Overview
Pocket Planet Survival is a casual 3rd-person resource collection/tower defense game set on a Goldberg polyhedron.
Development videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfii5GuaC0k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nbmhwPzD20
The game will support being played in a transparent window — similar to the effect in this game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3686480/Kernelbay/
This makes it an idle game that can be played while being busy with other tasks on your PC. Having a small planet where enemies move around and your base automatically defends will look unique in a trailer and pique players’ interest. The player will also have the option to play the game in traditional fullscreen.
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 intuitive, casual gameplay, where 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 player’s tools (axe, pickaxe, sword). There is no classic UI; all interactions happen directly on buildings on the planet, displaying only a minimal pop-up about upgrade costs, etc.
By exploring the planet, the player can discover Mines that automatically extract resources. However, he will also discover enemy hives that continuously spawn enemies who will navigate and attack the player’s 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 and strength.
The main gameplay challenge will be finding the optimal exploration speed, deciding where to place defense towers, and prioritizing upgrades for mines and towers.
After some time, the player will control the whole planet. He can still upgrade the Mines, but if he is not careful, enemies might overwhelm his defenses and destroy existing mines. At this stage, the game essentially becomes an incremental game. There will be minimal manual fighting or resource collection; progress will mostly be determined by deciding which upgrades the player wants to invest in first.
The first few tower upgrades can be bought with resources available on the first planet (stone and wood). However, to upgrade further, the player needs to explore new planets that offer new kinds of resources and different level designs. To gather these resources, he also needs to upgrade his tools, and the cycle starts anew.
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 of the planet is a hub with multiple transition tiles. Each of them offers access to other planets, also by walking through a transition tile. Additionally, near 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 approached, but otherwise have no AI or objective.
Enemies spawned by a Hive will use pathfinding to navigate to the most vulnerable Mines or towers. Flow field pathfinding offers unique advantages. Counting enemy deaths on each tile allows the algorithm to pathfind around heavily defended areas, and the amount of damage inflicted on player structures helps the enemy AI identify weak spots.
There won’t be 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 or unlock item.
The player can buy a terraforming item that allows terrain height modification. When carrying the item, two buttons appear on default tiles: dig and raise. Pressing and holding a button will slowly lower or raise the tile height. Raising terrain costs resources, while digging will slowly recover resources (at half the rate).
To allow terrain modification, at least one surrounding tile must remain within the maximum character step height to prevent breaking pathfinding. This should allow the player to create defense lines and also to access higher tiles by creating steps.
These buildings are pre-placed on the level and need to be discovered:
Mines are cave-like structures. Once discovered and invested in, they generate x resources every y seconds. These resources will be stored in front of the mine, and the player still needs to move near them to collect the resources. Resources can be invested to increase the extraction rate.
The player can buy building blueprints in a workshop for gold. Once bought, it will spawn an item in the world, which the player can pick up and carry around. When the player is on a free tile, he can place the item to create a construction site.
When the player places or discovers a tower foundation, he needs to gather the required resources and also spend x seconds to complete the tower. This mechanic will prevent the player from building towers directly deep inside enemy territory. The player basically needs covering fire to expand his “safe area.”
A completed tower will automatically engage the closest enemy. When the player moves onto the tower’s interaction spot, it will display the upgrade cost for the next improvement (range, fire rate, damage, HP).
The gold cost of new towers will increase with each one placed, encouraging intelligent placement instead of spamming endless cheap towers. The interaction menu will also include an option to deconstruct the tower, returning a tower blueprint and half of the building resources.
Allows the player to sell resources X for Y gold, which is needed to buy tower items.
The tile-based approach offers unique level creation possibilities. The entire Planet/Level setup can be determined by configuring individual tiles, placing random resources, enemy spawns, mines, player buildings, etc.
Since the game needs a level editor anyway, it will be implemented as an in-game level editor. The player walks around the planet. When opening the editor menu, he can edit the current tile using a simple dropdown menu. After completing a planet, the player can freely modify the whole planet setup and share it with other players.
Theoretically, the level could also be modified during playtime; however, I have not yet found a good way to integrate this into the gameplay.
The game is based on Unity ECS (DOTS). This will allow simulation of enemy behavior across the entire 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 include the lack of an official animation system (expected in Q3 2025) and no multiplayer support.
Unless the game becomes a huge success, it won’t offer multiplayer. It would be outside my skillset and overall scope. This post about They Are Billions also explains why a game that utilizes heavy parallelization is especially difficult to handle in multiplayer:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/644930/discussions/0/1778262124947847998/
Even with the right skills and time investment, there would be significant performance limitations.
For the first public release, getting the core gameplay loop and the incremental mechanics working is key. If the reception is good, I want to continuously grow the game with updates. Adding factions, neutral/player units, and expanding their agentic behaviors would add a lot of depth to the core gameplay. In the best case, I would like to move the game in a story-generator direction like Rimworld or Kenshi, where lots of dynamics happen in the background and the player can only partially influence the outcome. All of this while keeping the controls simple and the onboarding casual.