Wasteland Survivors: Rebuilding Hope (2024)

Overview
Wasteland Survivors: Rebuilding Hope was a small, real-time strategy project undertaken by a team of four over the course of eight weeks. The client, AVImmerse, provided a brief that outlined various gameplay concepts and mechanics that had to be adhered to. This included features such as a system governing morale, dynamic weather, resource gathering and a system for building and expanding a base of operations for the survivors.

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Project Design Goals

Create a game in the survival/strategy genre in Unity, with the objective of leading a group of survivors through a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

An emphasis on resource gathering and management, to be tied into a settlement building and management system.

Management of a community of survivors, each with their own skills, personalites, and traits.

Exploration of the wasteland as a central mechanic with dynamic weather and events that cause the player to deal with choices and moral dilemmas.

My Role
For this project I undertook the roles of project lead and lead developer. This consisted of managing the project timeline, ensuring that the team hit their deadlines as well as making key decisions regarding the direction of the project to enable as smooth a developement cycle as possible. As the lead developer I was primarily tasked with crafting the various systems that governed individual aspects of the game as well as the systems that enabled gameplay directly. For example, this included a system that managed the tasks of each different survivor independently, while also remaining modular and adaptable to different needs as they arose.

What Did I Learn?
This was one of the most ambitious projects that I had undertaken in regards to complexity of systems at work. This meant that clean, modular code was a must to enable quick adjustments and additions to the project as necessary. This was also the first time I was in the position to manage a team in a game development scenario and as such learning the importance of good source control practices was extremely important.

Assets Used

Models: Sketchfab

Animation: Mixamo

Sounds: Pixabay

Fog of War: AOS Fog of War by Fischl Works