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.

Implementation Details

As a solo project, this prototype demonstrates end-to-end implementation of modular systems, optimized spawner directors, and data-driven weapon scaling.

Enemy spawning director

• Built an enemy spawning director with spawn pacing, cap management, and optional object pooling to hold performance under high enemy counts.
• Implemented rarity-weighted enemy selection with per-type parameters such as speed, size, and squad count, plus runtime tuning hooks for spawn rate and movement speed.

Data-driven weapons and upgrades

• Built a fully data-driven weapon and upgrade framework with stat scaling and functional modifiers, such as homing and boundary ricochet, authored as editor-defined upgrade definitions.
• Created dynamic runtime UI that adapts to the available upgrades and current player state, scaling cleanly as new weapons and modifiers are added.

Delivery

• Set up the Unity project for rapid iteration and HTML5 delivery on itch.io.

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.