Making an Open World Building Game | Devlog 1
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- čas přidán 25. 07. 2024
- Hey everyone, this is my second game devlog in which I document the journey of creating more building functionality and implementing a modular inventory system for my voxel building game, built using Unity. I hope you enjoy!
Any feedback/suggestions are welcomed!
Chapters:
1. Introduction: 00:00
2. The Building System: 00:17
3. Adding Objects: 02:24
4. Designing an Inventory System: 04:36
5. Let's Code: 07:21
Track List (all music sourced from Epidemic Sound)
1. The Forest Grand - Trevor Kowalski (chapter 1)
2. Melted Mind - Max Anson (chapter 2)
3. Coffee Stains - Lofive (chapter 3)
4. If you Do, Don't - Vincent & A Secret (chapter 3)
5. Racing Hearts - Mattie Maguire (chapter 4)
6. Ultimatum - AGST (chapter 4)
#devlog #gamedev #indiedev #unity #voxel #building - Věda a technologie
I wanted to write "First" but then I remembered I'm 21 years old
I wanted to write "First" on this comment, but then I remembered you're 21 years old
Really showed them
I'm very much pleasantly surprised to see a devblog discuss good software engineering principles and methodology, especially testing. I don't think I've ever seen testing being mentioned at all. Kudos. :)
I'm glad you like that element, and I appreciate the feedback! It's difficult to know how engineering focused to be in the videos vs just demonstrating the game content. I'm trying to find a balance of both.
great to see this much progres!
Things are looking great so far! You have a good mix of dev and design skills.
Thank you, I appreciate it!
Really excited to see where this goes
I'm really glad to hear that! Thanks for the support.
You devlog are a very good source of inspiration, thanks !
Thank you, I'm very glad to hear that!
yesss I've been waiting for your next devlog. i love building games like Minecraft and this is right up my alley ❣️
I’m really glad to hear that! Thank you for the support
Saw the last devlog a day ago and I cant wait to see the end product!
Ah that’s great! Glad to have you back for the this video.
old video but you could do a mix for the block placement. raycast to figure out where, and screen space difference to figure out how far
its always nice to find a Game Dev who makes a Game that you're interested in and that you would want to play yourself :D
I’m really grateful to hear this!
Brilliant devlog! The game world and UI looks like a great start.
So great to see you mentioning TDD in your code too. It'd be awesome to see you have this working in unity.
Thank you! Yeah I’ll certainly be diving deeper on this topic soon 🙂
Great devlog and amazing progress! I completely feel your pain with the whole UI/UX issues. A few months back I wanted to redo my whole level editor UI, to just give a better user experience while also having both PC and controller support.. It was a nightmare and eventually abandoned it, but I'll get back to it when my editor is more fleshed out. But I think your inventory system is looking solid for, keep at it!
Thanks man! Yeah, The UI can be tricky, but it's fun if/when it starts coming together. Adding controller support is on my list of things to do soon, it's going to be quite a big job 😅.
I just finished your first vid like... 20 minutes ago.
What a nice coincidence :)
Ah great! Glad to have you return for the next!
I’ve been scrolling for good game devs and I finally found a type i like :). Amazing work btw.
Thank you, that means a lot.
Yeah, i have experience 😊
Great to see this progress!
I would recommend that you include a mouse hover effect in your inventory, so that for example the item name shows up when the mouse is over it.
Thank you and yeah, that’s a good point. It’s something I will be adding for sure.
Great stuff, I stumbled onto the previous video just the other day and was hoping the next episode would come out soon.
Have you considered going the minecraft way for the props, meaning that they would also be made out of blocks, they would just be "templates" or randomly generated following some rules.
What's the next feature you're gonna work on? Or is that a spoiler? :p
Thank you! Great to hear you was waiting for the next devlog. Means a lot.
And yes, I have considered that, but I like the combination of non-voxel objects and voxel terrain, frees me from the constraints of just having block based things. For example, ores could be modelled, and characters could be more unique. But we’ll see how that goes! I could use smaller voxel to get more details.
There’s a whole list of things I want to add next, but my priority is getting the core gameplay loop in and starting on the world generation. But we’ll see!
Great progress! Funny how the "flashy" stuff that people think shows you've made a lot of progress is actually super easy (like adding trees from the asset store), whereas redesigning your object placement system is a FAR more massive undertaking - yet nobody will ever see it, especially in a video. So you've made a LOT of progress!
I'm a game/film composer and I'd love to chat about music someday when you're ready, but I know it's still early in development. I'll just keep following. Keep up the great work!
Thank you! I appreciate that. Yeah, there's certainly a lot of behind the scenes progress with a game like this that takes time to develop before I have anything demonstrable. Makes it challenging when planning for devlogs and trying to make them somewhat entertaining.
That's cool to hear you're a composer! Yeah, right now I haven't thought too much into which elements I'll do myself vs getting help for, but I love the idea of collaborating with other creators in the future. I might try and start a discord at some point in the future where these sorts of things can be discussed, but not sure yet when...
@@wheezyworks awesome! I'll definitely keep following. If you want to share your email or Discord, I'd be happy to send you a demo reel and maybe talk about some ideas for the music (with no pressure/commitment on your end of course).
What is the goal of the game? The pitch deck / how you want players to feel. EX: Doom's "Push combat forward"
I recommend studying Stonehearth as it is very similar to this game with being a top-down voxel building game that has a lot of good and bad to learn from and Valheim for inventory/construction.
The reason I'm saying these things is because if this game is meant to be primarily focused on building and carving and structuring and making your way through the world, a civilization if you will, you don't wants to be following in the footsteps of vanilla Minecraft, because its survival mode is no longer able to building massive structures without becoming laborious. Just look anywhere in the Minecraft realm and most people who make big things in survival mode will all agree that the inventory in that game is no longer suitable to that dream because of all the blocks being added and being unable to have enough in the hot bar nor having enough on hand from limited stacks and varients such as slabs and stairs requiring another inventory space (Just look up The Inventory Update for examples or Xisumavoid's inventory mod he discusses on CZcams).
However, Minecraft is very much still suited for its survival gameplay where you have to manage your inventory of what you keep, and how you choose to keep it, with item durability, blocks to give yourself protection against mobs, torches to light things up, and these are all limited resources that require space and you have to make sure you prioritize these things accordingly.
If you want the focus of your game to be building, this (Minecraft/Terraria survival) is not the style that your game is going to be needing, it would be closer to Valheim, where you choose what you want to make and then the systems allow you to make it drawing from a pool of resource that is simply just your wood or stone instead of planks, logs, strips, stone brick, cobblestone, chiseled stone, etc. The building blocks placed expend the wood, more like an RTS inventory than a survival one, that way you can make whatever wood types you want and they take the same resource but it's simplified down to the point where you're choosing what your building with instead of having to cram everything and its varients into chests, the hotbar, etc. Then, expansion of inventory could be an expansion of the amount of wood you can have as a overall hierarchy or just expanding chest storage from 1000 resources to 10k wood or maybe 10k of any mix or match or even a split of 5k wood, 5k stone. There's a lot you can do here.
If you want you, could also make it so different trees grant different resources than just wood like dye for example, and so Redwood blocks, for example, would require wood and red and a redwood tree would give you both wood and red as resources and then something like a oak tree would give you just purely would, but you'd get more wood than the redwood tree.
I hope my wordwall was helpful, best of luck in your gamedev journey moving forward!
Thank you for taking the time to write such comprehensive feedback! You make some really good points from an interesting perspective I haven’t really considered.
Right now I’m torn between two routes. The casual route, focusing on creativity and adventure, and a completely different - darker route, focused more on survival and action.
I want to prototype both, and to be honest would like to develop both (they both would use the same building engine) so right now I’m taking some time to prototype and explore each concept.
I’m doing a lot of travelling at the moment, but when I’m back I will be continuing to work on my next devlog and will dive into this some more.
Again, thank you for the feedback, I will be sure to consider these points.
reminds me of custom renderers for Dwarf Fortress
Hah, I hadn’t seen those before, but I see what you mean! They look great
Ah open world.
They're just as amazing as hard to make
True that! But worth every line of code.
Love the look of it!
have any further plans with the art aspect of the game?
Thank you! And yes 🙂, I plan to learn and do a lot more in the art & music department. Keen to get away from my current “dev art” standard 😅. Just trying to find a style currently.
Great stuff! What program did you use to make those notes? It looked like a nice for blueprint and flow diagrams… I need this in my life ha
Thank you! I was using Draw io
TDD in unity needs a community to set its standards. I let go of that idea. Plz do share more about the matter
Interesting, yeah, I will certainly be going deeper on this.
9:53 I like how you came up with your solution here, but why not just render the block itself in the inventory as a 3D object and save yourself from having to generate textures for it?
Great question. I considered that initially, but when I think about it, I would need to create potentially hundreds of 3D objects in the scene to show a full inventory. That would be a lot of vertices to store and render. For cubes it's not as bad, but for items that will have higher poly counts, rendering them as a 2D sprite with baked lighting would be more efficient. Also, as the item icon is from a fixed angle, I can get the same level of detail from a simple 2D sprite, than I could from a potentially complex 3D model. I also save on texture mapping etc.
it looks super nice, the building looks good too. im still watching so maybe its shown later, but if player can rotate the world likely make building easier, is it possible?
This looks awesome! Just please make it available to Phones or Nintendo Switch 🙏 , this looks really good, looking forward to play it 💕
Thank you! I appreciate that. One of my objectives for this is to make it controller/hand held friendly. Presents some extra challenges, but I’m designing for that as I go.
@@wheezyworks thank u bestie 💕✨
With this stage of development, I want the game to be a colony builder, I think it's more cool, fun and challenging 🤞
I agree, it could work nicely in this format. I’m doing a lot of work on the overall concept/design at the moment. I intend to include aspects of this genre, but without making that the sole purpose, will try and explain it in the upcoming videos
Add a little solarpunk, you won't regret it.
Agreed! I was looking into this concept also, I really like the idea of incorporating it somehow
Would say first but then I would get an air strike called to my house
😅
An amazing read, would highly recommend for game devs and gamers alike. (Though the sequel was regrettably not as good)
What tool did you use to do your flowcharts for your design ?
In this video, I used a mix of Photoshop for scribbling down ideas and Draw io for diagrams
What's that book around 3:00?
It’s called “Blood, Sweat and Pixels”. Its about how some iconic games were made, and talks about the struggles and challenges. It’s a great read. *note to self, start using Affiliate links 😅😂
you need more decors like chairs tables etc.. but you will say that nobody will see the house from the inside so add a system that allows you to do that and add some people to walk in the world you make so it allows you to have a goal and the people work for you to mine and other at the start you do everything by yourself but as you upgrade you have workers make creative mode and survival make the game has more goals like a boss or anything creative the game needs a mod system like adding blocks and more you can make the camera movement better also add night day cycle wether and all kind of stuff add Quasts a terrain system well be good add good graphic and make it so you can change it in settings like low quality or turn off shadow anti analysing sound well be good and as my gaming knowelodge animals make the game have life a skipable tuturiol removes the boardness from the start free games always make the player happy because if they buy it and they didn't like it(which is not happening) they get angry or a demo does it and add the final touches like boimes or seasons
sorry for my bad english
Some great ideas there. Some of which I will be talking about in one of my upcoming videos. The idea of having "management" elements is something I'm exploring. Also, the camera angle and being able to go inside buildings is something I definitely want to add, so will be trying to solve that challenge.
I also plan to be adding things like terrain generation, day/night cycle, wildlife and plants. The idea of seasons is really nice. That could be a really cool mechanic to add.
Thank you for taking the time to write your feedback! It is much appreciated.
dog :)