Hello, Mars pioneers! Welcome to another development update for Hostile Mars. This month, we've focused on new traps, wave system improvements, bug fixes, and build mode enhancements. Let's dive into the details.


We're excited to announce several new traps we have been testing, expanding your defensive options and strategies. These traps are designed to give you complete coverage over different enemy types and scenarios. (Please keep in mind we're still prototyping these traps using our finest 'programmer art' - Our art team will work their magic soon enough.)

Continuing our prototyping of new traps, we're testing The Conveyor Trap! This ingenious device manipulates enemy movement by pushing them while they're stunned or slowing them down by shifting them to the side. Use it strategically to direct enemies into other traps or to delay their advance, giving your defenses more time to take them out.

Another newcomer is the Rocket Engine Trap, a powerhouse that activates when enemies are in front of it. It thrusts them away with immense force, dealing serious damage in the process. This area-of-effect trap is highly efficient at wiping out large groups but consumes resources to operate and yields fewer resources from the destroyed bots. Deploy it wisely to control the battlefield!

Crush those pesky small ground bots with the Rock Crusher Trap! This mechanical marvel pulverizes enemies that venture too close. You can upgrade it to process multiple bots simultaneously, making it even more efficient at clearing out swarms.

Turn the battlefield into a corrosive nightmare for your enemies with the Acid Sprayer. This trap douses passing bots with acid, inflicting damage over time. It's perfect for weakening enemies before they reach your core defenses.

Set deadly traps with the Acid Pool! Bots that are small enough will fall into this hidden pit, where they'll be slowly dissolved by acid. It's a satisfying way to eliminate groups of weaker enemies without expending additional resources.

Stop large enemies in their tracks with the Drill Bit Trap. A massive drill bit emerges from the ground, dealing increasing damage over time. It's especially effective against bigger bots that can't squeeze past it, allowing you to focus fire on other threats.

These new traps not only diversify your defensive arsenal but also open up new strategic possibilities. Whether you need to handle swarms of small bots or halt a giant mech, these traps provide exciting and effective solutions. Equip them wisely, and watch your enemies crumble!

We've enhanced the systems controlling enemy waves to support multiple locations that can run waves independently. For example, a major outpost discovered through exploration could have its own waves and defenses. This allows for more granular wave progression or having the failure EMP only affect certain spawn points, so they can fail independently.

These changes are designed to test various concepts for base defense gameplay. We're considering different sizes for building spaces—such as multiple smaller buildable areas to spread defenses around, as opposed to having one vast open area.

We're also researching how much agency the player should have over progression—whether you should be able to control when to spawn new enemies or if the waves should impose their own rhythm.

One issue we've had with wave progression was that players would enter a new wave blind to what was coming. While this mostly worked with a slow ramp-up of the number or rank of enemies, the introduction of new spawn points or enemy types came as unexpected surprises that players had to deal with manually.

There could be value in keeping some of that information vague or hidden, but the potential for heavy consequences from an unhandled spawn point or enemy type felt unfair.

So, we're introducing a toggleable overlay that displays information on upcoming waves. Currently visible in-world, this might be changed to appear in a menu or look different in future versions.

Many enhancements have been made to the build mode this month! As we internally playtest, we're constantly looking for ways to improve this central mechanic to be as frictionless and efficient as possible.

Free-Form Selection: We've changed the selection from a grid-snapped box to a more free-form selection. This allows for finer control over what gets selected, making quick edits in crowded areas easier. We've also added incremental selection controls to add to or remove from the current selection when dragging a new box.

Grid Placement: Placing a grid of objects is now supported, making the construction of larger structures more straightforward.

Non-Grid Objects: Support for non-grid "free placeable" objects has been reintroduced. Previously removed to streamline interactions, we've brought it back for small items like decorations or utility objects (e.g., storage crates) that don't conform to the build grid. These objects also work with selection and copy-pasting!

Additional Tools: We've added a pipette tool to easily pick an object to place from the world and a deletion hotkey to quickly remove buildings.

That's all for this month's update. We’re incredibly grateful to have such a passionate community and excited to keep sharing our progress with you. To stay up to date with all the latest developments, join our incredible Discord community: https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg

Take Care,
-HM Team

Hello, Mars engineers! Welcome to another monthly development update for Hostile Mars. We've been hard at work enhancing the gameplay experience, focusing on maze design, enemy diversity, and base-building mechanics. Let's dive into what's new this month.


Building on last month's work, we're emphasizing the importance of managing bottlenecks in your maze designs. Significant congestion will now trigger a timed warning, giving you insight into potential issues and an opportunity to address them before the bots react. Be cautious—failing to design your maze to scale can have serious consequences!


While focusing on the tower defense aspect, we're exploring new enemy variants to enhance diversity and deepen strategic gameplay. We've been prototyping extremely fast bots, others that resist most damage types, and even bots that ignore the core and hunt you down!


A long-standing idea from our design meetings is introducing mechanics that split enemies into multiple paths. We're adding temporary tools to experiment with this concept. Similar to splitting resource conveyors into multiple processing modules in factory games, we're curious to see if treating enemies more like living resources rather than just foes can lead to interesting player choices.

This past month, we've concentrated on isolating wave combat and defenses to increase player agency and experience. In doing so, we've been prototyping different defenses that significantly impact maze design. Here are a few examples:

Shoots a barrage of lasers across multiple cells, offering an advantage when placed at the end of long hallways.

Launches missiles over walls within a certain radius. As long as ceilings aren't placed and the area is open, units will be targeted.

Our first large-format turret, occupying four squares. Similar to the Arc Missile Trap but fires a giant bomb instead of a small missile. It has massive range but requires a long preparation time for each shot.

We're also aligning trap designs to better consider the quantity of enemies passing through the maze. We plan to showcase more in next month's dev log.

We've dedicated significant time to defining what the Home Base will be—how much will be pre-existing structures versus player-defined. You can see a few sketches in the concept art. We're leaning towards a smaller starting base, allowing you to make critical choices about where larger base elements will reside.


As you know, the possibilities in a physics-based, wave-based shooter are extensive. It's crucial that we make design decisions based on what's best for the player experience, rather than adhering strictly to genre conventions. We dissect each gameplay aspect to determine its value in the context of the multiple genres we're incorporating. Though it takes time to refine these mechanics, the result should be a more polished and unique experience for many players. We invite you to continue this journey with us as we work through the game mechanics to create a great experience.

That's all for this month's update. We're excited about the direction Hostile Mars is taking and can't wait to share more with you in the coming weeks. As always, we appreciate your support and feedback. Stay tuned for more updates, and happy building!

We’re incredibly grateful to have such a passionate community and excited to keep sharing our progress with you. To stay up to date with all the latest developments, join our incredible Discord community: https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg

Take Care,
-HM Team

Welcome to the October 2024 Hostile Mars Devlog! As we get further into development, the team has been hard at work refining every aspect of the game, from waves of enemy robots to player-driven systems and mechanics. This month, we’ve been focusing on improving the core combat experience, enhancing the game's systems, and introducing exciting new features that will shape how you defend Mars. Let's dive into what’s new and get you prepped for the battles ahead!

We’re currently isolating the wave system and Home Base defenses, doing a deep dive into traps, turrets, player weapons, and enemies to see how they can be optimized. The goal is to make waves not just challenging, but also full of interesting choices for the player. Expect big changes!

Once we’re satisfied with the core wave mechanics, we’ll layer the manufacturing and logistics systems on top to further deepen the design. This process is taking a bit longer than expected due to the unique blending of genres, but we're getting closer to finding the perfect formula.

Our shift to grid-based traps and buildings is paying off. By using grid cells to track enemy positions, we can optimize how traps interact with enemies, making it easier to detect when bots are bottlenecked or when players have created efficient mazes. This optimization allows us to reward clever base-building strategies and reduce unnecessary complexity in the process.

We’ve made a few quality-of-life improvements to Management Mode, streamlining the UX by automatically switching between selection and placement tools based on input. This speeds up the process of building and adjusting your base, making it feel more fluid. We’ve also added a copy-paste feature so players can quickly duplicate base elements and design more efficiently. You can even drag the blueprint to repeat over a large area! Take that all other games that don't have this feature!

It’s time for the player to feel the impact of battle! We’re adding status effects like stun, knockback, and slow to make combat feel more dynamic and dangerous. These effects will add a layer of challenge beyond just managing health, making certain enemies even more threatening. Plus, we’ll be integrating improved animations so the player character reacts more naturally to being hit, adding a deeper sense of immersion.

We’ve cleaned up and improved the code for handling damage and health, giving us far more flexibility in how entities interact in combat. Now, when an entity deals or receives damage, it can track what caused the damage and even trigger special behaviors—like bots self-destructing upon destroying a structure or spike traps activating on impact. This upgrade opens up new design possibilities as we fine-tune the game’s tower defense mechanics.

Power has always been a tricky part of our game’s design, especially considering its importance in factory-building games. But in a wave-based combat game, a power outage during a wave could punish players too harshly. So, we’ve revamped the system into a grid-based power system.

Power flows through tiles connected to a central generator. As long as tiles are connected, they’ll stay powered. If an attack breaks the connection, only those affected tiles will lose power—so don’t worry about catastrophic failures mid-wave. The new system simplifies power management, letting you focus on building without worrying about power shortages.

While there may not be much to show visually, we’ve drastically improved the way waves are structured. Now, we have more control over where and when enemies spawn, allowing us to create more exciting and strategic waves. The new system lets us fine-tune which spawn points release specific enemy types, giving us the ability to design waves with more precision and intensity.

This month, we’re giving you a sneak peek at some of the latest concept art for Hostile Mars! Our talented art team has been hard at work bringing the Martian landscape and enemy designs to life. From the gritty, industrial feel of your Home Base to the mechanical menace of enemy bots, the visual direction is getting sharper every day.

Expect to see towering enemy robots, deadly traps, and a Martian landscape filled with hidden resources and strategic opportunities. We can’t wait for you to experience these environments and enemies in action, but for now, enjoy this exclusive look at some of our newest concept art!

That wraps up our October devlog! We’re excited about the progress we’ve made and can’t wait to share even more updates as we continue refining Hostile Mars. With major improvements to combat, new systems in place, and a deeper focus on strategy and gameplay, we’re getting closer to delivering a Martian defense experience like no other. Stay tuned for more, and as always, thanks for your continued support!

Until next time, keep defending Mars! 💥

We’re incredibly grateful to have such a passionate community and excited to keep sharing our progress with you. To stay up to date with all the latest developments, join our incredible Discord community: https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg

Take Care,
-HM Team

The public pre-alpha demo of Hostile Mars, launched during Steam's Tower Defense Festival, was a resounding success! Over 2,500 users engaged with the demo, averaging two hours of playtime each. We’re thrilled with the turnout and deeply grateful for all the feedback received through the post-demo survey. It has been instrumental in guiding our enhancements. If you haven’t had the chance yet and would like to provide feedback, you can still do so here.

Your feedback has given us clear insights into what’s working well and where we can focus our efforts to improve the game. We’re particularly grateful for the constructive suggestions regarding features that are still in development, such as the outpost system. This system is designed to provide unique experiences and unlock new technologies with each completed outpost, and we’re excited to refine it further to meet your expectations.

We were blown away by the creative base designs that many of you shared. Seeing how you engaged with the game’s mechanics has been a huge inspiration for our team. Your participation and feedback are vital as we continue to develop and enhance Hostile Mars. We’re listening closely and are already implementing many of your ideas to make the game even better.


In preparation for the demo, we made some significant updates to the game’s progression system. By tying the tech tree directly to the world, we’ve created a more immersive and rewarding experience. This also meant reimagining the environment with new Points of Interest (POIs) and special locations that align with the revamped progression.

The demo showed us that we’re on the right track, and we’re committed to refining these elements to ensure they’re both intuitive and enjoyable. We’re excited to see how these changes will enhance your experience as you explore and conquer Mars.


We’re excited to share that we added a new intro sequence to the demo, bringing a fresh layer of narrative depth to Hostile Mars. While there’s still more to come, the current intro has already received positive feedback, and we’re eager to continue expanding the game’s storytelling elements. This is just the beginning of the cinematic experiences we plan to offer, making the world of Hostile Mars even more engaging and immersive.


Throughout the demo, our team worked tirelessly to ensure everything ran as smoothly as possible. We’re always striving to deliver the best experience, and your feedback is helping us polish the game even further. We’re a small but dedicated team, and every challenge we face brings us closer to creating the best version of Hostile Mars.


We heard your thoughts on the building system, and we’re excited to announce some great improvements! Building vertically is now more intuitive, thanks to updates that make placing walls and floors easier and more precise. These enhancements will allow you to focus on your creativity, making base building a more enjoyable and seamless experience.


The art team has been working hard on lots of stuff, here's a preview of some of the concept work done:



Thank you for your continued support! We’re incredibly grateful to have such a passionate community and excited to keep sharing our progress with you. To stay up to date with all the latest developments, join our incredible Discord community: https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg

That's it for this dev log.
Take Care,
-HM Team

The public demo is almost here! Hostile Mars is excited to participate in the Steam Tower Defense Festival, featuring our latest demo! The festival kicks off on July 29th, but you can dive into the action early with the public demo going live on July 26th. Get ready to defend Home Base!

If you experienced our last public demo, prepare for a whole new adventure! This demo has been completely overhauled from top to bottom, with revamped game mechanics, enhanced enemy behaviors, and a host of new features. Get ready to dive into an even more thrilling and immersive Martian battlefield!

Let's take a look at the things we've been working on for the past month:


We've been crafting a weapon that truly captures the essence of Hostile Mars. With our focus on battling massive waves of enemies and physics-based interactions, we've created "The Ripper."

The game kicks off with The Ripper as your primary utility weapon. Originally designed for repairing and debugging live robots, this versatile tool can disassemble bots into pieces for inspection. It also throws scraps too heavy to move manually into storage or recycling bins. But here's the twist: The Ripper can be easily modified to pull enemies in close, tear them apart, and hurl the pieces at other bots!

Upgrades allow The Ripper to pull in more enemies and shoot more scraps per shot. It's an incredibly satisfying weapon to wield, and we're continually refining it to ensure it feels fantastic and scales seamlessly with the increasing waves of enemies. Get ready to rip through the robotic hordes with style!


We've enhanced the attack token system, which balances combat by limiting simultaneous enemy attacks. Previously, all enemies shared a global token budget, making it hard for all enemy types to get a chance to attack in large groups. Now, each enemy type has its own attack group with a private budget, ensuring more balanced and engaging combat. Enemies can still use the shared budget, but if depleted, they rely on their group's budget. This update allows for fine-tuning the number of attacks from each enemy type, making battles with mixed enemy groups more dynamic and exciting.


Up until recently, the enemies would aggro the player whenever they were in range, no matter what. This meant the player could easily stop the entire wave from progressing by standing in range of the path as enemies would try to reach the player instead of going for the core. And this worked even when hundreds of enemies were around.

We've changed the aggro behavior to limit how many enemies will take the aggro at once, using the attack token system described above. This resulted in much better interactions when getting too close to the swarm, most of it will continue going for the core as some enemies stay behind to take care of any pesky player bothering them !


We've revamped Build Mode, now called Management Mode, with a cleaner UI. The interface has moved from a vertical stack to a bottom row, freeing up screen space. Category tabs are smaller with clearer icons, and material costs are shown only when hovering over items. This is our first pass, with more improvements to come based on feedback.


We are building out home base to fit with the wave structure of the game and this is the central power generator!


Mahines, Turrets, and Crates.


Health for structures has been implemented more robustly and now shows on the prompt when viewing an object's cursor prompt.


We've been hard at work tuning our machines and crafting system to seamlessly integrate with Hostile Mars' intense gameplay. Each type of enemy scrap can be used towards smelting two different metal types, giving you the freedom to choose which resource to extract from each enemy. Additionally, certain traps can yield both resources from each enemy type, emphasizing the importance of home base design and strategic resource collection. The better you design your base, the more resources you'll harvest from each wave, enabling you to build and upgrade with even higher efficiency. Get ready to optimize your base and turn enemy scraps into Martian treasures!

That's it for this dev log. If you want to keep up with development, join us on Discord:
https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg

Take Care,
-HM Team

Great news, Martian defenders! The long-awaited public demo of Hostile Mars will finally be available on Steam at the end of July! Get ready to dig into the action and face the robotic onslaught!


This month, we've been mining deep into the core systems of the game, polishing and refining them to perfection. While we don't have a lot of shiny new visuals to show off just yet, we've been hard at work on item progression. Although we can't reveal the details right now, expect some game-changing updates next month! Our goal is to make the early game as straightforward as possible without digging into the complexity and creativity that makes the late game so rewarding.


After lots of discussion, the decision was made to pivot all placeable objects to objects that align with a grid to provide a more predictable and precise building experience. The world grid is represented by three main coordinates.
(1) The cell coordinate.
(2) The shared side coordinate which is a combination of a cell coordinate plus an indicator for which face (left, down, back) it represents. And
(3) The inner side coordinate which, like the shared side, is a combination of cell coordinate and face (left, down, back, right, up, forward).

These three types of coordinates allow us to define items that take up entire cells, specific sides between cells, or even a specific side inside of a cell. This gives us a lot of control over the placement requirements that must be met for an object placement to be valid and also allows us to get very granular with the rules we build. Can I place a trap on this wall if the floor already has this other trap? Does this wall support having a trap placed on either side or only one of the sides? etc. There are many more exciting aspects of the grid system that we will discuss as development continues.


We want to give players tools to better understand how their base design performs against waves, and part of that will be through various overlays showing these details in a heatmap style.

The first one will display where enemies were destroyed, so we added support to track events during a wave. We're still designing the UI and exploring how it'll be rendered, but these overlays will be accessible in the Build Mode, which is being improved into a more general base management mode.


The character controller we are using wasn't designed to work with Unity's DOTS packages, which includes the physics system used by all enemies and most of the game. This makes properly integrating the player's movement with the enemies challenging. However, we found a temporary solution to simulate the collisions and resulting forces that we can apply to the character.

While this causes some jitter and definitely doesn't feel like proper physics as the controller wasn't meant to be used this way, this is still a massive improvement as the player now pushes enemies differently based on their mass instead of pushing them all like inflatable balloons.

Running against a big enemy or even in a crowd of smaller bots will be more difficult, and in some cases, the bots can overpower you and push your character around.



Our art team is hard at work crafting immersive and stunning locations around the Hostile Mars map. Here are a few sketches of these awe-inspiring environments currently being modeled.




Our enemies are leveling up! Each robot type will have various ranks and visual identities, gaining more shielding, larger silhouettes, and deadlier weapons as they progress. Check out these concept designs for the first rank of the Transport Bot and the Laser Bot. They're shaping up to be formidable foes, so gear up and prepare for battle!

Stay tuned for more updates, and remember: in the war against evil robots on Mars, it's all about digging deep and mining every opportunity for victory!


That's it for this dev log. If you want to keep up with development, join us on Discord:
https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg

Take Care,
-HM Team

Welcome back, explorers! Gear up for an exciting journey through the latest enhancements and unveilings in the world of Hostile Mars. Let’s dive into this month’s thrilling updates!


Over the past month, a large amount of time was devoted to defining all of the key elements of the game and getting everyone on the same page about the gameplay loop and depth of the game. This should allow us to deep-dive into each core mechanic and analyze its purpose and value. After that, the next step is to identify exactly what needs to be done to get the game into early access, and then just do it.

We are really excited about a lot of the changes and feel like the formula is forming really well.

As you know, we are mixing a few genres so taking care to analyze which parts of those genres work well in our formula, which don’t work well, and which can be improved or reduced, are all important in figuring out a gameplay loop that lets the player be creative and expressive while having an engaging experience. Some of these adjustments are explained further down.



We've spent a lot of time considering boss design for Hostile Mars. Given the unique blend of combat and base defense genres, it's crucial that the boss isn't just a larger bot with more health. Reflecting one of the main pillars of the game—massive amounts of enemies—we decided to construct the boss out of thousands of individual bots.

This isn't just a visual trick; each component is its own bot that can be destroyed. Once enough bots are destroyed from a segment, it compromises the integrity of the rest of the leg, causing it to collapse. The bots are then dropped and enter the player's maze of defenses.


We've been experimenting with the behavior of the enemies, adding more dynamic reactions when the player is close by, improving the way they look when moving, and leveraging all the systems we've been working on.

In the clip below, the bots' movement speed has been increased to better demonstrate their drifting and leaning behaviors.


We're also in the process of adding an attack to the first enemy type. They used to ignore the player but it didn't feel right. Playing into the physics-based nature of Hostile Mars, these bots will now be ramming you when you get too close, being surrounded by hundreds of machines should always be a deadly situation, even when these are "cute" transport bots.


Last time, we introduced companion bots, helpers that follow the player and simplify some common tasks. At that point, they were still being prototyped and were spawned using debug tools. However, these companion bots can now be crafted, upgraded, and equipped on various backpacks.

Each exopack can provide a different number of slots to equip bots in, and each slot can be restricted to specific types of companions.


We’ve made quite a few changes regarding the item progression and the early game complexity.


The power system continues to be refined to allow focus on what’s most important for the title, base design, and combat. A power core is dropped each wave, allowing the player to expand their defenses.

Instead of multiple distributors and considering the range between distributors and buildings, all of the power distribution is done through the grid system. This means a centralized power generator making use of all of the power cores and distributing power through connected floor, wall, and ramp panels. Power capacity is now given as a standard unit, and all placed items consume a set amount of power.


Because of how the power is distributed, all defenses are now ‘snap-to-grid’. This relieves some ambiguity regarding how traps will function based on where they are placed, providing a more accurate experience for the player.

Often, traps placed just off target cause frustration when the wave fails, and the trap needs to be slightly adjusted. Now all traps are a full panel size and affect any unit that is located inside of the defense's attack zone.

We feel this makes placing and adjusting defenses super fast, getting you into the action and allowing iteration much quicker.


The early game item progression focused a lot on micromanaging various resource types when recycling and converting enemy scraps into usable materials. New players spent much time managing this process, interacting with machine UIs to craft and check which items were necessary for progress or construction.

We have reduced this by removing a lot of the ‘parts’ like springs and cogs. Now defeated bots directly drop scrap metal which can be forged into scrap ingot. This allows us to provide a combat and base defense-focused experience in the first hours. Don’t worry, there will still be more complex items down the road, but the early game will contain much less to understand and keep everything organized.


A lot of these changes are in an effort to reduce early-game complexity. This does not mean that the game will lack complexity; there will be plenty of time throughout the game to ramp up more complex mechanics and strategies. Everyone on the team feels better about reducing the complexity early and waiting to introduce complexities until the core mechanics of the game are understood by the player.









That's it for this dev log. If you want to keep up with development, join us on Discord:
https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg

Take Care,
-HM Team

Another monthly Dev Log! Let's jump right into it:


The weapon system has been improved upon by adding a ton of enhancement options. You can increase various stats for all weapons using gun parts to increase individual stats.

There is also an experience system with each gun, so the more you use a gun the more familiar you get with it allowing for additional abilities and modifications. Leveling up a weapon will have automatic perks such as increased reload speed and accuracy, while unlocking different abilities at milestone levels. Each weapon will have an ability tree that the player can customize to their choosing. Want to focus on dealing damage to the most bots possible? You can do that, or focus on single target damage for the larger bots, up to you. Each weapon will have its own unique abilities to unlock.

Passthrough bullets penetrate bots so multiple can be hit with the same shot while exploding bullets deal massive damage to a target with splash damage to nearby bots. But why stop at a single ability? Why not both passthrough and exploding bullets:

Want 10 barrels on an SMG? Anything less doesn’t even make sense:

The uses are endless, be creative! Wondering if it would be a good idea to shoot explosive bullets on the ground underneath yourself? We may never know:

There are tons more abilities waiting to be tested on ridiculous amounts of enemies.


How do you know when you have too many upgrades? That’s the wrong question, the correct question is: How do we add more upgrades? Here’s how:

Turrets have single stats that can be upgraded by spending AI Cores, which have a low chance of dropping when defeating almost any type of bot. Increase the damage, range, and rate of fire, you pick, so that your turrets can be effective in the situation that it is used.

You can also now calibrate your turrets to either deal more damage or shoot faster.


We want massive amounts of enemies, each being capable of attacking the player. This can make balancing them challenging as we'd want an encounter to require fighting even with only ~10 enemies, but it's possible to be surrounded by 100 of them at once which would then be completely impossible to even survive from.

That's where the "Attack budget" comes in, each enemy taps into this budget to execute their attacks, and enemies that are well positioned get to consume it in priority, but once the budget is depleted no more enemies can attack during this frame. Difficult enemies consume more of the budget at once, while ones that can be mostly ignored would drain only a very small amount.

This system allows balancing enemies independently from one another based on a "normal difficulty" budget depending on how much of the player's attention/skills they require to be dealt with. Yet it still adapts to any combination or quantity of enemies.

It also provides a great way for us to manipulate how difficult the game is by tweaking the total budget, even while the game is running.


One of the ways the player will progress in the game will be via these companion bots. They can be equipped and they follow the player around, automating tasks the player would've had to manually do before or providing convenience such as more inventory space.


More than a year ago (in Devlog #20) we worked on backpacks the player could equip to gain abilities, basically equivalent to a class system, except the player can swap classes at any time (provided they have unlocked the associated backpack).

We've been updating them to work with all of the new systems as most of everything changed since then.



Bot trails, cool.










That's it for this dev log. If you want to keep up with development, join us on Discord:
https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg

Take Care,
-HM Team

This month, our journey through the cosmos of Hostile Mars took us deep into the design and rhythm of the game's universe. We've made significant strides in the storyline, revamping the majority of our bots to align with the evolving narrative theme, while also refining key gameplay mechanics to enhance player engagement and progression.

We're thrilled to announce the expansion of our creative crew with the addition of an Art Director, VFX Artist, UI Technical Artist, and Environment Prop Modeler. Brace yourselves for a visual revolution in the updates to come!

This trap hits nearby robots with lightning that chains to other nearby bots. This can cause a chain reaction throughout the entire wave!

The new enemy system is in a good place; it was time to spread the refactoring love to the turret system as well. This task was completed much faster because the design is very similar to that of the agents. Nearly all the turret code is now parallelized and has been largely optimized, making it simpler to extend and create new kinds of turrets.

During the exploration of the open world, the player will encounter bots, mostly enemies. We created a highly customizable system to define encounters and how they happen. This example has a small group of enemies spawning near the player on a timer, but the system can allow for much more variation in when: triggering an encounter each time a bullet is fired, continuously while an alarm is triggered, etc., and in what: calling reinforcements if the enemies stay alive for too long, trapping the player with status effects or props, or even creating full-on mini-waves!

This month, we started our first iteration of a Map System for Hostile Mars, so please forgive the programmer art. Mars will feature many different points of interest for the player to discover and explore. The map will assist them in navigating their way around and serve as a resource where players can view specific information about POIs they have already discovered without having to travel back to those POIs. For example, they can see the repair cost of a distant signal generator.


Laser Turret
Chain Lightning Trap
Bomb Trap
Combining Robot


Early exploration of the Foreman Defense Unit (DFU)
This robust observer controls and defends the workers during their mining operations.
The Surveyor drone is the front-line explorer of Hostile Mars. Their task is to burrow down into the Martian regolith using the SFR (sub field radar) they can detect all nearby ores, and notify the local FDU for collection.
Mining Laser Droid used for close-quarters surface precision cutting and mining.
And a Resource Transport Bot to carry valuable materials around the surface.
That's it for this dev log. If you want to keep up with development, join us on Discord:
https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg

Take Care,
-HM Team