Hi, I was thinking about developing an Indie Survival game but I would like to know your opinions on the concept.
So I am thinking about gathering some programmers, a level designer etc. and then start working on a survival game where you find yourself in a small Kansas town where you hear the “town” alarm going off and find a timer counting the time you manage to stay alive. On the other side of the town, a reasonable amount of WW2 German infantries will have arrived and will start to shoot everybody in the town. Your goal is to stay alive as long as possible. You will be able to enter all homes in the town to find weapons to defend yourself and you will find other people living in the town fighting as well. The WW2 soldiers are not zombies, but are just healthy soldiers who arrived in your town unknown how. When you last longer times, you can unlock access to new homes or maybe rooms to find new weaponry. Possibly if you reach a certain time, you could unlock a new town located in let’s say, Nevada? This concept seems quite fun to me and should not be to difficult to develop when working with the right people. I would call the game Confuzo. I made a simple map of the town and some ‘‘concept art’’ which you cannot really call it because it looks quite awful. Please give me your opinions on the concept or propose better ideas please.
The pictures:
I like the idea but would their be a hunger or thirst system behind because I generally don’t like games that go so much in survival
Meh. Germans. Good folks. I lived there for 3 years as a youngster. I always got huge ice cream sundaes and they let me drink kinderbier and play slot machines and go into all night discotechs when I was between 9 and 11. Why not the real baddies…the Bolsheviks. 60 million Orthodox Christian murders, priests crucified on their own altar crosses. nuns being whipped naked down the streets, offal warehouses where they would not just machine gun down the populace but dismember them and pile the arms in one pile, legs in another head in another and the gutters filled with 18 inches deep of flowing blood and offal. Ever wonder why we don’t here much about them but always the germans/krauts/Hitler? Go do your homework. Horrible idea.
Yea, I am not German but I feel Germany and its people deserve a break from this kind of discrimination. I mean if it was a actual, factual historically based scenario then maybe it would appeal, but your idea in its current state doesnt please (me at least), and Im Brittish.
Why not just have made up soilders rather than Nation specific ones, I mean if there is no story/explaination as to why these soilders are here attacking you in the first place then it would be fine just to have generic soilders.
Personnally if it were my game, I would instead not make them soilders and instead make them a random terrorist organization or somthing.
Anyway, Good Luck!
Yeah you are right, they are quite discriminated when looking at games and movies, but it seems that the majority of gamers will jump up to play a game where they have to shoot Nazi’s instead of a nameless terrorist group because the idea of Nazi’s is quite familiar to them as everybody knows the story. I might think of a different “enemy” and maybe make this enemy unusually large or weird to make it appeal more.
Thanks for helping!
Np, glad to be of service!
Large and Weird… now your thinking 
No, it’s purely about not being killed by the ‘‘enemies’’, it’s not going into hunger and that crap. So you don’t like games where you have a hunger and thirst system? Because in that case I agree with you.
What a piece of shit this concept. I mean, come on! Shooting Nazi’s! My grandfather was an official SS soldier recruited without any choice by himself. He was forced to infiltrate homes and kill innocent people. This game refers to shooting nazis as if they are all stupid animals without any morals trying to murder everyone in the town! Why would they go into a town and just kill everybody?! Come on. Just give it up and go do some friction homework or whatever man…
I would consider adding those under a hardcore mode. Having the option means more potential customers. Not like it would be much additional work. Some additional code to handle eating and mark certain clutter items as food.
Reminds me of This War Of Mine. Idk. Probably without the feels?
And is that suppose to be a town? Looks more like a friendly neighborhood to me.
WWII Germans rolling into a Kansas town for no particular reason…? Why Germans lol, if there’s no reason then you shouldn’t randomly just choose WWII Germans. As someone stated above why not some random terrorist group, at least they’ll have a motive… to terrorize… you know…
I’m going to be honest, ALL idea sound like crap to me, but once you actually build the idea, then I may have an opinion.
What keeps you from just turning the other direction and skipping town? That’s what I would do. Trying to find a gun and shoot back against a whole army of soldiers seems like a quick way to die to me. But fleeing town doesn’t make for a very interesting game… how will you resolve that?
I doubt most people who want to play this sort of game really would be motivated to kill Nazi’s over anything else. You could put giant rabbits in your game and they would be happy.
Besides, Nazi’s are not the powerful population who everyone fears anymore. They have been reduced to a bunch of neo-nazi’s who have parades to upset people and form pro-white groups in isolated forested areas of the US. 
Why not think of a new and original enemy? Even the Russians are getting old as the number one bad guys.
If you use a made-up group, then you won’t insult anyone at all. Or you could go for humor…how about an invasion of Canadians? 
I have worked out my idea somewhat more, and found that one specific enemy would be quite boring. I think adding 5 different groups of enemies from different time periods would make it more interesting. Like, you would have to endure a specific time during an attack of an ancient tribe to unlock a next group of enemies who are a little more advanced concerning weaponry and military knowledge. It would make the game a little more worth playing.
Well if you look closer at the map you can see fence around the town which stops you from exciting the town. There would not have to be a reason for it. The game is supposed to resemble chaos and confusion because of an unlikely event happening like this.
Well, yeah it would of course make no sense that Nazi’s come strolling into Kansas for no reason. But it would create an effect of chaos and confusion right? I was thinking about creating different invasions of different historic or maybe even futuristic armies to give the game more a sense of variety. This is actually based on a town in the middle of Kansas called Schoenchen, although reduced in size a bit.
I know realism isnt really your concern here, but thats not what the germans, or the nazi’s, did at all. I mean first of all, theres the problem of actual invasion tactics, which you havent read up on it seems. Hitler liked to appropriate each countries invasion to how he believes the country would best respond. Poland was invaded by pillaging villages, burning down houses and just being generally terrible, because he believed thats what slavic people would respond best to. In the invasion of France, Hitler made sure there were huge parades of the armies marching down the street, he believed the french would respond best to festivals and celebration. In his (failed) invasion of Britain, he settled a small invasion force on the channel islands, who were under strict orders to be as polite and well mannered as possible, and basically live there as ordinary civilians, as he believed the British people would best respond to a polite force, which the channel islands did.
If Hitler were to invade America, he wouldnt run in guns a blazing. He’d probably focus on something similar to the invasion of France, but done a bit more, how do I but this, garishly. Thats an estimate of course, but its far more realistic than an invasion in which the soldiers are instructed to treat yanks like poles. That makes no sense.
Not only that, but the actual soldiers of the german army during WW2 werent just savage and evil brutes spawned by satan. They would see no need to go into Kansas and murder every civilian in their pass, maybe the ones who fight back, but still only in a reasonable fashion.
This. One million times over, this. I was in Birmingham the other day, and I saw a poster. ‘Capitalism has failed’ it read ‘Its time for change’ with a picture of the old hammer and sickle. Imagine if I had put up a poster saying ‘Political Correctness has failed, time for change’ with the Swastica. I’d be arrested in an instant, yet the soviets get little to no whip back, and its seen as perfectly acceptable, despite the fact that stalin was far more dangerous, and evil, than hitler ever was.
But off politics, your right.
First up, get you genre right. This is not a survival game. A survival game is about dodging the enemy, not being seen ect. A survival game typically describes facing a hostile environment. Cold, hunger, thirst, exposure are all trademarks of a survival game. As are enemies you cannot possibly damage.
You are simply describing a FPS with a timer mechanic. Conceptually it’s not that bad an idea. It’s also nothing brilliant either. To be honest you will struggle to compete with an indie FPS. Why should I play your game over Call of Duty? What do you offer that I can’t find in Halo? You could probably already find this exact game as a half life mod.
idk i kinda like the idea… but maybe a bit different…
you made me think of like… the movie “the pianist” near the end hes moving house to house and trying to hide, and he almost gets caught a bunch of times,
game like that would be pretty cool… that part of the movie was really exciting…gripping
I do not remember that the Germans were so aggressive with civilians, maybe pick the ISIS fundamentalists or their Boko Haram friends, lol. Plus it can add a comic element if you let them recite their pseudo religious rubbish while they hunt you. The reason why Allah supposedly wants them to eradicate your infidel presence from the globe. If you do it right your game could even be an anti propaganda against them without losing the element of the game idea. Maybe also put some islamic family in the game that also has to run from them, so no one misinterpretes the game as anti islamic.
I mean all in all, when I read it I thought … ohh no not germans again … (btw I agree with you, also ohh no not zombies again, lol). So yes anything will do, that is not germans, zombies or the pesky aliens.
Maybe also some soldiers of unknown origin if you dislike the idea to have a game that is critic politically ? So the people also would want to know where they came from etc.
How about you make them neo nazis who have joined isis? Then you’ve got the german tech and the isis brutality. Sounds like quite the harsh survival scenario.
For the shoddily constructed inventory system, of course! That’s really what people mean when they say ‘indie survival game’