FatalZone is a roguelite auto-shooter (also called Bullet Heaven, VS-like, or simply survivor — not survival). Players need to destroy hordes of zombies, collect resources, and escape the nightmare to strengthen the survivors’ base and patch up their health. The game’s motto: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.
The game went through a full development cycle: from concepts to release and support on Steam. The release was multi-stage, through a prologue and early access — meaning there were many releases, each release being a release build compilation, testing, polishing, and all that responsible and nerve-wracking goodness )))
The game was created by an experienced team. Before this, we developed nearly a hundred different projects, so we had the tools, pipelines, and infrastructure.
At peak months, 17 developers worked on the game (programmers, game designers, 2D and 3D artists, specialists in sound and visual effects, quality control, and management).
Important business parameters: time constraints, budget constraints, genre constraints.
One of the important (challenging) business goals was to make the game in 2D, pseudo-3D, more beautiful and higher quality than all competitors on the market.
At peak, the game’s online player count reached 4,000 players.
Made on Unity, we especially want to highlight the use of FMOD. Yes, budgets are always tight, but FMOD is worth every penny.
Very rare features for the Bullet Heaven genre (at the time of the game’s release)
Permadeath — permanent character death. Run after run, you clear locations, choose builds, weapons, take risks… and in one of the raids, your character dies. That’s it, no more of that character — gone. Five hours of gameplay and they’re dead? Well yes, those are the rules. We were aware this was hardcore, some players wrote hurtful comments and we can understand them. But other players loved it. We believe the feature is worth it. Because there’s a challenge in it, it sharpens interest since the stakes are high. And no other game in the genre had permadeath, so we decided to go all out )) This feature is reflected in the game’s motto: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.
By the way, we thought about making a cemetery, like in Darkest Dungeon, but we never got around to that feature. Maybe it’s for the best :D
In general, we love this kind of hardcore, which is why our studio is called MidHard Games (MIDcore HARDcore Games).
Evacuation — the ability to escape from a raid. This feature is compensatory for permadeath. On schedule, a helicopter arrives on the map that you need to reach. If you feel like you’re walking on the edge and don’t want to lose your character and resources, you survive until the nearest helicopter and evacuate. Or you can hang out under the helicopter’s protection and use this event as a temporary breather and boost — that’s also an option.
The feature can be upgraded in the city. Initially, there’s no evacuation. For it to appear, you need to unlock the hospital in the city, then upgrade that building, and as you upgrade, mechanics will appear:
- the ability to evacuate appears,
- a protective dome during evacuation, which after another upgrade stuns enemies,
- a reward crate during evacuation (you can upgrade one skill for free),
- increased number of evacuations and waiting time,
- reduced distance to the evacuation point.
Mutations — the game’s events unfold after the apocalypse (post-apoc). Nuclear wars, cultists, combat genetic engineering, etc. In short, raids into locations and battles with monsters are dangerous because they infect you with a virus.
Every 1000 points of viral load adds a mutation to your character. Each mutation is a random buff, debuff, or combination of buffs and/or debuffs. Examples: “+10% to health”, “armor -5” or both of these parameters in one mutation. So mutations are part of the character’s build. And the more the character runs through zones, the higher the difficulty of those zones, the more viral load and buffs/debuffs. Mutations can be treated.
Characters also get infected with various infections that significantly debuff the character. Infections need to be treated, and they heal while other characters are on raids, meaning you’re forced to play another character once to give the infected time to recover.
Survivors didn’t have this, but we liked the feature in combination with others. It’s not exactly wow-wow — like permadeath or evacuation — but it adds spice and depth. In general, you need to become stronger through mutations and monitor health, plus there’s a sexy nurse ;)
Pseudo-3D — this is when the game is technically 2D but looks like 3D. We aimed to make “the most beautiful 2D survivor at the time of release” and it seems we succeeded. To achieve this, we built a development pipeline for 2D animations through 3D. As a result, there are about 4,500 sprites per character. The pipeline isn’t new for the industry, we’ll tell you about it in another article.
The main thing — many players (and us) liked the result, it was worth it — the effect was achieved ;).
Standard Features
Characters. We wanted to make many characters, like in Vampire Survivors or Brotato, but we wanted even more to make significantly different characters from each other. In the end, we made this one of the game’s design principles and stubbornly went in that direction.
The game has seven unique mercenaries, each with unique skills (passive and ultimate), characteristics, and appearance. By earning experience and resources in battle, you can upgrade heroes and their equipment, building another interesting build.
However, being near the infected doesn’t go unnoticed for fighters, and with each new battle, the viral load on their organisms grows. Because of this, they mutate, acquiring new properties. You can recover if you have enough patience and money.
Each character has their own ultimate. The ultimate needs to be charged through killing enemies. Yes, it’s rare, but BOY does it pack a punch ), spectacular and effective in skilled hands ))
Locations — locations differ from each other visually. Each next location is harder than the previous one. Each location has 6 difficulty levels, each of which increases reward and difficulty.
Locations also have unique enemy types that aren’t found on other locations. Different space design — so it plays differently ) you can’t just run through forests: you need to clear the park and overcome the factory.
Base — a place for rest and upgrades. The base has buildings with different functions and there’s a lot to do and think about. The foundation is character build formation + a bit of economics.
We also made the base first in 3D, then render, overpaint, and added effects. Why we did it this way — because with 3D base elements it was easier for us to “play constructor”, easier — that’s cheaper (faster).
A cat named “Bobby” and a dog named “Shkhuna” live on the base.
Automated Testing System. Fatalzone is a game with monstrous combinatorics. This means the number of diverse builds, sequences, and situations can number in the tens of thousands, which you can’t check in manual testing mode. Therefore, for this game we built an automated testing pipeline. A very cool system, helps a lot. More about the automated testing system in another article.
If you play FatalZone, remember, we put our soul into this game )))
Where to Play
The game is available on Steam, Nintendo Switch, Xbox and PlayStation. Choose your preferred platform and dive into the world of FatalZone!