C.A.R.E.less Survival

Overview

C.A.R.E.less Survival is a Halloween-themed survival game set in the suburbs of Red Rock City, it was released as post-launch content in the Halloween 2025 update. Mercenaries have been hired by the mayor to take out a key witness in a high-stakes political case, and with the city's robot task force, Community Automated Response Enforcement (C.A.R.E.) system down and Halloween as cover, it is the perfect time to strike. Defend the victim until midnight when the C.A.R.E. system comes back online or die trying.

Gameplay

• A 24-hour clock at the top of the screen starts at 20:00, and the player has to keep the witness alive until midnight 00:00.
• Enemies storm the house from all over the neighbourhood and try to shoot the witness, who is lying in a medical bed. The game has a hidden wave system to allow a steadily increasing flow of enemies as well as timed events to up the ante with different kinds of enemies.
• Weapons, ammo and health pick-ups are hidden throughout in randomised locations. The suburbs are a network of houses, front and back gardens and connecting passageways, along with retail car parks outside where the player can search.
• The player can only carry four resources at once, but can stockpile them in the garage of the witness's house.
• Allied agents can be found around the map and recruited to defend the house giving the player a little more time to go explore further.
• A list of challenges is shown on the opening title screen. The achievements earned are saved between playthroughs and will be highlighted once completed as well as the player receiving a notification in game.
• An external generator is being used to keep the witness alive. The player cannot bunker down and must go out to maintain the generator to keep the life support system on.

Design Goals

We wanted to bring something new to the Arcadia platform that stood out and brought players back to play again and again. We identified two areas to focus on: the first was challenging the player through heightened difficulty, and the second giving them the freedom to choose how to complete the game.

• The game is hard to complete. Learning the map and the possible spawn locations takes a few tries.
• The player has to balance staying at the house to defend the witness against roaming the suburbs for weapons, resources and to make sure the generator keeps ticking.
• All the player needs is out there scattered across the map. The player's agency dictates the timing, and the order in which they make choices changes the outcome of every new game, so there is a different way to play every time.

My Role

I led the team with some hurdles set out from the start. It came with three challenges: a newly formed team of six, most of whom had not worked together before; a one-month schedule from start to finish; and longer-term projects sharing the same launch date that took higher priority.

• Stitched everyone's content together into a single level, reviewed the work and fixed bugs.
• Covered team members roles while they were on holiday or off sick, which had me working on AI enemies, pick-ups, wave flow management, achievements and time management.
• The localisation for the whole project had to be written in the first 72 hours, so we committed to what we had written and built to it.
• Repurposed existing content, adding new systems only where it would enhance the overall experience of the content
• With a new team I had to trust people to do their jobs, but after reviewing their work and talking it through, I moved people off some areas of development and onto others to protect the core features.
• Spent a lot of time training less experienced team members in the fundamentals. It is better to teach than to take over, especially when people are willing to listen, but time is something you cannot get back, and when a deadline is looming, decisions have to be made to meet the goal.

What I Built

• Implemented ammo and weapon scripting tools.
• Implemented an update to AI's so they did not drop their weapons by default
• Implemented a system to properly hide unwanted features carried over from the main game.
  • In the main game, when the player reaches low health a red blood vignette tinges the edges of the screen and turns the picture black and white. With a dark, spooky Halloween setting and a health system that does not recover automatically, this would have left the player with too low visibility for an unacceptably long time, so I removed the discolouring of the screen on low health to enable better visibility.
  • This, along with the health regeneration system we implemented, went on to be used in other published games.
• Brought the enemies, pick-ups, wave flow, achievements and time management up to a polished standard.

Challenges

• Balancing. One of our goals was to challenge the player through difficulty, and to keep that fair we needed to test the player against the full suite of gameplay features. With every feature developed in parallel and finishing at the same time, we had only a small window to balance the game. We started with a theory, tested against it, then edited, tweaked and refined the waves to reach a place that challenged the player enough to still be fun.
• Enemy targeting. The enemy AI we had to work with was built for linear single-player gameplay, but we wanted it to have multiple targets: the player, the allied AI and the witness. This meant implementing a system that overrides the behaviour and switches an enemy's target depending on situational criteria.

Result

C.A.R.E.less Survival was developed in one month and released on time as part of the Halloween 2025 update. Analytics showed it had the single highest player session length of all the ARCADIA games, with players spending several hours in a game that takes a maximum 20 minutes to complete.

Lessons

• I have learned to start with a full design document and iterate against it, rather than starting from a skeleton design and adding as you go. This gives the team clarity when they need a point of reference and removes the time spent waiting on answers to questions. This further benefits the design in totality. When changes are made you can compare them to the rest of the design and easily identify the places where it can cause friction or will enhance play.
• I have learned to give people the opportunity to work above their normal level, and work hand in hand with them to make sure they achieve it.