March Progress Update

A month has gone by and progress feels both good and slow! The first thing I guess is to pull back on what I said last month in terms of pixel art. I am still keen to learn and it’s quite therapeutic compared to writing systems at times, but I am too worried that it will hold back my progress. For now at least I’m going to use purchased art assets. This is a fairly easy decision in reality. I struggle for time as it is, I would have no chance of creating good enough art at the pace I need to. I may revisit this if I get better, but it’s an easily reversible decision if so. I think there is sometimes negative sentiment towards paid assets and I get it. But I think if you make a good game it should stand out. Either way, it’s the only realistic decision for me. One thing I’m finding with game dev is every single thing I do at this stage, such as building a campfire, ends up with building multiple whole systems. That will ease over time and building the game will move to a higher degree of composition, but I guess it’s inevitable when starting out.

I’ve spent some building out inventory capabilities this month. I’ve had to do this as I started to add a crafting system. Last month I mentioned about building a campfire and shelter, and therefore crafting and inventory refinements have been important. Now I have a system a bit like The Forest where you can choose to build something and you place a blueprint on the ground. Then you can add resources to it until it is complete. Of course I’ve added persistence for all the various stages of this. The other form of crafting is crafting into an inventory, which is mostly just a simpler version of it. The UI for crafting is all basic Unity visuals right now - I’ll come back to this much later I think.

I’ve also implemented game time, which includes a day night cycle. This ties in well with the other craftable I made - a tent! This will speed up time as you sleep. I’m still to refine the visuals of this, but it mostly working as intended. I don’t actually have any system yet for fatigure, nor do I know if I want that. I expect I do and it should be trivial to add. Building the day/night cycle I realised this would be easier using a URP project in Unity, which comes with some night lighting features. I added some lights to static objects and also to a campfire. There’s a bit of coordination between the light level of the world and the lights themselves as it doesn’t ‘just work’, but I got something looking pretty good. The lights even flicker to give a more realistic effect!

Moving into March I want to tidy up the crafting system a bit and add some new features there, but the main thing is implementing character visuals and how combat looks and feels. That’s huge and I think will take a long period of refinement, but I would hope to get the basic idea in place in the next month or two. Moving beyond that I want to target MVP survival gameplay elements such as good gathering and cooking. There’s a few parts of this in place already but I want to get it all feeling like a mini game in itself with all the survival elements in, before moving onto grander ideas. I’m not sure if a weather system is part of my idea of MVP, but it’s definitely part of the long term view.

See you soon!