Building a build system

I’ve always found base building a fun mechanic in any game. To my nerdy (dis)credit, I would sometimes map out rough Caesar and Theme Park layouts on graph paper as a better use of my time than doing maths homework as a kid. I think building an efficient, unique or challenging construct in a game gave me the same kind of buzz as solving a particularly complex or creative coding problem does today.

As a result of this, I really want to do my survival building system justice in terms of rounded out mechanics and well thought out features. I want to make building structures plannable and collaborative in their execution. I want to make construction large-scale so that you are building towns and villages in a fledgling nation. Most of all I want to make building on scale meaningful and make each town, village and nation feel busy, purposeful and interactive.

So how do I achieve this? Well a few recent games have managed to roll out fairly ground-breaking features in this direction, so by the time my game is anywhere near public consumption I imagine this will all be old hat. Conan Exiles introduced owning NPC helpers in your base; V Rising and decades before it Dungeon Keeper shows how good single function rooms can be to give a sense of purpose and scale; Grounded and Lego Fortnite have provided the concept of scaffolding and user created prefabs; and at time of posting Palworld and Enshrouded are doing a lot of work in the crafting NPCs and functional villages space.

Unfortunately before these games were released most of these ideas were design goals for my game. Every step that mainstream gaming takes towards these goals instils me with a small sense of loss at a unique feature missed. Nevertheless I try and keep in mind the idea that all games are just expansions on the shoulders of others and that I am never going to keep up with current trends as a solo developer.

I will be talking more of the detail of my build system in a feature post once the initial concept is released in v0.0.7. For now, I can say that I have implemented a fair amount of the basic features:

• a Build Menu from Mallet tool
• prefab ghosts for placing, rotating and other building controls
• the concept of building plans placed as a “scaffold” for group construction
• a variety of building pieces for the building of wood huts
• integration with VoxelPlay for use in procedural villages
• a tool for the creation of schematic templates to allow for more complex building items. Currently this only works in the unity editor, I need to convert this to JSON or other persistence for creation in game.