Big update
It’s been a long month here, but I think I now have some news that I’m (Jason) happy to report. In short, it’s gamedev time!
First is the above concept wall tile that dreamingofserenity did for us. I’ve not put it in game yet, but I’m definitely happy to see something better than my boring cubes. It’s designed to be tilable so it should do well for caverns. Still have some ideas we’re exploring but hopefully will get this into the game with some sort of UV soon.
Second is that I now have a big stack of paper work that covers the following:
* A pretty complete backstory, describing character origin and setup * All game mechanics to reasonably good detail, including first time play through and subsequent play through mechanics, resource management/storage, house building and crafting, farming/hunting, combat, skill/stat leveling, mini-games, breeding, status effects and NPC behaviours * Stats and skills system, including leveling and aforementioned status effects, with the possibility of the body part species type having an effect on character skills. * Classes and key methods for getting it all to work together * Events and Messaging for game play events and triggers.
Most importantly from all that paper is I’ve identified what will be in our first alpha build that I want to target to have completed within the next month or so. This will include the following
* 1-2 player directed autonomous NPC behaviours that exhibit key capabilities of NPCs to interact with the environment (e.g. tend the fire, collect wood) * 1-2 character stats (e.g. Health and Food Consumption rate) * 1-2 skills (e.g Melee and Resource gathering) and leveling * 1-2 spawnable items (e.g. monster, resource or new quest) * Build 1 structure at a player chosen location (e.g level the terrain, build location to store fuel for the fire or a house) * Collect/drop/deposit/use resources * Melee combat * Save/Load of Player and Resource storage states
I already have a start on several of these like character stats, building, collect/drop resources and melee combat from a previous attempt. I think I can re-use most of that code. So the new stuff will be the behaviours, skills and leveling, spawnable items, some aspects of structure building and load/save.
I will focus on delivering these core examples in a way that will let me expand/modify all of them to ultimately deliver the final game. There will be heaps to do like procedural world gen, animations, rest of the behaviours, stats, skills, structure crafting and such. Plus we’ll have all of the extra touches like dealing with the occluding walls in the way we really want them to work, lighting and special effects, mini-games, etc.