Anoxia Station News

You know when you drop your nice, shiny pen and it rolls under your bed, and you look under there and see it winking from the depths of a stygian expanse of superannuated dust bunnies, lakes of mildew and anomalous debris that absorbs far too much light? Just me? I need to get out the mould spray more often.

OK, how about when you were a kid and you lifted up a nice, round stone and the damp, fertile soil beneath writhed away from you in a fervent knotting of pellucid, boneless bodies and the tickling of a thousand little legs? Right. Anoxia Station is that and also, a turn-based strategy game about drilling for oil. The recently released Itch.io demo is rough around the edges, but I do adore the vibe.

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During development, I mentioned many games that inspired me in one way or another. But if I shorten the list, the closest analogs are Into The Breach, Polytopia, and Frostpunk. The objective in the game seems simple: discover resources, extract them, complete tasks, and leave the sector before a strong earthquake hits.

But it's not that simple!

Each level represents a new biome with its unique set of monsters, "flora," and points of interest. In each sector, the rules change slightly, and new mechanics are added.

While in novels or quests the player experience remains relatively consistent, in a strategy game, it's quite different. I offer tools, rules, objectives, and methods of achieving them, but the player has to decide every second what to do next and exactly how to achieve the result.
I aimed to make the gameplay as random as possible, so initially, the map of each level was generated completely randomly. I like it when players are encouraged to explore when there's no complete understanding of what awaits them. Even plot objects may be hidden in one playthrough but revealed in another.

Incidentally, I also don't have a visual map editor. Maps are created through code. In my case, it works, but I wouldn't recommend this approach to others.



Naturally, randomness led to imbalance: playthroughs could be either too easy or excessively difficult. Although it sounds obvious now, the idea initially seemed good to me.

As a result, I had to return to the map generation code many times. Today, in the story campaign, the map is created taking into account predefined rules: the base, resources, and plot objects are distributed in "fair" regions, avoiding extremes.

Another rule I followed: to make sure something crazy happens every turn. In a good way. The thing is, if you don't invest, don't use perks and a special locator, you're essentially drilling blindly...

The following resources are present in the game:

• Petroleum
  
• Fuel
  
• Energy
  
• Water
  
• Oxygen
  
• Gas
  
• Technology Points
  

People are also a resource. They are set at the beginning of the first chapter. You lose the game if you lose your entire team. In addition, their mental state needs to be constantly monitored. Gameplay is influenced by various factors such as temperature, radiation, and other biome features.
Also, to not make life too easy, I implemented some abilities as randomly obtained perks for special Innovation Points, which can only be obtained by completing story quests and killing monsters.

Anoxia is led by a high command of heroes – officers with various specializations and unique abilities. At the start of the game, you choose your hero-avatar. Their death means game over.

Anoxia Station offers two game modes:

• Story Campaign: The main mode with a narrative.
  
• Quick Game: This mode has a significantly higher element of randomness, creating unique challenges for players. The difficulty setting also influences this randomness.
  

I think the game turned out challenging. And possibly, not everyone will enjoy the plot. But my theory is that interest in a game is born in the learning process. When you first encounter the rules, begin to understand them, make mistakes, find new paths – that's where the magic lies.

Unfortunately, in Game Maker, at least currently, there is no visual UI editor. This means that I have to manually place each button at specific coordinates. Then I need to compile the game, see how it looks, and if something is wrong, repeat the process. And so for each available resolution.
At some point, I started using a special extension that allowed me not to recompile the game every time. This slightly sped up the process, but still didn't completely solve the problem and didn't save much time.

The save system in a strategy game with hundreds of variables is a nontrivial task.
I'm proud that I managed to implement exactly what I wanted. The game only has one save slot, but technology and characters are carried over between chapters. Of course, players can replay chapters as they wish.



Generally, a strategy game is essentially a collection of arrays and loops; lists. Therefore, I didn't reinvent the wheel, I simply save the objects at the current moment. However, then, when the level is recreated on reload, I simply delete everything and load the objects and their variables that I saved. It's crude. But it works.

Hello everyone! My name is Yakov, and I'm an indie developer. You might have played my previous projects: Dom Rusalok and Loretta. Two years ago, my friend and I decided to create a strategy game. And now, a year after I've decided to summarize the work – both for myself and for those who follow us.

Anoxia Station is a single-player turn-based strategy game with elements of science fiction and survival horror. It's a game about the boundless cruelty and greed of humanity.



Despite having released several games, I felt I couldn't call myself a game designer until I created a project with engaging and deep gameplay. So I decided to give it a try. In Anoxia Station, challenges arise daily. However, the most difficult for me were:

• The save system.
  
• The resolution scaling system.
  
• Balancing graphics and performance.
  
• The user interface (UI).
  

I keep repeating: I'm not a programmer. Even though I've been doing this for 6 or 7 years. My main problem is that I lack systematic knowledge and don't know any programming language except GML.
If I find an elegant solution to a problem in someone else's project on GitHub, I, of course, "borrow" it, but I always significantly rewrite it.

Honestly, sometimes I think I've gone mad for deciding to make a strategy game in Game Maker. Although I love this engine for its flexibility and the ability to implement almost any idea, there are almost no examples of successful strategy games. The only one that comes to mind is Norland. But our games and teams are completely different. Anoxia Station is much more chamber-focused.



I like that in programming, any problem can be solved in different ways. However, sometimes a solution that initially seems correct turns out to be wrong, and everything has to be redone.
Code for me is not the foundation, but a tool. I don't think in programming categories. But I admit: sometimes the intended result can't be achieved – there's not enough time or skill. Then I have to look for compromises.

What I definitely hate are bugs. I believe that players don't care how the game is written. The main thing is that everything works without errors. Here, my stupidity and stubbornness save me: I won't rest until I fix everything that can be fixed.

This game wouldn't have been possible without my best friend and the most talented artist in the world – Daria Vodyanaya. Dasha single-handedly created all the visual elements: buildings, tiles, monsters. Furthermore, she managed to add small animations for some of the creatures. Thanks to her work, the game's atmosphere will be truly unique and vibrant.

I gaze with alarm and approval upon the recent phenomenon of "dark strategy" or "horror strategy" games, a devilish parade of top-down drag-clickers, from The Fabulous Fear Machine to The Tribe Must Survive, that strive to find the fear in a genre that typically places you at a managerial remove. The best-known is probably Frostpunk, with its perpetual raging against the dying of the light, its ceaseless scrape for coal and wood as the temperature falls. Anoxia Station, announced this month, is similarly driven by the gathering of fossil fuels, and similarly shaped by questions of worker death and morale, but it takes you deep underground - into a sumptuous, brutal world of quartz crystals, salt caves, magma lakes, moonmilk rivers, swirling gases and, judging from the below trailer, enormous maggots and centipedes. Larva lakes, amirite.

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