Game Introduction:

High difficulty exploration survival + Automated simulation management

The core gameplay of the game is similar to most mainstream simulation management games. It basically involves improving the efficiency of the production line through various mechanical devices that interact with each other. At the same time, due to the tension of their own resources, players also need to continuously optimize the existing production line in the later stage.

However, the game has set up many obstacles in terms of the difficulty of player survival, such as: more aggressive creatures, the character cannot survive in the dark, a large number of trap events, etc. At the same time, the automation management in the game is very rigorous. Every creature captured by the player can have a unique role in the production line. Players have to risk capturing various creatures every day in order to continuously optimize the production line of the base, and they can also freely explore the unknown areas of this island, but the premise is that players can survive in this world.

"Atrio: The Dark Wild" combines high-difficulty survival and management-focused automation, resulting in a unique chemical reaction.

Game Analysis:

• Excellent combination of global perception and personal exploration experience

Generally speaking, when it comes to automated simulation management games, we often think of works with huge mechanical systems such as "Dyson Sphere Program". These types of games often have a high degree of cooperation between various devices, and players need to continuously optimize the production line and mechanization automation level in the game as the game progresses.

The core point of these games is to let players establish a global concept, so as to coordinate the various facilities in the game to achieve maximum production efficiency. In these games, there are also players who can leave the global mode to personally control the protagonist (drive the robot) to complete the base construction and resource collection work, but most games do not set survival difficulty restrictions for this link.

"Atrio: The Dark Wild" adds survival restrictions to the player's resource collection and exploration. Players can easily die when exploring outside. After death, players need to respawn back to the previous death point to pick up the materials they carried, and they will encounter various dangerous creatures and traps in the process of exploration. This survival exploration mode, which is independent of the automated base construction, also adds more playability and immersion to the game.

At the same time, such game settings also ensure high-quality global experience and personal exploration experience in the game, and also bring about certain changes in the player behavior logic of this type of game.

Among them, the second step of "Explore the dark" is actually different from the resource exploration link in traditional simulation management games. As mentioned before, the dark environment in the game is very dangerous, and players are likely to die in the process of exploration. This survival mode setting also makes the process of game exploration full of risks, unlike most automated management games where you just go leisurely to find resources. In "Atrio: The Dark Wild", the core purpose of players in the exploration process is survival, not finding more materials and capturing more creatures. While this setting ensures the strategic nature of the game, it greatly improves the player's role operability and playability.

This kind of survival gameplay reminds us of another game, "Don't Starve". But the core difference between "Atrio: The Dark Wild" and "Don't Starve" is that "Don't Starve" focuses more on survival, while "Atrio: The Dark Wild" is essentially an automated simulation management game, but it introduces survival elements to enhance the personal exploration experience of the game.

• Integrating the biological system into the automation mode

Most automated simulation management games advance the production line work through mechanical operations, while "Atrio: The Dark Wild" introduces a biological system into the player's automated base construction, which is also a very important part of the player's survival mechanism in the game.

Various creatures can be captured in the wild in the game, but the process of capturing creatures is often full of challenges. Because most creatures are hostile to the protagonist, players need to stun the creatures by operating on their own, and using some props and scene elements to complete the capture, otherwise, they are likely to be killed by creatures in the wild.

All creatures in the game can be directly put on the production line, and they all have unique roles on the production line. Therefore, when players need to further optimize the production line, they may need the ability of certain creatures to assist. Rather than calling them creatures, they are more like "living mechanical components", and player's base building optimization often cannot do without them.

This setting also adds more positive feedback and rewards for players while exploring in the wild with high risk, making players more purposeful in exploration, and provides a new idea for optimizing the base building scene and production line in the game.

Player Research:

• Demand for higher participation from players of automated simulation management games

This statement might sound a bit abstract. Generally, most automated simulation management games involve players participating in base construction from a "god's perspective". Even if they can briefly leave the global mode to control the protagonist to further construct the base facility (essentially, the player is controlling a puppet of their own to complete some operations, rather than substituting the protagonist as the player themselves), the core is still based on the player's participation in the global mode. Essentially, the player is still the "god", and there are no survival condition limits set for the game protagonist.

The most successful design in "Atrio: The Dark Wild" is to "pull the player off the pedestal". By designing a sufficiently harsh survival mode, it gives the player a more realistic sense of participation and operability. The game also integrates the biological system into the automation design, which gives the player's exploration a stronger purpose.

Indeed, for most players of automated simulation management games, such survival mechanism design can significantly enhance their actual sense of participation, and most players of this type are willing to try such design changes.

Design Analysis:

• An overly harsh survival mechanism is actually unfriendly to the early development of game automation

Although the main feature of "Atrio: The Dark Wild" is the fusion of automated simulation management and high-difficulty survival mechanisms, the production team obviously did not do a good job in debugging the survival mechanism. Since the core of these games is still automated simulation management, introducing a high-difficulty survival mode directly when the player's base has not been initially built in the early stages of the game can feel like it's overshadowing the main point.

Because players will die multiple times during the game's pioneering stage due to the harsh survival environment, the overall feeling will be more like playing a survival game rather than an automated simulation management game. In my opinion, since the core mechanism of this game is still the main focus on automated simulation management, it should provide more construction and creative space for players in the early survival mode, rather than letting players take survival as the first priority.

The survival mechanism in the game is to give players a better sense of participation and real experience on the basis of completing automated simulation management, by setting survival targets for players through optimization needs and resource defects in automated simulation management, rather than creating and arranging automated production lines on the basis of survival.

The solution to this problem is also simple, deliberately reducing the survival pressure of players in the early stage of production line construction, and fully introducing a more severe survival mechanism after the player's production line has a prototype, allowing players to explore from the purpose and perspective of optimizing their own production line, rather than exploring from the perspective of prioritizing their own survival.

Summary & Outlooks:

Introducing a higher difficulty survival mode to enhance the sense of participation and operability of players in certain established categories of games, these games are mainly some simulation management games with high strategicality, or war chess games. While ensuring that the game's strategic nature is not greatly affected, introducing a more realistic survival system gives players a better sense of participation. For example, in SRPG war chess games, players are pulled out of the "god" who can globally arrange their own characters, and let players actually control a general in the entire lineup, and then arrange the formation of other characters through the player's direct control of the general. (For example, controlling the general to convey orders through messages between different characters, or directly rush to the side of other characters to fight with them, of course, all this is based on the survival of the general, players may cause the general to die due to their own operational errors)