Last Refuge

Inspiration

I grew up in Uzbekistan, and as kids we barely had anything to play with. So we made games out of whatever was lying around: bottles, sticks, scrap, bits of wire. A sharpened stick became a sword, a bottle became a target. You learned to look at junk and see possibility. That is exactly where the heart of Last Refuge comes from, the idea that everything is a resource. Sharpen a branch and you have a spear. It is weak and it breaks, but it is something.

The other half goes back even further. Ever since I was a kid I was a little obsessed with how I would defend my house if I had to, where the weak points were, how to funnel someone in, what I would booby-trap. Watching Home Alone as a child only made it worse, in the best way. That instinct, turning a home into a clever, layered trap, became the tower-defense side of the game: fences bent into mazes, trenches, stakes, pit traps, funneling the dead instead of just fighting them.

What it is

Last Refuge is an isometric zombie-survival game that mixes tower defense, base building, and resource management. You hold one building on a grim, irradiated street, salvage a dying town, and make one decision over and over: reach further for more, or stay compact and dig in. The economy only runs down, so every choice costs you something.

What I learned

I learned how much harder it is to keep a design coherent than to come up with ideas. Lots of mechanics sounded fun on their own, but the real work was cutting and shaping them so they all served one core decision instead of pulling in different directions. I also learned to separate what I would build first from what I would love to build eventually.

How I built it

This is a pre-production design package, not a built game. I wrote the full Game Design Document, mapped the player's first fifteen minutes, built a visual concept package and an isometric interface mockup, and laid out a production plan that scopes a buildable MVP and sequences everything after it.

Challenges

The biggest challenge was scope. The ideas kept wanting to grow into a different, much bigger game. Keeping it focused, a single-player core that is actually buildable, with the bigger multiplayer and fog-of-war ambitions parked as a clear roadmap, was the hardest and most important call I made.

What's next

Build the graybox, prove the core decision is fun, then grow it: more survivors and events, the colonies layer, and eventually a persistent shared world where other camps are real players.## Inspiration

What it does

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for Last Refuge

Built With

• google-docs