City-builder · 3 levels
Grow a little city one building at a time — while Dr. Calamity, a cartoon evil scientist, hurls earthquakes, storms and floods at everything you make. Fill every plot of land to win, as fast as you can.
Build & Survive is a friendly city-builder with a mean streak. You start with a couple of workers and a small pile of cash, and you grow a town: houses to hold people, businesses to earn money, training centres, factories, hospitals, research labs. The catch is that an evil scientist across the map keeps sending natural disasters to knock your buildings down. You win a level by building on every plot of land — but you have to keep rebuilding what Dr. Calamity wrecks, and the clock is always running.
It sounds simple, and the first few minutes are. Then you realise your businesses only earn money when workers are free to staff them, your workers are also the ones doing the building, and every disaster forces a choice about what to save. That’s the game.
Fill every buildable plot in the level with a finished building, and you win. Do it faster than everyone else and you top the leaderboard. There are three levels, each a different neighbourhood — a plain town, a river town, and a storm-battered coast — and the disasters get stronger and more frequent as you go.
Dr. Calamity is the heart of this one, and he came straight from a child’s notebook: Henry drew a tall, blocky mad scientist with a stripe of hair sticking straight up, angry eyebrows, a frown, and a little robot sidekick. We built the pixel version to match that drawing on purpose. The rest of the game grew out of play-testing — the early version let you win by spamming one building, which was boring, so we rebuilt the whole economy so that workers have to be shared between building and running the town. That single change is what turned it into a real strategy game.
Businesses now need workers to earn, and those same workers do your building — so growth is a balancing act, not a spam-fest.
Added placement bonuses: businesses earn more beside houses, and research centres shield their neighbours.
Floods now target the waterfront and earthquakes punish dense blocks, so where you build is part of the strategy. Three distinct level maps, with escalating disasters.