Terminus: Zombie Survivors · published
Hey everyone!
This is our first dev update since the Steam store page for Terminus: Zombie Survivors 2 went live.
We started work on the sequel to Terminus: Zombie Survivors back in April 2025, and it's been coming together bit by bit ever since. So many of you loved the first game that we wanted to make something even better. The first game was a one-person project, but the sequel is being made by a six-person team who all love zombie survival games.
If you played the first game, you probably noticed the new look right away. The original was a top-down pixel art game built in Python. For the sequel, we switched to Unity and went full 3D with an isometric camera. That let us build in ideas from the very start that would have been hard to pull off in the first game. The heart of the game hasn't changed: survive the zombie apocalypse and reach the Terminus. What we wanted was to make that journey a lot more immersive.
For our first devlog, we want to talk about random map generation.
The biggest change to the map is that it's now a true open world. In the first game, every location held a single building, and you hopped between locations on a node map. Nodes had their upsides, but we felt that surviving a zombie apocalypse would feel far more immersive if every place flowed into the next, with nothing cut off. It also means making calls on the fly. Do you check out the house you just spotted, or skip the main road where zombies are milling around and cut through the woods instead?
But the trip to the Terminus also has to stay fun over many runs. If the map never changed, you'd learn the route after one playthrough, and the ending would get a lot easier to reach. So the sequel's map had to be two things at once: an open world, and a random one.
Random maps always come down to a tug-of-war between two goals: every run should be different, and every run should feel believable. Randomize everything and you get variety, but something always looks a little off. Handcraft everything and it all feels natural, but after a run or two there's nothing new to discover. So we split the world into three layers and decided, for each one, what stays fixed and what changes.
Land: The roads, railroads, rivers, lakes, and zone layout are always the same.
Lots: Each lot gets one building, picked from its own list of candidates.
Inside buildings: The props on furniture, the state of doors and windows, and the loot in containers all change with each new game.
The further you zoom in, from the land down to the inside of a building, the more things change. Put simply, every piece, from the buildings to the props, is handmade, and how those pieces come together is left to chance. Let's go through the layers one at a time.
We build the land and lots in a tool we call the World Editor. First we lay down the railroad and main roads and add rivers and lakes, then we divide the map into zones like forest, farmland, residential, and downtown. On top of that go the lots where buildings will stand. Each lot gets a list of candidate buildings, and when you start a new game, one of them is picked at random. A few examples:
One of several houses
A grocery store, church, hospital, or restaurant
A gas station, liquor store, bar, or restaurant
So the hospital you raided for medicine last game might be a church this time around.
Most buildings in the first game were randomly generated. But buildings in the sequel are much bigger, and you can see their interiors in full detail, so the same approach just couldn't produce buildings that looked natural. Our randomly generated test houses kept coming out with bedrooms you could only reach through a bathroom, or living rooms without a single window. So this time, we decided to build every building by hand. We've made about 170 so far, and we're aiming for over 1,000.
We build them in our own tool, the Location Editor, which started life as the map editor we used to make the first game, ported to Unity. The first game was strictly top-down, so multiple floors took some trickery, but the sequel's isometric view gives us far more freedom with them. Today, this one editor covers every step of making a building.
Lay floor tiles and put up walls, doors, windows, and fences.
Add upper floors and place stairs.
Place furniture anywhere, at any angle, and set up several prop arrangements for each piece.
Add details like bloodstains and graffiti.
Jump into a test play straight from the building we're working on and walk through it ourselves.
Each finished building is saved as a single file and dropped into lots in the world. Here's what we have so far:
50 houses
40 restaurants (4 types)
20 liquor stores (2 types)
10 each of motels, hospitals, grocery stores, gas stations, and churches
12 bars (2 types)
5 police stations
Each new type of building takes a lot of prep. Before we could even start on the grocery store, we had to make at least five prop arrangements for each of its 28 furniture types, draw banners and posters, and create new walls and doors for the restrooms.
We've settled on a few rules along the way, too. Too many one-off props would bloat the game's file size, so we put real care into each prop and reuse it across many buildings. And since cramming in too much furniture makes a place hard to move through, we check every building to make sure there's still a clear path to walk.
Even when the same building shows up, its interior changes with each new game. The props on each piece of furniture come from one of the arrangements we made for it in the editor. A bookshelf, for example, has several versions of how its books are shelved. We can also tell the same shelf to pull from kitchen props when it's in a kitchen, and bathroom props when it's in a bathroom. Even the doors and windows change, from intact to smashed and bloodstained.
What you find in a container depends on the building and the type of furniture. Medical supplies mostly show up in hospitals and bathroom cabinets, guns and tactical gear in police stations, tools and melee weapons in garages and storage rooms, clothes and bags in closets and laundry, and food in stores and kitchens. So you can make a plan, like hitting the hospital when you need medicine or the police station when you need a gun, but you won't know exactly what's inside until you open it.
Run into the same building next game, and the door that was open last time might be broken this time, with the zombies waiting somewhere else entirely. No matter how many times you start over, we'll keep working to make sure the road to the Terminus never gets easy.
Drop your thoughts in the comments, in the Steam Discussions, or on our Discord. Your feedback really helps shape where the game goes. Even a quick word of support means a lot to us.
Next time, we'll cover base building, including placing furniture yourself. Hit Wishlist and Follow so you don't miss it!
Thank you!
Best,
In-geon
Longplay Studios