Today, I want to talk about Survival Mode of the game.

As you already know from my Dev Notes 1, this mode is heavily inspired by Call of Duty Survival, Zombies and Uncharted Survival.
If you are here to shoot everything and not to read dialogs, your path lies here.


Fight, Shop, Repeat.

Core of this mode is a survival against waves of enemies that become stronger each wave. There are 4 difficulty options available with different waves patterns at each difficulty.

Also the higher the difficulty, the stronger the enemies become.
But they also have higher critical damage multiplier to encourage accurate shooting.


Anyone can find a right level of challenge.

Also you have a Hardcore Mode option there. This mode changes damage for you and enemies so you can kill enemies much faster, also as they can kill you fast too.

You start the game with pistol only and start your way survival. You can find a weapon printer on each level that will give you random weapons like mystery box in CoD Zombies.


You can find this on every level.

Each round has 5 waves with 1 special wave and boss wave. During your survival you will encounter various enemies from lightly armed cadets to heavy troops with assault drones.



These guys like to shoot things...

A special wave is needed in order to bring the player out of the comfort zone.


During SIEGE Wave you need to neutralize a certain number of enemies while in the marked area.

Boss wave throws at you a special enemy like juggernaut to complete the battle on the current level.

After clearing 5th wave you will be sent to the shop, where you can buy weapons, perks, medkits and resupply your ammo. After shopping you will be thrown to the next level to survive on the new playground.


What are you buying stranger?

In Survival mode you will get experience points and raise your Rank. After leveling up you will get more weapons and perks to your Arsenal.

These weapons will start to show in the store and you can get it from weapon printer. We will talk about Arsenal more in the future so I will stop by the Perks first.

You can buy and equip only 3 perks at a time, and also their removal is not free. This decision was made so player have to think twice before buying them and think about his future tactics.

All perks were designed to be helpful for different playstyles.


There are 26 different Perks to aid you in your survival.

You want to run and gun with minigun? Take Strength Perk that gives you additional speed with heavy weapons.
Dying too fast? Get Big Guy or Armor Plate Perk to raise your HP or decrease incoming damage.

Overall Survival mode was made for those who wants an action for half an hour after a hard working day. Is wasn’t developed as addition to Story Mode, it was designed as complete standalone experience. So you can play it even without Story Mode completely (But I still would recommend you to start from there for training, at least =)


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Let's talk about gameplay and some other related mechanics.

From the start of the project I decided to make quite a simple system without complex control scheme.

Everything that have no reason to be controlled by player was thrown out, so no need to pick resources on the ground by special button or anything like that during combat.

At first I had an idea to add different equipment, godets and other things, but making additional active elements makes controls more complex and ruins flow for me, that’s why I decided to stop with standard abilities for player. My main focus was on moving and shooting, so everything was created on top of that two core elements.

Not the best use of player's abilities... But what a problem if you survived...

I started with basics: moving, firing and throw grenades ability.

After that I added med kits system, so player can heal himself during combat. I prefer this variant over regenerate health, because it gives player more choice during gameplay.

He need to think about this HP in long run, but med kits give him ability to make mistake and heal him up for that. But because meds amount is limited and can’t be restored easily he needs to be careful.

Because weapons have limited ammo, I needed something for player to attack if he runs out of ammo, so I added melee knife attack.

No bullets? You knife can do the thing

Also I have buttons to change weapons and activate things.

Most of the controls should already be well known to players. So I have no need in big tutorial to teach player with basics.

Pretty standard set of actions

But after playtesting it was clear that player need some ability to avoid incoming fire if needed like performing a barrel roll. So I added dash mechanic to the game. When player is in dash state he is immune to enemy fire except explosives.

Moving like Neo, killing like John Wick

Dash ability has small cool down and it’s not limited to stamina or other limiters. But this move cancel weapon reloads and also needed to be mastered so it used to player's advantage.

Also player is able to perform some additional moves, like shooting grenades to detonate them early or perform a critical shot when the crosshair is precisely on the enemy to give additional damage.

Detonating grenade by your fire won't give your enemies a chance to run away

Critical shot element is the main reason to abandon gamepad controls, because I wanted to make shooting mechanic with standard FPS feel when player can make headshot. This thing is very important to eliminate enemies fast and efficient.

Critical shot working the same as a headshot in FPS shooter

And finally the main idea of player's abilities is that everything should be available to the player from the beginning. I am not making grind heavy RPG here, so I have no need to hide abilities under level lock or something like that. All core abilities are ready to use by player from the first shootout. You don’t need to level up for ability to dash.

All these things affected a HUD too, overall your character has HUD like this:


In the left bottom corner we see:

• Current HP
  Simple and easy to read. Changes color when player in critical condition.
  
• Amount of med kits
  Simple too, but do its job. You can only store 3 at a time.

In the right bottom corner we can find:

• Current weapon name
  I wanted to make icon for a weapon, but couldn’t think of nice implementing this without additional screen space usage just for this element. Also player have only 2 weapons at a time, so I decided that he is able to memorize what he has.
  
• Current ammo count
  Really, there was no real reason to make bullet count with visual counter, but I really wanted this, so it’s here =)
  
• Overall ammo count
  Just represent ammo that player has in his pocket.
  
• Grenades count
  Same thing as overall ammo, simple and easy to read.

As you can see all HUD is heavily inspired by old shooters. But I tried to make it practical and simple (can’t tell that it was the best way thou).


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I am writing articles about my game on IndieDB

But why not to share them here too? So everything will be in one place and anyone can read them if interested.

Let's start then!


My name is Roman, I am a solo indie-developer and working on this project something about a year and a half after my main work.

In overall, my goal is to give people awesome top-down shooter with good gunplay, nice graphics and weapon feeling in which you can play half an hour in the evening after a hard day.


Minigun for CQC? I think that's probably fine...


Film "John Wick" (This is pretty obvious from the description of the game =)
I wanted dynamic CQC experience like you can see in the original film. When you are always on the move and need to think fast about your next steps. But I didn't want to make it another Hotline Miami style of game.

When enemies are all around you, you have to think faster.

Old PS2 game "Black"
I wanted to let people have fun of shooting guns in the game. So I designed every weapon in game to be powerful and helpful. So it’s up to you what weapon to use. With large Arsenal you have pretty large choice in this.

Assault shotgun is really good around here...

Call of Duty Spec Ops Survival
I really loved this mode =) So at first I started to make all my game around it. So Survival is not just an addition to story. It’s more like a main dish after you complete story mode and have some general skills.

Weapon Printer works like Mystery Box from CoD Zombies mode.

Uncharted 4 Survival
Love this one too. I took idea of changing locations after several waves and special waves from this.

One of special waves - Siege, where you need to eliminate enemies from marked location.


When I started this project I thought about military style shooter with a B class story plot. Like in old action movies.

You will blow things up from that thing too

I want to create an action game without overcomplicated story and focusing on gloominess and drama. We have pretty enough of this in our life, so something lite and positive will be good for lifting player spirits.

Although, some characters have some kind of serious themes in their stories, but it's just additional information for player to find out more about each character.

True shooting story can't exist without miniguns.

At first, I started to think in a way of "Battlefield: Bad Company" style of story, but pretty soon I had an idea to make game about airsoft combat.

This setting greatly expands the boundaries of what is allowed for me to use in game. Pink LAVs, extravagant characters, comedy situations without any drop of blood...

Soon after that I thought, what if I will put this all in standard Anime or Manga like place as school? And then I was carried away...

Maybe I was carried away too much...

I like weapons and other military stuff, and also I have anime style academy. So how about to combine these things? Girls in uniform and military equipment with rifles on a training in Academy. Sounds good, am I right?

It was easy to find enough of art and cosplay to have inspiration for everything about the visual part and I start working on this.


Big thanks to creators for pices of art like these

The main problem was that I wanted to make weapons as fun as possible. For this reason, I came with idea of AR glasses and combat training with the use of special weapons. So it allows me to add fire, bullets, shells and other stuff so it wouldn't look out of place.

The whole story was gathered around this setting and these elements. So player end up in a Military Academy on a distant island in his dorm room and preparing for his first study day.

He doesn't know what's coming...

The main plot takes place in just one school week. So I need to connect all the events in a short period of time, and do it so that everything looked logical and without particularly obvious stupidity.

I don't want to make player do routine tasks, while he has a very important and urgent business. We know how important it is to find your son, not collect tons of garbage along the way, right?

Because of this problem, as well as my personal abilities, I had to give up part of the planned levels and the pink LAV. But even without it, you will find a large number of other things. And also you will find something that will replace the LAV...

It doesn't look so dangerous, but it's older brother will do the job...


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