Castaways has been in development for three years by Monocool Interactive and is a first person survival game like no other! We have done our best to make Castaways completely different to any other survival game you have ever played or heard of, whether it be single player, co-op or online multiplayer.

Castaways will change how survival games are played by giving you, the player, the power to create your very own survival game. Choose your environment, choose your enemies. choose your objectives. Some people might be brave enough to put their survival skills to the test by playing it solo. Others might prefer to pick their team and play with friends or just wait for a team to find them and make friends. With Castaways, you play exactly what you want, when you want, how you want.

  • Character Backstories - Every time you play a game of Castaways you must pick the Backstory of your character. For every game you complete, you will receive experience for the current Backstory, which in turn will allow you to improve certain aspects of this Backstory for future games. Each backstory has a range of benefits. Whether it be harvesting wood, catching fish or killing enemies. Each backstory will find certain aspects of being a Castaway easier than others.
  • Survivor Rating - As you play you will level up and get points which you can put into a general tree that affects you as a survivor differently to your backstory. As you improve your survivor rating you will find that you will be far more adept at surviving the situations you choose to put yourself in. Your survivor rating will improve your character regardless of which Backstory you choose to play with.
  • Team Combinations - We’ve developed a system that allows over 1500 unique team compositions. When playing with others, each player can choose the same or different backstory for their characters. Picking a variety of backstories will give your team a relatively balanced advantage when playing. If all players choose the same backstory, you will gain access to incredible bonus skills and buffs which are only available by matching multiple of the same backstory. The more you match, the better the bonuses become, but reduces the versatility you might have as a team.
  • Base Planning and Building - Castaways gives you the tools to design, build and manage your camps as you please. Once you decide on where you want your buildings placed, your whole team can help out by constructing the building from the ground up. Certain backstories will allow the building of different and better structures. Other backstories will give perks to the actual building, planning and maintenance of your camps and its buildings. Once you’ve chosen what you want to build, it then comes down to your team to work together to manually build that building.
  • Personal and Team Inventory - Castaways has two types of inventory, personal and team. When exploring, it’s highly likely that you will find items to pick up and use. But what about when you return to camp and you don’t really need these items? They can be refined and deposited into a Storage Hut which not only improves how much they are worth, but gives the rest of your team access. These resources can then be used to improve your camp or build any items you or your team might need. There are far more benefits to working as a team as to not.
  • Make the Rules - Play the game you want to play - you are in control of everything. Pick how long your game lasts. Set rules for how decisions are made for building and creating. Even go as far as how long each day and night lasts. Castaways is about you creating your own adventure. The more difficult the adventure, the more experience you and your team will be awarded if you survive.
  • Player vs Player - We are currently experimenting with a competitive player vs player mode with a variety of games. Each game mode is designed to test the teams in different areas of Castaways, whether it be wiping the other team off the island and taking it for yourself, defending until help arrives or preparing yourselves for an assault on a well established teams base.

Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or ideas for Castaways.

  • View media
  • View media
  • View media
  • View media
  • View media
  • View media
Post article RSS Articles

October has been awesome! We’ve received confirmation that we’ll be receiving funding from Princes Trust as well as being in talks with the potential of a few additional projects. Not to mention, we’ve been making some fantastic progress on Castaways!

Weapons and Tools Remodeled and Textured
Hammer, Chisel, Axe and Torch have been remodelled and retextured and are looking much better than our original place holders. We feel that going forward our new tools and weapons will work perfect up until the beta.

Player Animations and Model
Currently we are using a place holder first person rig so we have begun the development of redoing the model and the animations of our first playable character. The modelling is complete and it’s just a matter of animating before we can implement it into the game.

Leaf Remodeled and Textured
We have added new leaves - not the most exciting of headlines but it is all a part of the design process. Again, our place holder leaves were extremely rushed as a way of just testing how they would work. We are much happier with our new palm leaves and they are a massive improvement to the resource gathering side of the game.

Screenshot of our new leaf


Single Player to Multiplayer Conversion
Now that we are flying ahead with the single player we have begun to ensure that this is all working in multiplayer. So far, players can create their own games as well as join existing games. We have also implemented the following:

  • Personal Inventories
  • Team Inventories
  • Tree chopping and resources spawning
  • Lumber carrying and depositing
  • Boulder mining and resources spawning
  • Resources gathering
  • Basic Building

UI Overhaul
With the advancements on the multiplayer side of the game we felt it was important to start looking at the main menu and how we go about joining these games.

  • Full Main Menu in place but not fully coded.
  • Create a Game Menu Designed and mostly working. We just need to actually make some of the options we’ve included work.
  • Join A Specific Game finished. Allows you to join a private game if you know its name.
  • Browse Existing Games has been Designed. We just need to begin populating it with the servers we create.

Background System Implementation
We have started work on the Background system which we are really excited about. Currently we have only implemented two classes, Lumberjacks and Engineers. Picking one of these backgrounds will give your character certain benefits while performing tasks.

  • Lumberjacks currently chop down trees 50% faster than other classes.
  • Engineers build structures 50% faster than other classes.

We have also planned out the benefits of having multiple of the same Background within your group of survivors but we have not begun implementing this yet.

AI Started
We have started putting together the basics for our AI. The plan is to have the basics in place ready for November so that when we are done with what we are working on currently; we can begin adding the AI to the game almost instantly. Currently we have put together some of the more basic of player interactions such as following and interacting when in range. We have also began putting in some of the more objective orientated AI functions. We know what Game Modes we are going to implement first, so we also know what tasks we need the AI to perform in order to make the Game Modes work.

Stay tuned to the Castaways Facebook page for regular updates, and you can also follow us on our brand new Twitter account @Monocoolint. Over the next few weeks we'll be working closely with a sound engineer while looking at the sound track for our upcoming trailers as well as sound effects for the game. Not to mention we have some great plans for our Hunger and Thirst System, Polishing a lot of our models and also implementing game modes! You will be able to find out all about these and more over the next month by following our Facebook page. You can also follow us on @monocoolint our brand new twitter account.

Castaways - November Dev Update

Castaways - November Dev Update

News

November has been a pretty hectic month as we have a lot of deadlines that we would love to hit before Christmas comes. As a result it’s been pretty...

Post comment Comments
SniperCharlie
SniperCharlie

Interesting.Will track:)

Reply Good karma Bad karma+1 vote
rhyswillis Creator
rhyswillis

Awesome. :)

Reply Good karma+1 vote
Post a comment

Your comment will be anonymous unless you join the community. Or sign in with your social account:

X