Humans Must Die

Our project, "Humans Must Die," is a cooperative multiplayer experience designed to blend high-stakes territorial control with the satisfying mechanics of a production-line game. It pits two distinct factions—Humans and Aliens—against each other, not through direct player-versus-player combat, but through logistical and engineering superiority. The ultimate goal is to complete a sophisticated production chain faster than the enemy team to manufacture powerful combat robots that automatically clash for territorial supremacy. Players win by securing key resource points and maintaining a steady flow of production to overwhelm the enemy with combat units.

Inspiration, Build, and Challenges

The core inspiration stemmed from the desire to create a competitive strategy experience where every player feels essential. We moved away from traditional PvP combat, focusing on the satisfaction of completing a complex, team-based objective, similar to the logistical challenges in games like Factorio or Starcraft, but translated into a collaborative and immersive VR environment. This forced us to design asymmetrical roles, from logistics runners to assembly operators, ensuring that teamwork is the true key to victory.

Building "Humans Must Die" taught us critical lessons in network synchronization and large-scale NPC state management. The main challenge was ensuring that the production line logic, involving multiple discrete steps (resource refinement, component assembly, final manufacturing), remained perfectly synchronized across all players. We centralized all critical state changes within a dedicated Game Control component. A secondary challenge was developing the complex state machine for the autonomous Combat Robots, ensuring they navigated, aimed, and fought based on the real-time scoreboard and territorial control. This synchronization was crucial for fair gameplay and reliable feedback via the scoring HUD.

Roadmap

The future roadmap includes expanding the variety of support roles, boosters, skins, and adding more complex robot types (aerial, siege) that require even longer and more specific production chains, thus increasing the strategic depth of the game.

What's next for Humans Must Die

Built With

• horizon-worlds