Creating a Survival Game

[Eric the Orange]

I've always liked the idea of a survival game. But so many survival games feel like they have reverse difficulty curves. By that I mean the Longer you go the more resources you have and thus the easier it is to survive.

To be clear I'm not talking about the multiplayer survival stuff like DayZ or Rust. I want pure Man VS Nature stuff.

So my question is how do you create a survival game that starts off easy but gets harder the longer you survive?

Most survival games create the curve by giving you larger and larger objectives with only the first objective being to survive. Like in minecraft after you create a small house and a garden you can pretty much survive indefinitely, so the game moves on to new objectives.

But I want to play a game where the only objective is to survive as long as possible and it gets harder and harder to so so. I've thought of a couple of possible ways to do this.

1.) Dwindling resources.
So in this idea resources would be finite and this would cause you to keep moving to try and find more. But this only mitigates the problem, it would still be easier to find resources in new areas because you would have made better gear and whatnot in the earlier areas. So I think this should be coupled with...

2.) Increased threat.
This would make it so that the farther away from the start or the longer you've survived the harder the threats become. Like more aggressive animals, or harder to get to resources.

But I have yet to find a game that really does this. Don't starve kinda does, but after a point you do kinda plateau out. The long Dark does but it only has pre-built maps so you kinda just learn where everything is after a few runs.

So is their a game like this, or is their a game that does a good difficulty curve on survival a different way?

 

[Schtimpy]

I can't believe I never noticed that. I love survival games, but I always get bored and stop playing. I think the issue is the fact that you or your tech keep leveling up. Even on the harder mods, usually the begining is scary, but you can manage after you have water, food, weapons and shelter. It just becomes a "can I tech to fight this enemy" game. Which is like every game now that RPG Elements are in everything.

2.) Increased threat.
This would make it so that the farther away from the start or the longer you've survived the harder the threats become. Like more aggressive animals, or harder to get to resources.

Gave me a cool idea for a game. Stone-age tech survival game, you get separated from your tribe as it's moving for winter. You start the game just knowing they went south, or a easy mode where you have waypoints on landmarks like mountains and stuff (you know their route). Procedurally generated map, 20-30 min day/night (or longer), and in two months, winter is coming. Better hurry up. Pretty easy to fit the dwindling resources thing and/or more aggressive animals over time into that. Or have it fluctuate with "biome" as you go further.

OT: I can't really think of a game. Everything that runs through my head has that plateau, very few recent games have a constant ramp of difficulty until you die. Even then, it's usually something like Geometry Wars. People needs their happy fix, and a win/power state. It'd make a really cool mod for a survival game though, if you did it right. First issues I see are lag and "500 health zombies are bullshit."

 

[CeeBod]

One idea from the Long Dark's community forum that I liked the sound of, was that the amount of daylight should be reduced the longer you survive - very much in line with "winter is coming" as mentioned by Schtimpy. That naturally makes scavenging and hunting more difficult, and you're likely to need to light fires and torches much more often as time progresses, both to keep warm in the longer colder nights, and to see where you're going when you can no longer hunt with the sun high in the sky. It can also tie in with weather settings - more blizzards for longer as you approach the depths of winter for example.

 

[Totenkreuz]

Well apart from "The Long Dark" I can't really think of any other game that does something like what you were asking for. I remember an old survival island game but can't remember the name of it that had some sort of 'advanced/hard' survival in it but the translation from russian, I think it was russian, wasn't that good.

Cheers.

EDIT: somehow I missed that you already knew about the long dark so I had to remake this whole post of mine.

 

[sXeth]

Rivals seem to be the main method of curtailing the endgame plateau for survival games. PvP seems to be the method of choice for games of late, but I'd guess having scaled NPC rival survivors could pose at least some ongoing threat.

One idea is possibly an advanced civilization that continues expanding into your lands, forcing your primitive self/tribe further into less hospitable territory, with the endgame simply being a final blaze of glory effort to see how much damage you can do.

 

[SweetShark]

I never played a survival game [only one I think which isn't exactly a survivol game], but I think it would be cool if come in the form of other survivors. What I mean with that:

Let say you are a lone survivor in an Island and you do whatever is possible to be at least safe for the agresive animal/creatures of the wild. At some point you are full prepare for all danger of the island.
But then the "Hunter" came. A Tribe of trained soldiers which hand for enjoyment. And their target is you! Because you were in the island because of them. They let you here and gave you time to prepare to at least to be able to somehow fight back. But they know with their advance weapons and huge numbers you can't win. Or can you?

I can see potential if someone can make a game with it.

 

[1981]

I haven't played This War of Mine myself, but from what I've heard, it never lets you off easy.

2.) Increased threat.

7 Days to Die tried this and it felt artificial. I think Don't Starve did it better with its underground worlds, although as you probably know, you don't have to explore them.

Oh, and the problem with other players as the endgame threat is that most are raiding and killing for the sake of it rather than attempting to roleplay. I've had some fun on PvP servers where griefing is discouraged. There have been attempts to assemble roleplaying clans, but I don't know if there are any active ones.

 

[happyninja42]

There is a game on steam, called Skyhill. It's a "hotel apocalypse survival" game. And I think that might be along the lines of what you want. The resources are randomly generated when you loot things, and they tend to lean heavily towards "you find nothing". The game premise is pretty simple.

You are a guy who happens to be in the hermetically sealed penthouse room of a 100 floor hotel, when a virus apocalypse happens. Now, you have to get to the 1st floor and escape.

The monsters get harder the lower you go, and you have to scrounge for everything. You have to keep up your strength by eating food, but sometimes the food you find is rotten, and thus risks actually causing you health damage. Your weapons have to be crafted with scraps, but those scraps are also needed to upgrade your homebase of the penthouse, as well as to repair the elevator shaft so you can fast travel up and down progressively further.

It's tough as shit in my opinion, and I have yet to beat it, but it's pretty damn fun. And it's the closest game I can think of to what you are looking for. It's also pretty damn cheap on steam.

OT sidenote: I think what would make the games more difficult, would be to have degrading supplies. I don't really see a problem with there being a large amount of stuff to scrounge in post apocalypse world. I mean just look at all the stuff we would have laying around in this world if it went south all of a sudden. There would be TONS of stuff. But a lot of it would have a shelf life, it would degrade, or spoil in the case of food. And as you used the stuff, it would wear down. So I think having durability on the items would be helpful to help mitigate your concerns.

 

[rotorist]

Sorry I'm late to the party.

One game that does resource "control" right and has correct difficulty curve, is This War of Mine. In the game you do a lot of looting like most other survival games, but here the loot doesn't respawn. So as you play longer, as the easy loots taken and consumed, you'll be forced to venture into the more difficult ones and make difficult decisions. I eventually quit, not rage quit due to difficulty, but due to the stress of living the life as a victim of war. It's just too much for my weak mind to handle

 

[Lufia Erim]

I think survival games would benefit from having multiple people trying to survive. It is easier to survive on your own than surviving as a group. That may seem counter intuitive at first but when you think about it. If one person gets sick the whole group suffers. If you don't have enough food, the group suffers. If one person is uncooperative, the whole group suffers. Jelousy, hunger, sanity , fatigue, selfishness, morale etc... are all things that can doom a group to fail if one person is not on the same page.

 

[LetalisK]

I've always liked the idea of a survival game. But so many survival games feel like they have reverse difficulty curves. By that I mean the Longer you go the more resources you have and thus the easier it is to survive.

To be clear I'm not talking about the multiplayer survival stuff like DayZ or Rust. I want pure Man VS Nature stuff.

So my question is how do you create a survival game that starts off easy but gets harder the longer you survive?

Most survival games create the curve by giving you larger and larger objectives with only the first objective being to survive. Like in minecraft after you create a small house and a garden you can pretty much survive indefinitely, so the game moves on to new objectives.

But I want to play a game where the only objective is to survive as long as possible and it gets harder and harder to so so. I've thought of a couple of possible ways to do this.

1.) Dwindling resources.
So in this idea resources would be finite and this would cause you to keep moving to try and find more. But this only mitigates the problem, it would still be easier to find resources in new areas because you would have made better gear and whatnot in the earlier areas. So I think this should be coupled with...

2.) Increased threat.
This would make it so that the farther away from the start or the longer you've survived the harder the threats become. Like more aggressive animals, or harder to get to resources.

But I have yet to find a game that really does this. Don't starve kinda does, but after a point you do kinda plateau out. The long Dark does but it only has pre-built maps so you kinda just learn where everything is after a few runs.

So is their a game like this, or is their a game that does a good difficulty curve on survival a different way?

State of Decay does both of those. The main campaign does have a win state, but the DLC Breakdown does not. Your whole goal in Breakdown is to fix a motor home to escape the area and it keeps breaking down in new areas, so you have to fix it again to get to the next area. As you progress to each new area, resources get scarcer and enemies become harder until you eventually die. And while your characters do progress, it does not keep up with the difficulty. Here's the shitty part though: it's the same map over and over. Granted it's a massive map, but you're essentially playing the same map over and over with randomly generated resources and enemies.

This game is an over-the-shoulder third-person real time zombie slasher/shooter game.

Another one: Dead State. This is an isometric turn-based party combat zombie game. It does the increased threat and fewer resources in a more natural way. As you progress, you end up having to venture into more and more dangerous areas as everything around you get picked clean. As far as character progression vs difficulty progression, I thought it was pretty spiky. The start was fucking brutal, but as soon as I got some decent melee weapons and learned the game, I did well for a long time to the point where zombies were almost trivial. Then I met guys with guns and had to adapt to that. Then guys with armor. Then guys that liberally used flashbangs. Etc. I haven't finished the game so I haven't got to a point where I could just dominate anyone and everyone, so I don't know if there is a power plateau. I imagine there is, but your characters aren't exactly beef cakes and if you make a mistake you're going to have a bad time against equally equipped guys.

That said, it also has a win state. I think, I didn't get that far and only read about it. It never actually tells you about it in game and you might go forever without discovering it, but it's there. But there are fail states for individual characters if you don't handle them right with your main character. And sometimes the right way to handle them isn't apparent and you end up getting shanked during the night. Just sayin'.

 

[MysticSlayer]

I haven't played This War of Mine myself, but from what I've heard, it never lets you off easy.

I haven't managed to make it all the way through the game myself, but from what I've seen certain events create unique challenges. Various resources, some necessary and some just nice to have, become scarce either randomly or as part of the story. Looters become more aggressive, and failing to defend yourself will create many problems for your resource supplies and health. Winter is also always a coming threat with the cold. There's also an issue that easy-to-loot places and trading posts eventually run out of resources or get taken over, forcing the player to more difficult areas. And on top of that, there are always potential issues that come with either losing or gaining a new survivor to the group. Larger groups are harder to feed, but they offer more protection and better rotation schedules. Smaller groups are easier to take care of, but they're relatively helpless, often tired, and may suffer more mental issues (depending on why it is smaller).

Overall, the game just has a lot of ways to keep the difficulty up. I've heard that it becomes a lot easier if you can manage to make the group self-sufficient, but getting to that point fast enough is an insane challenge I doubt most people pull off on their first playthrough (especially since the game is horrible at explaining anything).

 

[FalloutJack]

Well, in order to survive in a place where it is a challenge to survive, you must take what you have and slowly adapt to your environment, to the point where your environment supports you in some way. If you can't do this, you can't survive, so once you get a long ways in, you will have either died or adapted well enough to your environment that you will be under no threat of dying anymore unless a calamity arises.

My recommendation is to go the Castaway route. Focus on survival, and then once that gets done, try to escape.

 

[Xeorm]

Personally, I'd say the better ones use the combination of: Increased Threat, Longer fuses going off, and requiring more resources for the same time. Preferably too with increased objectives.

As an example: You start in summer. Pure survival is straight-forward, you forage for some food and create a shelter. You're fine for now, and even have some time to make some tools to make future survival easier. But, other fuses starting running short. Your clothes that you started with have a limited lifespan, so you need to procure more. Sickness sets in occasionally and you need to find specialized herbs to stay alive, etc.

As you survive, you'll have other varied threats. Perhaps a wolf comes in that you need to fight off. Or an injury makes something that was previously simple become much harder. Best if there's a varied number of threats that come in from different angles. Don't make me fight a wolf, then two wolves, then three.

Then there's more resources required, like heating during winter being the prime example. Or needing better tools to effectively do the same thing I did before. Say, it's easy to plant crops in the dirt, but there's not much dirt around, so you need to turn other tiles of harder ground into dirt before you can use it.

Lastly, objectives I think are what makes the really good games, especially if they're optional. That way it becomes a difficulty system of sorts, or a leaderboard. Survival is easy, but survival while being moral is more difficult. Or taking care of more than one person, where additional people are a large drain on resources.

I'll admit to disliking dwindling resources. It's depressing knowing that no matter how well I might to do, it will always end after some time, regardless of how well I play.

 

[bubba42]

I think DayZ is a great example of what you are talking about. I have played H1Z1 and 7 Days to Die and Sate of Decay, but I keep coming back to DayZ. It's still Alpha and a work in progress but I have given it over 2500 hours of my gaming time.

For example: Here's a video of a guy trapped in a house with 3 fully geared enemy. He only has a pistol, and tries to stay alive long enough for his team mate to come help. Where else can you find this kind of tension?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Bs2dbB4WGM

 

[MHR]

Didn't "Don't Starve" just have a new expansion in Early Access?

It's my estimation that survival games that get progressively more difficult the longer you've survived would most often be impossible after a while. That's what happens in a lot of "endless mode" games. Things usually artificially ramp up until they become impossible. Things are often too easy or too hard. I'm not saying the search for the perfect survival game should end, but I would lower my expectations -- already have in fact. To get that survival fix, I usually just play various roguelike games now, and I force myself to do a workout every time I die to my own damn carelessness in Fallout 4.

Yesterday I was fussing with my fucking cat on my desk in front of my monitor, and I accidentally lightly tapped the fire button with the very tip of my fingernail when I had a missile launcher pointed at the ground. Thanks cat. It took me about 3 seconds to realize that what I was looking at really did just occur.

I died only 3 other times so far in 100 hours played. The first was when I got chased by too many ghouls at the police station, and they chased me right into a minefield. The second time, I found the only trap besides bear traps that I had ever seen a super mutant set; I died to a fucking missile launcher rigged to a tripwire in a shack entrance. Third time I was chased by a randomly spawning deathclaw into a sinkhole, and in that sinkhole was another deathclaw, when trying to click on the entrance prompt I had seen for the sinkhole dungeon to escape them... I started drinking the water instead.

My thighs ache. So many squats.

 

[Mudman1234]

Didn't "Don't Starve" just have a new expansion in Early Access?

It's my estimation that survival games that get progressively more difficult the longer you've survived would most often be impossible after a while. That's what happens in a lot of "endless mode" games. Things usually artificially ramp up until they become impossible. Things are often too easy or too hard. I'm not saying the search for the perfect survival game should end, but I would lower my expectations -- already have in fact. To get that survival fix, I usually just play various roguelike games now, and I force myself to do a workout every time I die to my own damn carelessness in Fallout 4.

Yesterday I was fussing with my fucking cat on my desk in front of my monitor, and I accidentally lightly tapped the fire button with the very tip of my fingernail when I had a missile launcher pointed at the ground. Thanks cat. It took me about 3 seconds to realize that what I was looking at really did just occur.

I died only 3 other times so far in 100 hours played. The first was when I got chased by too many ghouls at the police station, and they chased me right into a minefield. The second time, I found the only trap besides bear traps that I had ever seen a super mutant set; I died to a fucking missile launcher rigged to a tripwire in a shack entrance. Third time I was chased by a randomly spawning deathclaw into a sinkhole, and in that sinkhole was another deathclaw, when trying to click on the entrance prompt I had seen for the sinkhole dungeon to escape them... I started drinking the water instead.

My thighs ache. So many squats.

Do the same with a Souls game and you'll look like Arnie himself come the games end.

 

[wings012]

Project Zomboid probably feels like the most survival as far as zombie games go. Eventually you can get to a point where you can get some self sustainable farming going - but I have yet to get to that point. The tools needed are rare and you die way easy. A single scratch from a zombie carries a chance of infection. A bite means you're screwed.

When you start, there's still electricity and running water. As time passes, the electricity gives out first and then the water which drives the difficulty up hard.

Food rots in the game, so when you lose power - your accumulated perishables suddenly become useless.

When you lose water, you're kinda boned. This is kinda the crucial point. If you haven't made it to one of the wells in the game, or have some sort of system of rain collector barrels by then - this is probably when you die.