A Third-Person Survival Roguelite built in Unity
Ashfall is a systems-driven third-person survival game set in a collapsing post-apocalyptic city. The player must survive as long as possible while hunger, oxygen, enemies, and environmental hazards relentlessly scale with time.
This project emphasizes clean gameplay architecture, modular systems, and scalable difficulty over scripted encounters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abi_9CmqB2g
- Spawn into the city
- Explore to find food, oxygen, and weapons
- Survive zombie attacks while managing resources
- Days pass → difficulty increases
- Player dies → run summary → restart from Day 1
Ashfall is intentionally designed as a run-based survival experience.
- Systemic Survival – Hunger, oxygen, fall damage, zombies, scarcity
- Escalating Pressure – Each in-game day increases difficulty globally
- Scarcity – Pickups do not respawn once collected in a run
- Replayability – Short runs, fast deaths, constant tension
- Clean Architecture – Minimal coupling between systems
- Third-person movement using
CharacterController - Camera-relative input
- Sprinting, jumping, air control
- Smooth rotation toward movement direction
- Over-the-shoulder framing
- Mouse-driven yaw & pitch
- Pitch clamping
- Smoothed follow
- Shoulder offset for aiming clarity
- Cursor lock & visibility handling
- Dynamic footstep system
- Separate walk/run cadence
- Speed detection via:
CharacterControllerRigidbody- Input fallback
- Integrated sprint state
The player manages three survival resources:
| Stat | Description |
|---|---|
| Health | Damage from zombies, falls, starvation |
| Hunger | Decays over time |
| Oxygen | Decays over time |
Mechanics
- Hunger & oxygen drain every second
- If either reaches zero → health drains
- Health reaching zero triggers death
- Stats are clamped and event-driven
Two complementary implementations (iterated design):
- Tracks fall start height
- Tracks peak downward velocity
- Applies damage only if:
- Minimum fall height exceeded
- Impact speed exceeds safe threshold
- Damage scales with impact speed
- Max damage clamp prevents instant death
- Velocity-based approximation
- Uses
CharacterController.isGrounded - Linear damage interpolation
- Runtime weapon equipping
- Raycast hitscan shooting
- Fire-rate limiting
- ADS animation support
- Muzzle flash VFX
- Per-weapon audio
- Self-collision filtering
- Layer-mask aware hit detection
- Rotating pickup
- Trigger-based equip
- Weapon prefab + optional shot sound
- Automatically replaces current weapon
- NavMesh-driven chasing
- Player detection radius
- Smooth facing at close range
- Attack cooldown system
- Damage scales per day
- Animator velocity syncing
- Robust player acquisition fallback logic
- Damageable entity
- Event-driven death
- Auto-destruction on death
- Ambient groans
- Randomized intervals
- Coroutine-driven playback
- Auto start/stop on enable/disable
- Multiple spawn points
- Min distance from player
- Max alive cap
- Spawn interval
- NavMesh-snapped spawns
- Auto cleanup of dead zombies
- Radius-based random spawns
- Per-spawner caps
- Timed despawn
- Lightweight pressure spawner
- Food
- Oxygen
- Static spawn points
- Random prefab selection
- One-time pickup per run
- Consumed spawns tracked via stable IDs
- Prevents farming
- World rotation for visibility
- Trigger-based collection
- Applies stat increases
- Reports consumption to spawn manager
- Self-destructs on pickup
- Health slider
- Hunger slider
- Oxygen slider
- Day counter
- Live updates from PlayerStats & GameManager
- Pauses time
- Unlocks cursor
- Displays:
- Day reached
- Final health
- Hunger
- Oxygen
- Restart reloads gameplay scene
- Global singleton
- Day progression
- Difficulty scaling
- Scene bootstrapping
- Player death handling
- Run summary generation
- Fixed-length days
- Each new day:
- Hunger decay increases
- Oxygen decay increases
- Zombie damage multiplier increases
- Component-based design
- Event-driven where appropriate
- No monolithic “god script”
- Systems communicate via:
- Public APIs
- Events
- GameManager orchestration
- Engine: Unity
- Language: C#
- AI: NavMesh Agents
- UI: Unity UI + TextMeshPro
- Audio: AudioSource-based
- Input: Unity Input Manager
- Architecture: Modular component systems
Implemented
- Core survival loop
- Player movement & camera
- Zombie AI & spawning
- Resource scarcity
- Weapon system
- Death & restart flow
Planned
- More weapons
- Inventory system
- Environmental hazards
- Map expansion
- Meta-progression
Ashfall exists to demonstrate:
- Systems thinking
- Gameplay architecture
- Iterative mechanic design
- Clean Unity engineering
- Long-term scalability
Ashfall is designed to break the player, not the code...