Alien Survivor

Overview

Alien Survivor is a solo Unity prototype for a top-down sci-fi action game inspired by survivor-style pressure, simple readability, and quick escalation. Built September to December 2024, the build is available on itch.io as a browser-playable prototype. The focus was a compact core loop with progression data-driven enough to extend without rewriting systems.

The prototype was an end-to-end exercise in keeping escalation manageable. High enemy counts, repeated weapon upgrades, and runtime UI all needed to grow from data while the playable build remained simple enough to tune and deliver.

What I Contributed

As the solo developer, I owned the gameplay loop, spawning, weapons, upgrades, runtime UI, tuning hooks, and itch.io delivery. I organized the project around small data-driven definitions so adding an enemy, weapon modifier, or upgrade did not require another branch in a central controller.

Enemy spawning director

The enemy spawning director manages pacing, population caps, and optional object pooling to keep behavior predictable under higher enemy counts. Rarity-weighted selection chooses among enemy definitions containing parameters such as speed, size, and squad count.

Separating selection from pacing meant the encounter curve could change without rewriting individual enemy behavior. Runtime hooks for spawn rate and movement speed also made it possible to tune pressure while the game was running rather than rebuilding for every adjustment. The trade-off was maintaining more configuration data, but that data made escalation visible and editable.

Data-driven weapons and upgrades

Weapons and upgrades use editor-defined data with both stat scaling and functional modifiers. Effects such as homing and boundary ricochet are upgrade behaviors rather than special cases embedded in the weapon loop. That decision kept numeric progression and behavior-changing progression in the same authoring workflow while allowing their application logic to remain separate.

The runtime upgrade UI reads the available definitions and current player state instead of assuming a fixed catalog. Adding another weapon or modifier therefore extends the choices without requiring a matching hard-coded interface layout. This was especially useful for testing combinations because the UI represented the same data the gameplay systems consumed.

Delivery

I set up the Unity project for rapid iteration and HTML5 delivery on itch.io, keeping the prototype immediately playable without an installer. Shipping the browser build provided a concrete boundary for the experiment: systems needed to support the current loop reliably before their scope expanded further.

What The Work Shows

Alien Survivor shows earlier end-to-end systems prototyping: building a compact core loop, making progression data-driven enough to extend, and getting the work into a playable browser build. It also shows the value of separating runtime pacing, content selection, and upgrade behavior early, even in a small solo prototype where a single controller might initially appear faster.