Project: Survival

[conanjaguar]

I've been debating for a while where the best place to post this would be but I finally decided on Fan Creations because this is very much inspired by TLD. Imitation is the best form of flattery, as they say.

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PROJECT: SURVIVAL

INTRODUCTION

So what is Project: Survival? Well, it's a game concept that I've been tossing around in my head for a while, but have never quite had the confidence in my game development skills to attempt. Until now, that is.

The vision is for a survival game that is very much inspired by TLD in its gameplay and visuals, but expands on and encourages real-world survival strategies as well as featuring a limited building system. That's very ambitious, especially considering I'm doing this on my own and have exactly one game to my name, but I'm confident I can pull it off and go for an eventual Steam release.

I'll be posting dev diaries on this thread every month or so, so stay tuned if you're interested!

[xanna]

Wow! Will be watching with interest. Good luck!

[conanjaguar]

PROJECT: SURVIVAL

DEV DIARY 1: Movement and Stats

First off, I created a new Unity project and got a character controller working. It's not much: you can walk, run, crouch, and jump. Yep, that's right! Jumping will be a thing! I also created the core script that will keep track of all the player's stats: warmth, hunger, thirst, stamina, and fatigue, making sure to keep it nice and modular so it'll be easy to work with further down the line. Running and jumping drains your stamina, and like in TLD, hunger and fatigue decrease at different rates depending on what you're doing. How fast you freeze or warm up depends on feels like temperature, which I have separated from ambient temperature because connecting the two could bring up some nasty bugs.

That's all for now! I need to make an inventory next so the player has a way to... well, do just about everything.

[conanjaguar]

PROJECT: SURVIVAL

DEV DIARY 2: Stat Rework

The original PlayerStats script that controlled the player's stats was 300 lines of code... a nightmare to deal with both in debugging and adding new features. Before I did anything else, I had to split the script into separate ones controlling each stat to address this issue. Hopefully that will also make it easier to add new stuff down the line.

An idea I had recently was to not have any visible measure of how "full" each of these stats is, but rather a single-word descriptor like "full" or "hungry" with pluses or minuses next to it to indicate change. This is a double edged sword mainly because it will eliminate the precise calculations TLD scientists are familiar, but it will also add a touch more realism... you never know exactly how many calories are in your belly in real life, do you?

[Superbluebaby]

Wow this sounds like an interesting project! The meter-less stat system sounds cool aswell.

[conanjaguar]

Thanks for dropping in @Superbluebaby .

[conanjaguar]

PROJECT: SURVIVAL

DEV DIARY 3: INVENTORY SETUP

The inventory is the most important functional mechanic of any survival game. From it, you craft, consume, harvest, and repair items, just to name a few. It thus follows that the code for it has to be very complicated... which is why relatively little work has been done on it, I've been procrastinating a lot .

So far, I've almost got the basic slot mechanics and adding items to the inventory finished. I'm planning on adding a weight limit to complement this. My idea here is to have an inventory that is restricted in two ways: by number of slots and by weight. Now, the only game I've played that did this was Mist Survival, and it did not pull it off well. A blueberry that weighed 0.01 kg took up the same space in your inventory as a log that weighed 40 kg. The answer to this is STACKING. Every item will have a limit to how many units of its type can fit into a single slot. I would make some REALLY big items (logs, boulders), take up a LOT of slots, but sadly I have no idea how to do that. I'll just do what The Forest did and let you carry them on your shoulder.