First devlog: /blog/1529159/new-devlog-open-world-survival-craft-game

Regarding the previous post's options for picking the next feature to develop, some required less planning than others. World seemed straightforward, just code so things can expand and generate with chunks and all, tried and true methods. The characters would also be fairly straightforward, just make them move and animate like the player, most work would be thinking up a robust state machine and animation system.

But the items... that's the complicated part. The whole game economy hinges on them, all the crafting, all the inventory, status effects, building, loot tables...

So, I had time to think about it yesterday and taking my minimal UI approach into account and I had many ideas for where to start, so I will elaborate on them here.

Just to note, I have no setting of the world firmly in place, that includes the technological level, environment or anything, that will come later. At the moment, I imagine an alien environment you are stranded on and you have zero clue how anything works and what to do and you may find some existing technology to clue you in.

Item Info

No UI, means no item names, so each item should be identifiable by the icon in the world. Minecraft seems to prove it's enough:

But a name does pop up when hovered and can imply a lot of uses for the item. It's only the more abstract items like ender eyes or netherrack where you need to experiment to see what comes of it. I would want experimentation to be the key part of the gameplay for my game, but I also don't want you to have to refer to a wiki or keep it all in your head, so I figured having a manual similar to Tunic would be very cool for keeping track of item properties and uses and recipes:

Of course, there would be no text, just symbols and arrows and images of whatever it is that we are talking about. Would also help to give people a sort of a direction on what to try out next. Would be best if the manual was a physical item in the world so there would be a way to gain info for tutorializing by picking up pages, data discs, scanning, etc. It's also very intuitive that you would take notes and may want to reference them easily.

Item Use

The method of item use I had in mind was that you would pick up an item and it would end up in your hand and you would then need to click a dedicated interact button to decide what to do with it. You would get a thought bubble from your character and would list through options as to what should be done. Things you could do is apply it to a specific body part (arm, nose, mouth), put it inside a container within range (backpack, bucket), swing it around as a weapon (applying the item to anything it hits), throw it, apply directly to something in your environment (wall, plant, etc).

Now, I am the first to admit I would go crazy doing this for each and every item I encounter. And having shortcuts for each action is not the solution in a real time game. Roguelikes like Nethack can get away with it because they are turn based and even then it's overwhelming to remember all the things you can do at a given time.

So, I figured letting players define their own keys and strings of actions that would occur when the key is pressed. Like, you could bind the T button to pick up the selected item from the ground and put it into the bucket you are holding in the other hand. Or to sniff whatever is in your right hand and if it smells good to eat it. Would also permit people to stack the commands so you could press the "pickup to bucket" button 10 times quickly and it would try do it 10 times while you don't need to keep repressing it after each use.

I would provide some basic keys to start with, but you could rebind everything if you so desired.

Interaction Results

I considered pre-made recipes but I feel with the flexibility I considered so far, I can do better than that. I think of adding aspects to different items to denote what kind of interaction will occur when two items apply to each other.

For example, an item could be Flammable, and another item could be Sparking, so when you smash them together, the flammable one starts Burning. Or, an Organic item could be Wounded, but applying an item that has Regeneration on it could mend it. Or an item that has Sharpness on it could create a Wound if it is applied to an Organic item (that includes body parts)

You could also have specific tools that can bind items together, or mix them, and then that would permit you to create something entirely new, be it a mixture or a tool.

I thought of using symbols similar to what exists in Morrowind with alchemy/spellcrafting/enchanting or in Cultist Simulator/Book of Hours that dictate effects and states of objects:

Custom Language?

At this rate, I realized it will inevitably lead to having a language unique to the game itself, so that may become a puzzle of it's own to teach the players. If I will have symbols for body parts, states of being and actions, may as well add the extra few more linguistical things and make it functional for more than just UI.

I would prefer to use the manual to also take note of that, as it's own category, so may have pages like in Chants of Sennaar that explain the key concepts and elaborate which symbol means what:

I also did consider letting people type their own notes in the manual, as part of the research. Very simple floating text lines. But that's like a way later consideration.

Conclusions

So, to summarize, you would be able to interact with items by specifying what you do with them and where, they would systematically interact with other objects based on their aspects. And all this needs to be usable without using any English or other worldly language, just symbols.

Yeah...

...seems simple enough...

I think I would need to do a bunch of prototyping to see how viable this is. I am not even considering what the heck am I to do with visually representing all of this. I did plan for this to have adult themed interactions, so like... mouth would not be the only hole you could interact with eventually xD

So for now, I will just try and focus on the items and interactions with them as step one and see how much work there is with this. The world and the characters can wait.