Overview
Pocket Planet Survival is a mobile first, casual 3rd person resource collection / tower defense mix, playing on and inside a goldberg polyhedron.
The initial gameplay is very similar to My Little Universe:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.savetheworld.game&hl=en
It offers a intuitive/casual gameplay, the character just needs to be moved near resources to collect them automatically. These resources can be used to unlock new parts of the world and to upgrade the tools of the player(axe, pickaxe, sword).
There is no classic UI, all interactions happen on buildings on the planet, just showing a minimal popup about the upgrade cost etc.
By exploring the planet, the player can discover Mines that can automatically extract resources. However, he will also discover enemy hives that continuously spawn enemies who will automatically navigate and attack the player Mines.
To protect the Mines, the player can place defensive towers. The player can play it safe and work with the existing resource income, but if he wants to progress faster, he will also face enemies from multiple directions. Besides a cyclical time component, the total resource extraction rate will determine the enemy spawn rate/strength.
The main gameplay challenge will be to find the optimal exploration speed, deciding where to place the defense towers and upgrading what mines/towers first.
After some time, the player will control the whole planet, he can still upgrade the Mines, but if he is not careful, the Enemies might overwhelm his defenses, and destroy existing mines.
At this state the game becomes basically an incremental game, there will be minimal manual fighting / resource collection, the progress will be mostly determined by deciding what upgrades the player wants to invest first.
The first few Tower upgrades can be bought with the resources the first planet has to offer(stone and wood). But if he wants to upgrade them further, he needs to explore new planets that offer new kind of resources and a different level design.
To gather these resources he also needs to upgrade his tools and the cycle starts from new.
The player starts on the outside of planet one, at the opposite end of the starting point, he will find a transition tile, that allows him to walk to the inside of the planet. The inside planet is a hub with multiple transition tiles, each on them offers access to other planets, also be walking through a transition tile. Additionally, nearby the transition tiles, the collected resources will be visually stockpiled, giving the player the feeling of accumulating more and more wealth.
There are basic randomly respawning enemies that will harass the player when moving close to them, besides they have no AI or Objective.
Enemies spawned by a Hive will use pathfinding to navigate to the most vulnerable Mines/towers.
Flow field pathfinding offers unique advantages, counting the enemy deaths on each tile, allows the algorithm to pathfind around heavily defended areas, the amount of inflicted damage on player structures will help the enemy AI to find weak-spots.
Staying accessible is key on mobile, thats why there wont by a classic inventory system, all resources will be collected automatically after extracting them, and spent automatically when walking to the interaction point of an upgrade/unlock item.
One exception will be defensive tower items.
This item can be picked up by the player when moving close to it, while carrying the item, the player can not interaction or fight enemies. 2 temporal buttons will allow the player to drop the item or to place the tower foundation on an empty tile, consuming the item.
This way, we wont need a classic build menu.
These building are preplaced on the level and need to be discoverd:
are cave like structures at discovery, when investing resources, the mine building will generate x resources every y seconds. These resources will be stored in front of the mine, the player still needs to move to the near them, to collect them.
Resources can be invested to increase the extraction rate.
The player can buy tower items for X gold. New tower tiers can be unlocked using resources available in the next planet.
When the player places or discover a tower foundation, he needs to gather the required resources and also spend x seconds to complete the Tower.
This mechanic will prevent that the player can build towers directly deep inside enemy territory, the player basicially needs fire cover to expand his "safe area".
A completed tower will automatically engage the closed enemy, moving to the towers interaction spot, will display the upgrade cost for the next improvement(range, fire-rate, damage).
The gold cost of new Towers will increase with each placed tower, encouraging intelligent tower placement instead of spamming endless cheap towers.
Moving near a completed tower or a foundation, will also allow the player to deconstruct the the building to the item. Only half of the resouces will be gained back, but the tower location can be moved this way.
Allows the player to sell resouces X for Y gold, needed to buy tower items.
The tile based approach offers unique level creation possibilities.
The whole Planet/Level setup can be determined by setting up the individual tiles.
Placing random resources, enemy spawns, mines, player buildings etc.
Since the game needs a level editor anyways, it will be implemented as a ingame leveleditor. The player walks through around the planet, when opening the editor menu, he can edit the current tile by a simple dropdown menu. After completing a planet, the player can modify freely the whole planet setup, and share it with other players.
Theoretically the level could be also modified at playtime, however, I did not find a good way to integrate it into the gameplay yet.
The game is based on Unity ECS(DOTS), this will allow to simulate the enemy behavior a on the whole planet with thousands of entities, even on mobile.
Being able to walk in 3rd person view in the middle of a 3D Tower defense simulation will be one of the main appeals of the game.
Drawbacks are the missing official animation system(expected Q3 2025) and missing multiplayer.
Unless the game becomes a huge success, it wont offer multiplayer. It would be outside of my skill and overall scope. This post of there are billions also explains why a game that utilized heavy parallelization, is especially difficult to handle multiplayer.
Even with the right skill and time investment, there would be significant performance limitations.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/644930/discussions/0/1778262124947847998/
On mobile the game will be free to play but without ethical monetization.
There will be ads that can double the resource collection of a mine for XX minutes. So if the player wants to have maximum output, he needs to watch a ad every ~10 minutes.
Or he can buy a permanent ad free boost for ~4€. Besides that there will be cosmetic character skins.
For the first public release, getting the core gameplay loop and the incremental mechanics working is key. If the perception is good, I want to continuously grow the game with updates. Adding Factions, neutral/player units and expanding their agentic behavious would add a lot of depth to the core gameplay. In best case I would like to move the game into a storygenerator direction like Rimworld/Kenshi, where lots of dynamics happen in the background and the player can only partially influence the outcome. All that while keeping controls simple and the onboarding casual.