Another survival game

that’s right, I’m letting another survival title grace the pages of the roblox website

the goal of the project is to recreate the classic survival experience with significantly better mechanics and visuals, along with a few other gameplay twists

here’s a basic outline

Items, inventory, and crafting

The bread and butter of any survival title. Aiming to make these better through unified and easy to understand UI design.

Screenshots:

Tools and buildings

More usual elements; again, mainly focusing on ease of use and style. One deviation is the introduction of a modular building system. “Modules” (such as walls, foundations, etc.) are added together to form one building. This feature is not yet implemented in the current patch. Tools are used to gather materials from the environment, and maybe even kill NPCs and other players.

Screenshots:

Map design and environment

In order to improve the visuals, I opted to increase the prevalence of environmental effects such as rain, thunder, lightning, etc. The final result uses variations of fog color, fog distance, lighting ambiance, and particle effects to simulate weather conditions. Map design is mainly focused around keeping a unified and pleasing aesthetic throughout.

Screenshots:

NPCs

NPCs are planned to be an important part of the game; animals are not unusual in the genre, but I also plan to implement humanoid NPCs that interact with players’ “tribes” for another interesting gameplay mechanic. I’d love to go into the details of this, but it’s too much to say here. Maybe I’ll put it in a follow-up post sometime.

Screenshots:

Here’s a link if you want to take a look: http://www.roblox.com/--place?id=110870673

please note that this is heavily in dev, so everything is subject to change and a lot of stuff may be buggy/incomplete; I also can’t guarantee the relative playability at any point in time. Constructive criticism is appreciated

ISSUES THAT I AM AWARE OF:
missing thumbnails/models
npc collisions
UI scaling

I gotta say, this looks amazing. I’ve been considering making a survival game for a while… but I never got around to it. Nice job though!

This looks awesome! Goodluck to you and the game!

Damn, this looks like an amazing diverse game. I look forward to it’s release!

I hope it’s better than Rudimentary’s survival Island games, their games confuse me way to much and I feel so under powered in that game - also I can’t find any clear instructions to how to get started in their games.

Maybe you could add some instructions for the games release to make it easier for the younger people in the Roblox community (which is quite a lot of the community), and obviously me !

quick update on progress and future intentions

After myriad bugfixes, content additions, and functionality improvements, I’ve decided to work towards making this a playable game. In light of this goal, I’ve created a main menu, character customization screen, and a quick (incomplete) tutorial. I want to keep this post short so I’m not going into other mechanics, but I do want someone’s opinion on one thing. What happens when a player dies? I’ve thought about just dumping them at the character creation screen again but this seems like a cop-out.

That looks very good! Nice style!

I’ve been developing such game for a while too right now - any special features you are going to add which we don’t find in another survival game? NPCs seem quite new for me. I am not going to put them in my game as the idea is that you are “alone” in the world, with some other people - no NPCs.

I’d really like to read that follow-up post on NPCs! :woohoo:

I closed down the game to the public since I’m going to be adding a lot of low-level functionality in the next few weeks, meaning that things are probably going to break (a lot)

I might end up doing a longer “closed beta” after everything is implemented, so if anyone wants to test then you can message me on roblox and I’ll add your name to the list

As a survival games fanatic, I PMed you.

Feel free to join #SurvivalGames on free node sometime to discuss some gameplay ideas. Some of my game players come there too and have some really nice inputs sometimes :slight_smile: