Building a survival game in Godot: notes from Timberline
Timberline is the survival game we wanted to play. It’s a hardcore first-person, open-world game set in the Utah high country, in the spirit of Rust, DayZ and Raft. It’s built in Godot, it’s still in development, and there’s an early Windows test build to download.
These notes cover the parts that make a survival game work, and how Timberline approaches each one. If you’re thinking about building one yourself, these are the systems you’ll spend your time on.
Why Godot
Godot is a free, open source game engine. There’s no license fee and no revenue share, and the whole engine is open for anyone to read. It handles 2D and 3D, and its own scripting language, GDScript, is easy to pick up if you’ve written any Python.
For a small project, that matters. You can start today with nothing but a download.
Start with the loop
Every survival game runs on one loop: gather, craft, build, survive, repeat. If the loop is fun, players forgive a lot. If it isn’t, nothing else saves it.
In Timberline, you drop into the woods with nothing. You gather wood, stone and fiber by hand, make your first tools, and claw your way up from a stone hatchet to iron and beyond. Nights are cold and dangerous, so each day is a race to be ready before dark.
The loop works best when each step opens the next one. Better tools mean faster gathering. Faster gathering means a better base. A better base means you survive the night and push further out tomorrow.
A world from a seed
A seed is a number that a world generator uses to build the same world every time. Share the seed and someone else gets the same map. Change it and you get a new one.
Timberline’s world is generated from a seed as you walk it: dense forest, rivers, mountains, cliffs and caves.
The hard part of generated worlds is making them feel placed, not random. Points of interest help a lot. Timberline has homesteads, mountain villages and monuments to search, with loot, puzzles and the infected waiting inside, plus caves with ore deep inside. Bring a light.
Crafting tiers
Crafting is where progress lives. A good crafting tree gives players short-term goals that always lead somewhere.
Timberline’s tiers run from stone to iron to diamond, with workbenches, furnaces and well over a hundred recipes.
Building
Building is how players make the world theirs. In Timberline you start with wood, then move up to stone and sheet metal, with doors, storage, beds, lights and campfires.
Material tiers aren’t only about looks. They’re about risk, which brings us to weather.
Weather that matters
Weather in a lot of games is just a backdrop. In a survival game it should change what you do.
Timberline has day and night, seasons, rain and storms. Lightning can start fires that burn wooden builds, so a wooden base is a real gamble in storm season. That one rule gives players a reason to upgrade, and a story to tell when they don’t.
Food
Survival needs a food plan beyond eating whatever you find. In Timberline you can plant and grow your own food, or track deer, elk and the wolves that track you. Farming rewards staying put. Hunting pulls you out into the woods. Both are valid ways to play.
A story under it all
Survival games don’t need a story, but a light one gives the world a reason to be dangerous. Timberline’s starts in October in the Kettle Range. A mining company reopened an old silver mine to chase lithium, and six hundred meters down they broke into something alive. You drove the last relief truck up Forest Road 9 and didn’t make it to the ranger station. A journal tracks what you find: notes, radio calls and the trail of what went wrong in the mine.
Co-op
Survival games are better with friends. In Timberline you host a game and your friends join your world, your weather and your clock, with chat, a player list and an optional password. Everyone builds, loots and fights in the same world. Friendly fire stays off unless the host turns it on.
It plays with a mouse and keyboard or a gamepad.
How Timberline is going
Timberline is still in development. There’s an early Windows test build, so expect rough edges. Like the rest of Draftline’s apps, it’s built with Claude Code.
If you like hardcore survival games, grab the test build and play a night or two.