A Struggle to Survive (ASTS) is a 2D, single-player, wilderness, survival simulator set in early 1800s America. It is being developed by a lone Gen-X gamer and professional software engineer whose experience with computers goes back some 40 years.
"When my parents gave me my first computer, a Commodore 64, they had no idea how that gift would influence my life. I can still remember laying on the living room floor keying in a page and a half of basic code out of a magazine just to watch a sprite move across the screen. It is from those early days that the seeds of discovery and imagination germinated into a career in software engineering and a love for gaming."
The history of my desire to create this game is somewhat chronicled in the first blog post of this site, which you can read here. My original idea was to experiment with a browser game. However, I soon realized I didn't have the tooling I needed to achieve my goals within the limitations of HTML and java-script. I decided I needed to choose a real game engine and found UNITY back in 2019. I put quite a lot of effort into the UNITY version before discovering a few things about the game engine that were difficult to reconcile. As of September of 2022, I have switched over to the Godot game engine and have no plans to return to UNITY, though it is a capable game engine. You can read about that here.
In ASTS, the player takes on the role of a pioneer experienced in his trade of choice during the times of the colonization of America. The game attempts to capture a sense of the struggles, dangers, and joys of pioneer life with a taste of history and plenty of danger. It is a sandbox game, but that by no means infers a boring and tedious grind within an empty game world. On the contrary, there will be many opportunities to explore, meet and trade with settlers and natives alike. War between the white man and the Native American is not within the scope of the game, nor will it be. Rather, the focus will be on survival, trade, and establishing a homestead, which will not be an easy task. Here is a partial list of features being targeted for the initial release of the game.
This list will grow over time and is meant to provide a general idea of the direction and depth the developer wishes to take with the game.
The World:
- A procedural generated, tile-based, seamless 2D game world that wraps around such that the player never sees the edge of the map.
- No chunk loading delays
- Eight 4-week seasons (early and late variations of spring, summer, fall, winter) comprising a fictitious calendar of 32 weeks.
- Flora that ages over time
- Large maps with upwards of a million tiles to give plenty of room for exploration
- Underground caves that can be excavated, mined, and explored
- Weather effects such as rain, fog, snow
The Player:
- 7 character stats which directly affect various aspects of survival
- 15 character attributes which define a character's overall physical, mental, and spiritual persona
- 5 innate abilities assignable from a list of 10 to further promote specialization
- Over 37 skills for the player to master
- Period clothing including buckskin outfits, moccasin shoes and boots, coonskin caps and beaver hats, which were all the rage in the 1700s.
NPCs:
- The non-player characters of the game provide opportunities for trade, quests, and learning.
- Both European and Native American tribes placed around the world.
- Trading posts where supplies can be bought and sold as well as native villages.
- Some skills will require learning from skilled NPCs.
Crafting:
- A deep and rewarding crafting system based loosely on real-world mechanics
- The crafting system will impart some basic survival knowledge to the player as many crafting recipes are based on real-world practices and materials.
Housing:
- Players will be able to construct many types of dwellings, including tents, cabins, and other period-type structures.
