Dev Notes - Building a Survival Game

I've been playing a bunch of survival games recently, and have noticed some great features that the games in the genre implement. It's unfortunate, however, that most of survival games put emphasis on some parts of the great survival game formula, but not all or even most of them. To be clear, I'm not claiming that the notes I am proposing for building an awesome survival game are the template every survival game must follow, but they are definitely things to consider. The focus of the notes is more so to make the single-player experience compelling. Co-op and multiplayer is not covered here, and is a different sort of beast to handle.

Taming

While mining rocks and chopping trees is a common way of interacting with the inanimate part of the world, taming is a way to interact with the living part. Yes, survival games typically have living creatures, but usually the only allowed interaction with them is to kill them to, once again, gather resources or to defend oneself. Taming, however, adds a new layer to the game. Not only does it expand upon the gameplay and creates a new type of goal for the player to optionally pursue, it creates attachments to the creatures, the world, and the game. It's part of why Pokémon was so successful.

Threat

There need to be threats to the player in the environment, and I don't just mean chores like thirst, hunger, fatigue, and other meters that fit the theme. I'm talking about threats such as creatures attacking you or your base at day, night, or if provoked. Always feeling "safe" takes away from the survival experience and turns it more into a peaceful crafting simulator, which can still be enjoyable, it just doesn't really fit the survival game concept. I'm all for "creative" or "peaceful" game modes though.

Mystery

Adding a bit, or a lot, of mystery to the world adds another objective and motivation to play the game and explore the world until the end rather than until you get bored of the crafting options. Alien ruins to discover, scattered notes to read, distress beacons to investigate, they could all help piece together a story for those players who are curious enough. The good thing about that sort of approach to storytelling is that it's completely optional and non-invasive. If the player doesn't want to learn about the world or solve a mystery, that's completely fine and this system allows for that.

Exploration

For a survival game to stand out and be continuously compelling, you have to go beyond just environmental exploration. Every survival game has environmental exploration of forests and different biomes. That's pretty much the standard these days. To be unique, you gotta add more. Having things like ruins, wrecks, caves, buildings, and strange installations that reveal a piece of the mystery or give you some useful rewards would go a long way of making the survival aspect not aimless and exploration rewarding.

Base Building

A survival game is incomplete without base building. Modular approach to base building components is best. You don't want to give players pre-made bases from the start. Could be fine for vehicles, but not for bases. Creating a base of your own design, even if that design is very simple, adds a personal touch and yet another goal to work towards. Expanding the base horizontally and/or vertically, building different base components like new crafting machines, plant or livestock space, electricity generators, turrets - it's all a part of the customization and personalization that people love about these games.

Evolve the grind

Gathering, crafting and building, but especially gathering, should be evolved as the player progresses through the crafting "tree". It should become faster or completely automated. Keeping the grind the same would make it feel like more and more of a chore and would make the progression onto better mining tools and equipment for mining better stuff more stale.

Automation

Automation adds a new component to base building. Now not only does your base serve as a place where you craft, store, and defend, it can also be a complex automated factory that serves your needs. You could automate resource gathering through automatic drills, maybe your tamed creatures could go out and hunt for you, the resources that you get could be conveyored into storage or into crafting machines where some sort of automated or remote production could take place. Real Time Strategy games have automated resource gathering and production for many years. You could send your peasants to mine ore or chop trees and then they would return to the nearest storage building and continue the loop. From there you could queue up and loop the production of certain units and set a rally point to even make them attack or defend something automatically. Adding this sort of automation as a later capability in a survival game would significantly change up the pattern that the player would have gotten used to throughout the game, which would add a new layer of exciting and satisfying possibilities for them.

Distributing the rewards

The main trick to making a survival game, and most other types of games, is evenly spreading out the frequency of player rewards. In the case of survival games, crafting blueprint unlocks are probably the most valuable reward. Therefore, you have to make sure those blueprints, as they get unlocked, aren't overwhelming the player nor do they get unlocked too infrequently.

High tech embedded UI

One thing that could make your survival game that contains high tech much more immersive and impressive is embedding the UI for vehicles, tools, bases, and suits such as fuel and energy meters, ammo counts, and on and off switches into the high tech object itself. This adds extra realism to the game as you interact with the object the way you would in real life, making it more intuitive.

Examples

Subnautica

This game brilliantly implements threat, mystery, rewarding exploration, distributing the rewards, and high tech embedded UI.

Factorio

Good example of evolving the grind, automation, threat, distributing the rewards, and base building.

ARK: Survival Evolved

This game shows good implementation of taming, threat, base building, and distributing the rewards.