I just want to quickly document a side project that I’ve been getting a lot of joy from. I recently bought an asset from the unity store, the SplitScenes asset. And my mind has been racing on how I could use it to make stuff that might have been a headache before to make for the quest 2 in terms of optimization.
To make a boring story short though, the asset gives me a dynamic scene streaming system so that I could essentially make giant world games by chunking down the world and only showing layers or objects that are where the player is. I’ve been playing Ancient Dungeon, frequenting Recroom worlds and VRchat worlds for inspiration and just daydreaming while building out small prefabs to decorate the player base with.
At the moment I’m just having fun building out the players home base. It’s mostly been like super basic prefab making and deciding on the projects prefab organization structure so I don’t easily get overwhelmed with the amount of stuff I’ll be having. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let me back up and try to pitch the project.
So basically…
This will be a single player fantasy rpg that focuses on weapon and armor crafting from materials gained during exploration and gathering. A big focus is going to be on actually traveling some distances to find different materials.
The player will have a summonable home base that will be the center of their crafting operations. It’ll be a basic tier progression system of copper, iron, steel and magic steel or whatever.
I’m trying to invoke the same feeling I had when playing the early versions of Terraria where there weren’t very many armor tiers and bosses. It would be all too easy to get excited and overscope with that kind of prompt but I really want to limit myself to two locations/biomes and three tiers of armor for the vertical slice.
I also imagine it would only be practical for me to lean on random generation so that I’m not bogged down with hand making the world + it would make the game slightly more replayable. Players would just need to “go” or spin up another world if they’re getting bored of the one they have now. Someday though, I would really love to just work with a team and make a whole ass world though.
Crafting
The house will be upgradable with more crafting stations and the like, maybe just simply more powerful crafting stations. I’m super inspired by a Township Tale’s crafting system. Although I don’t want to copy them outright with the intricacies and personal expression you can get with that, I just want to make a small game where you make a the pickaxe and do the minin’. All that to basically say, I don’t want to just make the crafting system a menu. Some assembly will be required.
I’ve already modeled the basic tools, and I’m using a color palette from lospec that I modified to also have each color transition to a darker and light color so its more versatile with flat shading and it’s still mostly cohesive.
Also helps with not having to have a bunch of different colored materials if I know I’m probably going to keep it flat shaded at least until after the prototype phase.
I’ve always been in love with crafting in games and the system that I really liked as a kid was Terraria’s crafting trees, I imagine it might be a bit simple compared to some survival games, and I don’t really want to delve into the amazing crafting world of A Township Tale. (You should check it out)
But the idea of the player crafting up a tool or thing by starting with something basic and just attaching pieces until they’re done lego-style sounds like it would add so much to what would be a simple crafting system.
As a stretch goal I would love to add stats to each thing that might need it like equipment and weapons, so the final item would be the sum of its parts. (Might be a bit tricky but I imagine scriptable objects might save the day here).
But why
When I saw the games that rec room kids were willingly playing with such janky looking graphics (no offense to the creators those rooms\experiences are magic in their own right), I realized two main things;
The kids yearn for the mines and that a game doesn’t have to look amazing. Just get the experience m’boi. I’ll try to keep this project updated but I’m not really under pressure to work at a breakneck speed for this one. It’s mainly therapy just making assets and if nothing comes from this, maybe I’ll have an asset pack to share on opengameart (if it’s a substantial amount of assets, I’ll probably sell them).
In an ideal world however, it would be amazing if I could finish this game as a cozy fantasy crafting game with random generation for the smallish world I’m thinking of and sell it to fund a future version of the game.
But until next time my fellow readers.
