Last Stand: Rogue

A top-down survival game played with one thumb. The sheriff fires on his own, so the only decision left to the player is where to stand, and the design is built to make that decision hard. Every kill drops mutagen and scrap, but none of it is yours until you carry it back to camp. The load slows you down in steps as it fills, and dying burns whatever you were carrying, so every run comes down to whether one more pack is worth the walk home.

The map is a camp and eight regions, each held by zombie nests, an elite and a boss that guards its own arena. Clearing the nests makes a region safe, the boss fight runs in two or three phases, and the cores the region drops gate the next tier of upgrades, so progression follows the map rather than an XP number. Enemy roles are there to break the habits a top-down shooter invites: runners crouch and lunge to punish hit and run, and spitters hold their range and leave acid pools so a player who camps has to move. Banked resources build turrets on fixed build points, from a light machine gun to a flamethrower, a laser, a sawblade and a mortar, and the zombies go after the turrets as readily as after you. Modules such as ricochet and multishot, equipment, weapon types that change the fire mode, timed Elite Mutant and World Boss events and a dog that fetches loot sit on top of that loop.

I am building it on my own: design, level layout, balancing and all of the code, on Synty's Polygon art. Balancing is done by measurement rather than by feel. An editor panel drives every system in play mode, and the last pass timed 82 fights across all eight regions to set how long each boss should take standing still and while kiting, and how much health each hit should cost at the region's recommended level. Performance gets the same treatment: turning off static batching on Android took mesh memory from 1085 MB to 265 MB, because the camera only ever sees a small part of the map.