Devlog #33 | Maze Mechanics, New Enemies, and Base Design

Hostile Mars Development Update

Hello, Mars engineers! Welcome to another monthly development update for Hostile Mars. We've been hard at work enhancing the gameplay experience, focusing on maze design, enemy diversity, and base-building mechanics. Let's dive into what's new this month.

Enemy Congestion Events

Building on last month's work, we're emphasizing the importance of managing bottlenecks in your maze designs. Significant congestion will now trigger a timed warning, giving you insight into potential issues and an opportunity to address them before the bots react. Be cautious—failing to design your maze to scale can have serious consequences!

Prototyping Enemies

While focusing on the tower defense aspect, we're exploring new enemy variants to enhance diversity and deepen strategic gameplay. We've been prototyping extremely fast bots, others that resist most damage types, and even bots that ignore the core and hunt you down!

Splitting Paths

A long-standing idea from our design meetings is introducing mechanics that split enemies into multiple paths. We're adding temporary tools to experiment with this concept. Similar to splitting resource conveyors into multiple processing modules in factory games, we're curious to see if treating enemies more like living resources rather than just foes can lead to interesting player choices.

Combat and Waves Deep Dive

This past month, we've concentrated on isolating wave combat and defenses to increase player agency and experience. In doing so, we've been prototyping different defenses that significantly impact maze design. Here are a few examples:

Bullet Wall Trap:

Shoots a barrage of lasers across multiple cells, offering an advantage when placed at the end of long hallways.

Arc Missile Trap:

Launches missiles over walls within a certain radius. As long as ceilings aren't placed and the area is open, units will be targeted.

Artillery Cannon:

Our first large-format turret, occupying four squares. Similar to the Arc Missile Trap but fires a giant bomb instead of a small missile. It has massive range but requires a long preparation time for each shot.

We're also aligning trap designs to better consider the quantity of enemies passing through the maze. We plan to showcase more in next month's dev log.

Home Base Design

We've dedicated significant time to defining what the Home Base will be—how much will be pre-existing structures versus player-defined. You can see a few sketches in the concept art. We're leaning towards a smaller starting base, allowing you to make critical choices about where larger base elements will reside.

Concept Art

Hammering Down Design Elements

As you know, the possibilities in a physics-based, wave-based shooter are extensive. It's crucial that we make design decisions based on what's best for the player experience, rather than adhering strictly to genre conventions. We dissect each gameplay aspect to determine its value in the context of the multiple genres we're incorporating. Though it takes time to refine these mechanics, the result should be a more polished and unique experience for many players. We invite you to continue this journey with us as we work through the game mechanics to create a great experience.

That's all for this month's update. We're excited about the direction Hostile Mars is taking and can't wait to share more with you in the coming weeks. As always, we appreciate your support and feedback. Stay tuned for more updates, and happy building!

We’re incredibly grateful to have such a passionate community and excited to keep sharing our progress with you. To stay up to date with all the latest developments, join our incredible Discord community: https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg

Take Care, -HM Team