Opportunities in the Survival Genre

Hello friends! 

In our last post, we talked about why we founded Sprocket Games and why we started working on a survival crafting game. We focused a lot about what drew us to the genre, and especially how our team and tech opened some cool doors. This post, we’ll dive into the opportunities to do something really different and how we think we’d stand out from the current ocean of survival games. 

We’re talking about our vision for the genre. Vision! Get it? There’s eyes in the mountains! 

Easy to Bring In New Friends

Survival games are great with friends, but it can be hard to get folks into a game if you don’t start together. This mostly comes from how big worlds can be, and how invested folks can be in their building and crafting progression. A new player hopping in can have a tremendous amount to take in, and may accidentally skip over the natural learning and specialization they might have experienced if they’d joined from the start. 

The answer to this problem for some folks is to start a new world when they play with new friends, but that’s not for everyone. Veteran players going into a new world are likely leaving behind their favorite toys, and retreading challenges that might not be that engaging when repeated. Especially with more narratively focused survival games, many moments just don’t have the same impact the second time around. Veteran players may also race ahead to resolve challenges they've already faced, leaving new players in the dust.

This was a huge reason for so many of the designs in Project Cosmos. If you’re an expert player bringing in a new player, there’s always something novel to experience. If you’re playing with new players, it’s a great time to try a character or experiment in a whole new role. Even if you stick with your favorite heroes, you never know what the next world will have in store, so you still get to explore and adventure in new landscapes.

And when it comes to leaving behind progression to see a new world, in Project Cosmos you will constantly jump into new worlds, and adapt to the challenges each one throws at you. That means there’s a wealth of opportunities to bring in new friends and have them experience a new world for the first time along with you! Sure, you probably know a few tricks, or have a character with extra possible options you’ve tailored to the world, but everyone is in for surprises together. 

Replayability

As we mentioned above, Survival games frequently have super deep research trees and crafting progression. This means that it can take dozens or even hundreds of hours to craft the most powerful weapon,  reach the far away corners of the map, or build the most impressive fortress. That’s usually a selling point, and one of the greatest features of survival games is just how much you have ahead of you when you start a new game.

The downside is that once you’ve climbed to the top of the mountain, either figuratively in a tech tree or a literal mountaintop, doing it again isn’t very compelling. Even when the worlds are procedurally generated, unlocking new crafting and building bits don’t change significantly. Resources might be in different places, and there might be a different path up the mountain, but the tools and tactics you use will be nearly identical. The monsters and other obstacles that block your path are likely to feel very familiar, and the mechanical and tactical differences that different gear choices offer are generally pretty limited.

The result of this can be that even your favorite survival game sometimes doesn’t have much to offer after the first run. To be fair, that’s not all bad. Many players enjoy the variety they can find hopping from game to game, and many of the best survival crafting games have had some excellent patches and expansions that brought new life to the experience. With Project Cosmos, we wanted to deliver that same excitement that you get on patch day waaaay more often.

That’s why our worlds are not just dynamic landscapes, but different combinations of biomes, monsters, resources, and quests, so that each world gives you a substantially different set of challenges to overcome. It’s also another reason we love our diverse cast of characters so much. If you want to approach a world in a new way, try out a new hero! Each hero has their own unique weapons, attacks, and abilities. They have different specializations that give them distinct styles in how they approach a world. Add in tactical - or random - combinations of heroes to your team, and you might find yourself with a number of different strategies. And that’s before we start throwing in patches and expansions…

Ease of Expansion

When devs want to add cool new stuff to a survival game, they’re often faced with a hard choice. Where should it go? If it gets sprinkled throughout the game, experienced players have to backtrack or start over. If the devs instead add all the new stuff to the endgame, the most engaged players are excited, but newer players either get thrown into the deep end, or face a long grind to catch up to their friends. The bigger the survival game is when it comes to content and progress, the more challenging it can be to find a solution that’s great for players. 

There can also be challenges when it comes to how much work it is to add a new thing on the dev side. If the game devs didn’t plan for the game to get new content down the road, it can often be much more work to add a few new buildings or create a more challenging version of a monster. When devs want to add whole new biomes or world types, the amount of work can translate to huge gaps between releases, which can be awful for both devs and players.  

At Sprocket, we wanted to make sure that we could easily add to the game for as long as players were excited for us to do so. From day one, we’ve built our tech to facilitate that. We’ve made our creatures easily adapt when they change abilities or properties. Our building and crafting tech trees are built to flex to different resources across a world, so that our biomes create new permutations through tech trees organically. 

We’ve invested heavily into the tools we use to build heroes to make their abilities easy to create and change. We’re actively developing the pipelines to make sure all of our heroes are brimming with creativity and character. We’re doing this with technology that many of us have dreamed up over the course of decades making games, while centering the very human touch we know is key to making great games. We want Project Cosmos to delight players for as long as they want new stuff, in the same way that the best survival games have kept players exploring for years and years. 

We’d love to hear what you want to find in our worlds, where you’d like to see Project Cosmos surprise you in each new world, and how you think we could make the game easier to play with your friends. If you’d like to talk with us, please join us in our Discord: https://discord.gg/projectcosmos!

Thank you for your attention!
-Jo