Welcome Cadets! Some fortunate recruits already have access to the first pre-alpha demo of One Military Camp (join our Discord to learn more!) but the game is still early in development and we want to show you some of the mechanics and features that you can look forward to in the future.
We have a lot of stuff planned to make One Military Camp a great management game, and this is only the beginning!
So let’s take a look at some One Military Camp features we are working on.
Military academy 101
Our goal with One Military Camp is to make a game about the creation and management of (you’ve guessed right) a military camp, capturing the mood and all the military imagery and stereotypes of movies like “Heartbreak Ridge” or “Full Metal Jacket”.
We are going for a lighthearted and comical tone, trying not to be overly dramatic and rigorous. Of course, real war is a very serious and dreary subject, but video games don’t need to be, so we approach it in the same way as other games in the genre have done with heavy topics using humor, such as hospitals or criminal organizations.
So, going into more detail… What does it mean to build and manage a military camp? You’ll have to not only design and build the facilities, but also recruit and train the staff and cadets that make it work. The objective is to train soldiers specialized in different classes that you will send to the front to fight against an enemy that threatens to conquer all the territories in its path.
There’s a lot more to it though! Look at some of the things that you will be able to do:
- Free construction of your military camp.
- Management of roads and camp layouts to optimize performance.
- Management of the power grid to supply the various camp buildings.
- Recruitment of soldiers and staff. Choose the best for the task according to their attributes.
- Train, evolve and specialize your soldiers and staff to get the highest ranking types.
- Manage the resources needed to keep the buildings running.
- Establish supply routes from providers to your camp.
- Manage the economy and (hopefully not) ask for bank loans.
- Research to unlock new buildings and building upgrades.
- Day and night cycle. Combined with schedule management for the characters to keep your camp running 24/7 if you dare!
- Modeling of health, morale and stamina in characters.
- Diseases and injuries - keep your soldiers healthy!
- Modeling of maintenance, noise and dirt in buildings.
- Surveillance elements such as turrets to prevent sabotages from enemy spies.
- Air defense elements like anti-drone batteries to prevent enemy attacks on your infrastructure.
- Customization of motivational elements. Record your own voice to cheer up your soldiers through the PA system, create your own flag and generate your own motivational texts to be displayed on banners around your military camp.
- Campaign mode with a story of around 20 hours.
- Sandbox mode.
Building
Building a military camp requires careful planning to have an efficient layout. You should place your barracks far from noisy areas, build related training buildings near each other and even place resource warehouses close to the buildings that will need those supplies. Taking all that into account, you’ll be able to build a camp as cool as this one:
In One Military Camp energy is also important, and building a good power grid is an art of its own. Planning the wire placement efficiently will help you avoid overloads and explosions. Be mindful of the aesthetics too, nobody wants a mess of wires ruining a good layout.
You’ll find the following building categories for your camp:
- Accommodation buildings: barracks, houses for the staff…
- Essential buildings: Canteen, heliport, infirmary and facilities to provide services to your camp and its inhabitants.
- Energy buildings: Different energy sources.
- Skills training: Buildings that will increase your soldiers’ skills.
- Specialization training: Buildings that will allow training soldiers in different specializations.
- Science buildings: Facilities to conduct research in order to unlock new buildings and upgrades.
- Motivational: Elements that will raise your soldiers morale, like flags, statues, leisure buildings and decorative elements.
- Defensive elements: Surveillance turrets and countermeasures to disrupt enemy attacks.
- Lighting: Lamp Posts and lighting elements to keep your camp illuminated at nighttime.
The mix between city building and management
Obviously, placing buildings is a key feature in a city builder. But have you ever wanted to take a look inside those buildings to manage the people inside like in a tycoon game?
We wanted to take a fresh approach and mix a bit of both!
Recruiting
Recruitment is one of the most important steps to have a successful camp, because you’ll need different roles to populate your base and each of them require a different set of abilities and traits. Visit your Reception Center and look at them straight in the eye to see if they have what it takes!
Just kidding! Beyond their looks, you’ll decide which ones to enlist based on two main aspects:
The skills, which are the innate abilities of the candidates and can be improved even further with hard training.
The traits, which are special characteristics that can be positive or negative and can make all the difference to decide if a character is fit for one job or another.
Training
Once you have recruited a few soldiers and staff, you can train them or put them to work deciding their schedule in detail. There are several predefined presets to make this task more automatic, but if you like to control every last detail, in One Military Camp you’ll decide when your cadets sleep, eat, train, work or have free time. However, if you push them too hard it can cause… unintended consequences.
You can also choose the training buildings that each recruit will use. This can be automated too, but we’ll give you the option to manage it in detail if that’s your playstyle.
Strategic map and missions
All this building and training has a purpose: to stop the advance of the evil forces taking over your territories.
On the strategic map view, you’ll be able to see the territories under enemy control, and different missions on the frontlines.
Deploy your best soldiers for each mission to be successful and liberate those territories! The difficulty and probability of success will depend on their training.
The missions are simulated and you won’t see your soldiers in action, but you will feel the consequences of success, or failure...
Your brave soldiers will return to camp in a helicopter to celebrate their success or recover from their failure. Some may come back with injuries, and if the mission goes really badly... some might not return.
After the enemy is driven away from a territory, you’ll get access to new resources and supply routes.
Research
Research? Yes! Your military camp is constantly evolving and you must destinate infrastructures and specialized personnel to improve its efficiency. The scientists working in your Research Center will generate science points that you can invest in unlocking new types of buildings or improving the ones you have already discovered:
Mockup of the research screen. This is not in-game art.
Through research you will be able to discover more advanced trainings such as the spy training building:
It will allow you to upgrade essential buildings such as supply warehouse, taking your camp to the next level:
Maybe I’m telling too much, but what the hell, I’d spend the day talking about the things we are preparing for you, so here we go. Do you want to know which is one of the buildings I like the most? The Cloning Lab, Ta-dah!!!!
Imagine, you are at the late game, swimming in money and you have been able to carry out all the research to have cutting-edge tech. Then, among the most advanced buildings in the research tree, you will find the human cloning building.
It works as follows: A soldier goes in, aaand two soldiers come out. Both with the same skills and experience!
The cloning process will require paying an absurd amount of money, but you are a big tycoon and you can afford it, right?😀
Resources and logistics
Buildings, in addition to specialized expertise to function, will require enough resources. For example, an infirmary needs medicines, just as a canteen needs food and some weapons training will need ammunition.
In One Military Camp the player will be able to define logistic deliveries to receive resources through the heliport of the camp. Then he will have to store them in different types of warehouses and from there the staff will supply all the buildings that require them.
Heliport buildable at One Military Camp
We all know that order makes everything more efficient, right? Well, in One Military Camp is no exception. Having to figure out the layout of the buildings and the interactions between the heliport, warehouses and the buildings that need resources, will be key to have an efficient camp.
We can get resources from different providers:
- They only serve a specific type of resource: Fuel, food, medicines or ammunition.
- There’s a limit on how many units we can order for them in a single shipment.
- They have a cost per unit.
- There’s a fixed cost for transportation based on the distance.
- The selectable providers will be the ones located on liberated territories.
In One Military Camp you can set a recurring resource transaction between providers and your camp (heliport).
When there is a scheduled resource delivery, at the beginning of each cycle the helicopter serving those resources will arrive and land at the designated heliport.
The providers that we will in the game are this ones:
Economy
In order to make the whole operation work, you must keep an eye on the economy. A great tycoon must build, train and win without going bankrupt in the process.
You’ll receive recurring income based on your camp prestige level and the amount of territories liberated from the grasps of the enemy forces. You’ll also receive rewards for completing missions successfully.
Of course, you’ll have to take care of salaries, maintenance, supplies…
If you run out of money… don’t worry, there’s still a chance to get out of the rut. You’ll have the option to request a loan. You’ll only have two opportunities though, so be mindful of your expenses.
You will have all kinds of graphs and reports at their disposal to understand where the money is going and make the necessary decisions.
Mockup showing different sections of the economy menu. This is not in-game art.
Different banks that you will find in One Military Camp:
The campaign
The story begins when a powerful and cartoonish villain has invaded all the territories in your country. All except one, the southernmost territory of the island, where One Military Camp is located, an old camp unnoticed because it is abandoned.
Now you are the last hope. You will have to repair the few rusty buildings that are still standing and build a great camp on that site. Your mission is to bring One Military Camp back to its former glory and build the ultimate military camp. With it, you’ll have to recruit and train the soldiers that will allow you to face the great feat of reconquering all the invaded territory, bringing peace once again to your land.
But you won’t be alone in this adventure. As you recover territories, you’ll free other heroes and special characters that will help you on your mission. You’ll also unlock new, more advanced military camps located in other parts of the map.
You’ll learn more about the background of the characters and the conflict through the mission descriptions and with cutscenes that will play after certain missions, that will show a dialogue between heroes and villains.
Different biomes
During the campaign, you’ll unlock more camps located on different biomes, bringing new challenges and strategic options
The first biome will be the forest biome:
Then the "Level 2 Camp" located in the desert:
And the "Level 3 Camp" is located in an icy area:
You’ll be able to switch between camps through the map screen. When you are in a camp, the time will pause on the other ones. We have thought a lot about this particular design decision and we think that is the best option. Otherwise the player could feel overwhelmed by the need to manage multiple camps that are evolving in real time and without the capacity to be on all of them at the same time.
Heroes
As you liberate territories throughout the campaign, you will rescue Heroes. All of them have their own story that will unfold after each mission. These Heroes can be used in your camps to provide unique advantages.
- Lower costs? ✔️Check.
- Additional combat strength? ✔️Check.
- Morale boost? ✔️Check.
- Espionage countermeasures? ✔️Check.
Events and hazards
So far we have talked about the things the player does to reconquer territories and win the war, but… you will not expect the enemy to stand still and do nothing, do you? The game has quite a few things in store that will try to slow down your progress. Among some of them we can mention the following:
Resource blockades
The enemy has sent troops to the facilities of one of the providers we have trade routes with and we won’t receive more supplies until we drive them out. When this event occurs the player will see a warning screen saying that the supplier has been blocked by the enemy and that they must carry out a recovery mission to keep receiving shipments.
Enemy spies
The enemy has sent a spy that plans to sabotage one of our energy buildings to put our camp out of commission. If he succeeds, along with sending enemy drones towards our camp, it can be catastrophic for the integrity and proper operation of our facilities.
The player can counter this event by placing watchtowers around the perimeter of the camp:
Enemy drones
The enemy can deploy drones of different types to target our buildings and disrupt our operations. The type of attack and its consequences will depend of the type of drone:
- Propaganda drone: The drone launches a rain of propaganda flyers that will lower our soldiers’ morale. Some of them might even quit!
- EMP drone: The enemy drone will shoot an energy beam at one of our buildings, putting our buildings out of service and even blowing out our energy sources. The player can build anti-drone measures that launch heat-flares and cause drones to crash outside the camp perimeter, preventing the attack.
- EMP drone with countermeasures: Some drones will be able to hack our defenses, so you’ll have to build frequency jamming towers to make your anti-drone batteries unhackable.
Sandbox mode
Campaign mode is great and all, but we know you also want less guidance to create your unique and personal story. Imagine that you want to customize the characters to give them the looks and names of some of your friends. Or imagine that you don’t want to do story missions in order to build the perfect camp. If that is what motivates you, then the sandbox has been designed for you.
You’ll have a blank canvas to start your camp from scratch.
All buildings and soldier classes will be at your disposal from the beginning, including those exclusive to other biomes.
At the start of the game, you’ll be able to choose your favorite biome and activate or deactivate a lot of aspects of gameplay (spies, injuries, diseases…) as well as choosing your starting money and science points.
The missions will be presented as “military maneuvers”, without an enemy and generated procedurally. The recurring income won’t be tied to the number of liberated territories.
Steam Deck, oh yes!
You might be wondering if you will be able to play One Military Camp on Steam Deck, and our answer is a big yes! The team is excited about Valve’s new machine and we are already thinking on how to adapt the game.
The way we think it would best fit by following a formula similar to the one the wonderful developers at Two Point Hospital have followed to port their game to Nintendo Switch.
We will have a free mode that shows different areas overprinted with button shortcuts. We also have a context-sensitive crosshair in the center of the screen that will show us contextual actions depending on the element that the camera is focusing on.
With the sticks and triggers of the controller we will have full control over the position, rotation and zoom of the camera.
When we press any of the shortcut buttons overprinted on the screen, the game hides the contextual crosshair shown in the center of the screen and the game goes into specific menu mode.
In this mode the player can press:
- LB/RB to toggle between menu tabs.
- Use the right or left stick to move the cursor between navigation elements. The cursor sticks like a magnet to the various interactive elements that make up the UI, so that it never falls into a non-interactive area.
- A to accept the button or element where the cursor is located.
- B to close the menu.
Did someone say private beta?
The article has been a bit long, I know 😉 but if you’ve made it this far you might be interested in signing up four our discord:
We are using it to give access to the private beta. The idea is to share the game in progressively larger groups each time to gather feedback and your ideas. At Abylight Barcelona we are committed to making One Military Camp a great product, and we want to do it well. To do this we think we should listen to what you think about the game, because at the end of the day we are creating the game for you.
Finally, we ask you to help us by letting people know about the Steam page of the game. If you think the game might be of interest to your friends, please spread the word!. We are a small indie development team, and every new wishlist means a lot to us:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1743830/One_Military_Camp/
Thank you very much for reading this article!
🖖 “Live long and prosper” my friends!
Miguel García
Your friendly neighbor Creative Director