Announcing our first title "The Last Defender"

David Lythgoe

March 7, 2022

The Last Defender

Note: Game play trailer and screenshots to be announced soon

As we’ve progressed through development, it's time for us to go public with our first game called The Last Defender. I thought I'd write a post sharing the idea, how it was designed and some key technologies which could put the fun back into enemy waves. Here’s the short blurb:

"Set in the merciless blizzards of a far off planet, The Last Defender is a cooperative third-person survival shooter with strategic defence and crafting elements. Nurture your colonists, build your defences and prepare for an enemy that adapts and learns your weaknesses.”

Gameplay

It's a 1-4 player co-op third-person perspective setup, set in a relatively small open world. Players will venture out, collect resources, build defences, early warning systems and craft weapons and set about the defence of the colony. You also command, equip and train up your colonists to best help you in your defence. The enemy comes in waves using a new roguelike AI the allows them to evolve and adapt to your weaknesses. You need to find a way off the planet before your colony becomes overrun. If you lose a colonist, they are lost for the game session. If you lose your core, the session is over. Life matters in this game.

Inspiration

Over the years, I've played a lot of survival games, horde games and RTS. There's elements in each of these games that I thought could be improved so set about the design that will mash a few of these genres together - we've dubbed it SDS (Survival Defence Strategy). The idea is to take the perspective and sandbox nature of survival (crafting/building - like The Forest/Valheim), give a strong tower defence like mechanics/objective (think swarm wave defence in They Are Billions) and mix in a bit of strategy (think X-com units you care about). After many game design workshops, the concept for The Last Defender was born.

The Uniqueness

An enemy that learns your weaknesses without ever cheating

Being a software engineer, I’ve always been fascinated with roguelike and procedural generated worlds. That idea that no gaming session is the same adds more fun and longevity to a gaming experience - also a great challenge. Together with the team, we wanted to remove predictability from wave based games - like if you know they come from the North at wave 5, the pattern recognition starts to take the fun out of the game as the challenge diminishes.

The answer to this, and one of our unique core parts of the game, is to develop a genetic based algorithm that mimics evolution. In basic terms, the enemies that do well during a wave effectively ‘breed’ their traits (such as enemy type, spawn direction and some other secret sauce) and over time, the generations become more of their strengths and less of their weaknesses.

Here's a few stills from the ‘Darwin’ system (as we've called it) in motion from one of the proof of concepts in the early days - it’s since been developed to be quite an effective enemy mind:

The evolving AI essentially adapts to your defences in both variety of enemy type and attack direction/strategies providing a roguelike interesting adversary that is a lot more advanced and effective than simply being random.

The art style

Our art direction has lent heavily to stylised with a gritty comic book style. We’re trying to create this beautiful world, yet have a sinister and absorbing style. Here’s a sneak peek at a few pieces from the cut scenes and concept art worked on.

The combination of complementing genres and SWARMS of enemy!

The mash up of genres adds its own uniqueness to the mix. You’re tasked with setting about the defence of your colony. You only have a set number of colonists who can be lost permanently, so you care about the strategy around them. Couple this management of your colonists with the crafting/building mechanics of survival/tower defence and the sheer fun/fear of facing an ever adapting and learning swarm, we hope that you’ll end up with a fun and unique gaming experience.

We're using relatively new technology to help us create a 'war' onscreen with swarms of enemies to defend against. The downtime between the waves will be appreciated!