Hey! Today I wanted to share the next game mode being developed in v2.0.0: Survival mode.

If you’ve been under a rock, I am rewriting this game from scratch and releasing it as a completely free update.

Anyways, Survival mode has gone under some big changes. The biggest change is lives are no more, instead the lives system has been replaced by a money system similar to Zombrains mode.

With money, it’s used to open chests and to revive yourself from death. Killing enemies of course will give you cash, however to minimize a player from hogging all the kills, cash rewards are shared by all players.

You collect items from chests to power up your character called “Vices”. I’ve gotten a lot less edgy in my old age, but I always kind of liked how vulgar Boring Man is, so thats why Vices are themed after “adult” substances such as alcohol and drugs. For example, collecting certain beers would upgrade your movement speed or your damage with all weapons.

You can collect the same vice multiple times to improve the upgrade it provides, for example having two Ales instead of one will give 4 extra damage instead of just 2. I’ve made the vices screen a lot more helpful in this regard, as seen below:

The green number in the description will reflect the total amount of efficiency your vices are giving you. So the more Hard Lemonade you collect, the larger the dual wield reload speed shows.

All 20 original vices have returned (with a few of them reworked or swapped around) and additionally, [i]20 new vices[/i] have been added to the game. I posted a screenshot of all the new vices earlier this month and I challenge you to try to guess what the new ones do.

Vice collection is also synced across the server, so no more “client side” chests, aka opening 1 chest will give every player a vice. When a player opens a chest, 1 vice will come out that is available to any player.

To prevent instances of stealing, accidental or otherwise, the vice that comes out of the chest will not be collectible for a few seconds to anyone except the person who bought the chest. There is also a server setting where you can set a limit on how many chests a player can open per wave.

Additionally, when you die, you will have to spend money to revive. It’s game over if all players are dead and unable to afford to come back to life. The cost of revival is about 20% of your wealth plus a fixed amount depending on how many vices you’ve collected.

This is an attempt to put a natural hamper on “hoarding” vices for yourself. Sure you’re powerful, but it also costs $22842 to revive, so dying will be much more punishing for you. On the flip side, this will also allow players who just joined the game to revive more often/cheaply and get a chance to catch up to more wealthy/powerful players.

In the old version you and your teammates would have to stay alive for as many waves as possible. To advance the wave, all enemies would have to be eliminated. This was the only objective, and you could do weird stuff like cheese the AI or find a good camping spot and pretty much have Survival enemies line up waiting to die.

To change this, there is now an additional objective to Survival where you will also have to defend inconveniently placed control points from a siege of enemies. Players can contest the point similarly to TDM, but if the enemies capture the point its game over. There is a brief period before the control point unlocks where players can search for chests and maybe deploy some strategy on collecting them.

I’m predicting players will get pretty good at this, so there is a server setting where you can set how long you want this buy period to be, or to turn it off altogether.

Most of the Survival enemies will be making a return but they have a new look. They get their OWN set of “hats” that players won’t have so they are easy to distinguish as an enemy outside of the red arrow being over their head. Making unique hats for them also tickles you with a little bit of lore, for example the Purples wear scary, almost ceremonial masks when they enter the battlefield to try to stop you and your team.

As you get deeper and deeper into Survival, new and stronger enemies are introduced and even past that they “ranks” where they will appear with different outline colors to display their strength. For example a Purple with a white outline has x1.3 health, speed and damage. This should make late game Survival mode a little more challenging when I run out of enemies to throw at you.

I have also created a few Survival bosses, I don’t plan on making them randomly generated like in the old version, I wanted to have bosses with substance and a little creativity.

For example, one boss is a martial arts master that can “dodge” all weapons example punches and hadokens. This will give players a reason to use unarmed combat and get use out of Vices that benefit from unarmed combat.

Another boss is a Blue Soldier that uses a skateboard and dual sawn off shotguns. His AI is unique where instead of capturing the point, he will skateboard around the map and try to do drive bys on players and try to get the most speed out of his skateboard. I would like to make a ton of bosses like this to fill the void that maybe randomly generated bosses left, but it will be tough.

Last but not least.. saving! Your progress gets saved now in Survival mode, so if you get disconnected or need to leave for whatever reason, as long as the same Survival match is going you can rejoin with all of your vices, money, kills, etc.

So! Hopefully you like the sound of these changes, let me know what you think. Survival mode will be available in beta5, the next update. I’m not sure when it will come out because maybe I went a little overboard with adding stuff and now I have a lot of testing to do. But I would like to get it out before the end of this month. The beta is only available on Steam at the moment, but I would like to make a page for it on GameJolt soon.

Thanks for reading! See you later.

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