March 2025 Update

Hey guys,

Time for another progress update.

Finishing up base building

On the base building side of things, we finished the crafting system: you can now build crafting stations, assign and manage bills, and survivors will carry them out. We added a number of new crafting stations and recipes, as well as some new floor and furniture options. We also implemented the last couple survivor needs, finalizing that part of the game.

In addition to new features, we did an initial QA pass, fixing various bugs, performance problems, UI and quality-of-life issues, with a total of over 50 bugs squashed.

Combat, stealth and expeditions

With base building in a decent state, we’re now moving on to combat and exploration mechanics. Since combat requires weaponry, we’re starting with the loadout management system. Survivors in AoA need to carry all kinds of gear in their pockets, from food and ammo to consumable items like grenades. Keeping your guys topped off manually would get tedious quickly, that’s why the loadout system is here to automate the process: you simply assign a survivor a set of gear to carry, and they’ll make sure to grab it from storage whenever they’re low.

We’ve implemented the skeletal framework for the detection system and are now refining the formula for calculating vision ranges. One of our design goals for exploration is an unleveled world that doesn’t arbitrarily scale to the player. This does mean that it’s possible to encounter threats you’re not ready for. To make sure you don’t round a corner and suddenly get obliterated by a surprise tank round we’re implementing a detection system allowing survivors with high perception to spot silhouettes and outlines beyond their normal vision range. Eventually we plan for more in-depth simulation of sound and other factors, but for now we’re keeping it fairly simple.

The expedition system is now up and running, with the player able to assign a target, supplies to carry and survivors to send. Target selection works on the basis of a simple list for now. This is a temporary measure we’re planning to eventually replace with a proper overworld map, but given the time constraints we’d rather implement a placeholder and give the map the development time it needs as part of a future content update. Our next step is to finish the parcel editor we’ll use for creating building presets, before adding them to map generation to populate expedition maps with small towns and other locations.

That’s it for today. Until next time, stay safe and keep surviving!