding where buildings are placed.

As such, I want to introduce "powers" - MMORPG-like abilities which have cooldown and can be used to influence the game. Ideas include:

• Boost tower efficiency
• Quick repair on specific area
• Bomb drop/ artillery blast
• Bounty (killing enemies generates scrap)
• Weather machine (clear bad weather)

Also considering the idea that powers cost scrap or are maybe "charged" by killing enemies.

In hindsight, some of Pickledtezcat's suggestions may make an appearance!

Any ideas on this would be very welcome!

[Brayzen]

Added a bit of "polish" to the game mid-way through, to make it look, sound and play a little nicer.

I like to do this as I iterate so that I'm not left with placeholders all over all throughout. Makes it nicer to show off too!

I added a short flash of light on the towers when firing which adds something I think.

Added some hightlights over the selected building, and some little particle effects (and a thud) when placing buildings.

Changes video:

[foofter]

I don't like tower defense, but the graphics are really appealing, and I can't put my finger on why. Especially the night-time lit up ones. i think it's because I love management games, especially when the things you are managing have some autonomy. The rain is nice, too.

Will the survivors be visible in the game? For me that's one of the most appealing parts, but you said they would be abstracted out, so I'm guess they're not gonna be in there. Kinda sad not to have them at all though, esp. when you can see the enemies...?!

[Brayzen]

I don't like tower defense, but the graphics are really appealing, and I can't put my finger on why. Especially the night-time lit up ones. i think it's because I love management games, especially when the things you are managing have some autonomy. The rain is nice, too.

Glad you like the graphics, spent a fair amount of time tweaking! The lighting on the campfire is animated to make it look like it's crackling, and the ambient lighting is animated throughout the day/night cycle too.

Will the survivors be visible in the game? For me that's one of the most appealing parts, but you said they would be abstracted out, so I'm guess they're not gonna be in there. Kinda sad not to ave them at all though, esp. when you can see the enemies...?!

I'd like to have them in the game in some form, but they won't be controllable. I'd like to have them visible in some instances, such as when working on the farm or in the lookout tower. The one difficulty is repairs, which currently happen all at once, the amount repaired per building limited by how many need repairing.

So it's something I'm toying with, but making sure it doesn't break the existing gameplay and scope is difficult!

[Brayzen]

Gonna take a break for a week - feeling a bit burnt out today, not sure whether it's because I've been spending as much of my time outside my full-time on the game, or whether I've reached a point with it where there's no more "major" functionality to add, just extra content and polish.

I added a target for the player powers, this one showing how it effects towers:



I also added some better destruction effects on buildings. Quite pleased with the result!

[s_harriton]

I really like how you implemented the rain. It adds a lot of flavor to the visual presentation.  Are you going to do a full day/night cycle? full weather?

[Brayzen]

I really like how you implemented the rain. It adds a lot of flavor to the visual presentation.  Are you going to do a full day/night cycle? full weather?

Glad you like it! There is a full day/night cycle in place, though currently it's just aesthetic. I plan for more weather, each with their own effect (heavy rain reduces critical hit chance for example). There will be other scenarios based around the world, which gives a little more room to create other weather effects like snow and storms, so watch this space!

[Brayzen]

Been working on cleaning up the UI a little, here are the results:


I'm tempted to remove the background from the build and power icons so that they're "flat" against the screen, like the text. But I think it also helps them stand out and differentiates them as buttons.

If you're interested, the icons on the UI are just renders of the models in Blender with a bit of ambient occlusion, environment lighting and gathering. The power icons are just generic low poly models I came up with for them!

[Brayzen]

I've recently added lights, which has changed gameplay a little:



Lookout towers have a day and night range. At night, range is greatly diminished, so enemies can get much closer before being attacked. However, by having a light, the tower can shoot enemies that would normally be in its day range within the radius of the light.

Bit of emergence coming from playtesting which is nice!

Balancing the difficulty is pretty tough though, given the variables...

• Spawn rate
• Enemy hitpoints
• Building hitpoints
• Repair rate
• Survivor generation rate
• Enemy speed
• Scrap generation rate

I think it'll just be something done with playtesting and feedback.

I hope to provide a demo soon!

[Brayzen]

Balancing is tough!

One change I've introduced is being able to prioritise either scavenging or repairs. A slider controls this. Survivors are still pooled, but you can now choose what they do (rather than them magically be able to scavenge and repair at the same time).

Furthermore, you must now manually "mark" buildings for repair. This allows you to further prioritise which buildings to repair specifically.

It's becoming a little micro-managey but I don't mind that so much, given so many other things are abstracted away.

But yeah. Balancing is tough.

[Brayzen]

Balancing is almost there. Trying to predict what the player can and can't do on each day, given the potential scrap and towers they could amass at discrete points in time, is difficult. That coupled with the fact that most players won't know the optimal strategy (even I don't!) means it's more through playtesting than mathematics that I'm getting a feel for the game's balance.

Little in the way of "visual" updates, so I thought I'd share how I'm creating the build buttons (and other icons) in game:

Given I already have the models, I just put them in a scene I've set up in Blender (for consistency), and render an image with given environment light and gather settings, with a little bit of ambient occlusion thrown in too.

I quite like the results, and given I'm rubbish with 2D art I found this to be an effective workaround!

[Brayzen]

Still working on the game - unfortunately it's mostly non-visual stuff at the moment. Just got persistence working, and hoping to have a second scenario working very soon!

In total I have 5 scenarios, and am planning on having multiple difficulty levels. Each scenario has a high score you can aim for, and you can only unlock all scenarios by playing through earlier ones.

I have a week off at the end of July which I want to commit to getting as much done on the game as possible - I'd like to have it in a state where there's only polish left if possible. In terms of remaining tasks on my Trello board, I have 4 small tasks, 3 large (two of which are music) and 3 known bugs.

Hoping to have some more interesting screens and stuff soon, and to have it in playtesting too!

[Brayzen]

Week off work! Time to get this game to the final 10%!

Working on the final few bits this week - all 5 scenarios implemented (though not necessarily balanced), additional menu screens (settings, stats and a how to play) and, if I have time, a little bit of polish.

If I have time to do LD this weekend I will, if not I'll use that time to polish the game up.

My website needs work too...

Here's the stats screen. I really like this sort of thing in games and it's really easy to implement:

I realised after I took the picture the ground hadn't been coloured properly... the texturing of the ground is done in game so that when you place buildings, the grass "dies" underneath it. A nice touch, except when it's not coloured in the Editor!

[s_harriton]

Here's a taste of the Menu music:

https://soundcloud.com/stevenharriton/last-stand-menu-loop

[Brayzen]

Starting over.

Most people don't recommend this, but having watched people playtest the game and try to figure it out, I can see it's not really working.

I'm not scrapping the project, but I'm bringing the scope way down. The way I approached the project code-wise wasn't great either, and really I should have spent time refactoring as I went along, rather than let so much tech debt build up.

I'm somewhat inspired by Brendan Cheung in this respect, the chap who made Atom Zombie Smasher (amongst other games). He said he re-wrote the game a number of times before releasing it, and it underwent a number of changes.

So how's it going to change?

I'm going to keep the core building mechanic. People who've played it like this a lot.

Enemies will get harder in a more linear fashion, rather than trying to ramp it up in a clever way. I'll do this by splitting the game up into a proper day-night cycle, which was previously just aesthetic.

There will only be one level. Though it was nice to have other scenarios, the way I built the levels was very poor and contributed to the massive tech debt. Cloning scenes to avoid "linking everything together" was a really bad idea, and I should know that by now.

Finally, the game will be simplified and made much clearer. Pressing "R" to repair buildings by hovering over them isn't clear. Having a slider to toggle how survivors are assigned to various things isn't clear. How more supplies are gathered isn't clear.

I'll be taking more time on things this time around, and planning things out better. My one problem at the moment is how to make night interesting, given all the construction and repairs will happen during the day. Other than that, I've got a much better idea of how to do things.

One positive is I can keep a lot of the models I created, as well as some textures and sounds. Steve (see the post above) has been doing some music and I didn't want to lose that.

Wish me luck!