Adding a Crafting System to my Survival Game | Devlog #2 

It's nice seeing a devlog of someone who isn't totally experienced with this because It feels a lot more relatable

"Make work now, make pretty later." -OverPhil 6 words of wisdom right there.

words cannot explain how excited i am for this game

When it comes to picking up items, I would recommend that you can press e to pick up an individual item but have another button you can hold to just hoover up whatever you walk over. Best of both worlds.

I’m looking forward to where this series goes! I can tell a lot of work goes into these, and I’m so thankful that you keep us up to date with this journey!

I would recommend to give the small items on the ground a larger "hitbox" for picking them up. I already saw you struggling to pickup that pickaxe, imagine having that while actively playing.

"After I did all that, it looks.... exactly the same". Story of my life man. Half my software job is just "do a ton of stuff, and make sure it's exactly how it was". So rough.

this devlog is incredible because its following the exact development process i followed when i was learning game development. I'm pretty excited to see where i could have gone if i kept going after i got bored!

in borderlands 2, you could pick up all the loot at once in a chest by holding down the collection button. I think it could be a fun way to collect a pile of resources in a survival game, considering that its pretty easy to have a bunch of resources lying on the ground that you do want all of. the farming thing im most interested in is seeing a plant have different stages and 'grow', I hope you pick something that has fruit on it like strawberries. Planting trees and saplings might be easier to program tho. great devlog series!

I can seriously understand why inventory management can be such a bitch to make work correctly. Even though I've never made such a system, I could think of so many edge cases... I'm sure you'll hit many more bumps with it later on and end up re-writing it more than once. Good luck! Looking forward to the next dev log.

Wiseman once said "Cutting down trees gives you logs, not planks" - Gandhi

This is totally inspiriting me right now. I wanted to hop onto Unity and see what assets I can make, let alone begin making my own survival game with unique mechanics that set apart from other games. Nice work!

it's looking really good! I loved the entire forest floating back and forth overhead lmao, like a terribly oversized earthquake also, the pickup system looks great so far, but if I could wave a magic wand and have a system that felt satisfying and functional, I think it would be this: tap "e" while looking at an item: pick up every nearby item of that same type. (this way, you could have bunches of resources explode off the nodes/trees/rocks in a satisfying way, and also not have to pick up individual stacks. usually, if a player is collecting a certain type of resource, they don't want just PART of that resource when it drops from the node. Requiring players to precisely look at something and tap a button to pick it up would get old quickly if players have to do it multiple times and AREN'T making a meaningful choice with that action I think. But tapping "e" multiple times to pick up only things I want and figuring out what I don't want on the ground WOULD be a meaningful choice.) hold down "e" while NEAR an item: hoover up all nearby items after a short delay, regardless of type. (This keeps it quick and easy for players that just want to gather all sorts of items, without requiring them to slow down and look at things precisely, because they're not using precision to sort or make meaningful choices, they just want to hoover up everything and get to the next node) Also, I think it would be good to be a bit more lenient with precision looking at items to pick them up, it always gets hard to aim the camera at small objects for me when I'm in third person mode in any game :') I feel like just making the item hitboxes wider+taller but leaving them at the same bottom level (so they behave correctly when they hit the ground) would be perfect to give players a bit of wiggle room when pointing at items to pick up. I think it would also help with the "run over items to pick them up" mechanic, which also feels like it needs a little too much precision right now. I always appreciate games that let you just kind of get "close enough" and will let you suck up the item instead of having to parallel park my feet directly over it lmao I hope that helps, I look forward to next devlog! :)

nice break down, great to see the growth and how your game dev is improving

Well done mate, I'm mostly impressed by your devotion to do this and how you make the time to do this. Coding, recording, editing, a lot of people would have given up a long time ago

I like ARK's approach to picking up items. Press 'E' to pick up an item. Press and hold 'E' to pick up anything you mouse-over. Press 'F' to pick up everything nearby, or everything nearby that is the same type.

i saw episode 0 at around 100 views and now its over 400k. wow, you deserve it these are really entertaining

Nice updates! "Make work now, make pretty later" pretty much how I work too!

imo the "gather objects when you're near them" is the right choice but make sure to make the distance required for gathering a little more so it wouldn't be frustrating

Im in love with your work, keep doing it man, you're now one of my inspirations!

Just a small thing, keep the stack size cap but maybe get rid of the indicator that say _ /50 and just have it say the amount in the stack and not the maximum as well to me it makes it feel like a clip of ammo instead of materials, if you want to keep a way to show the stack is full may put a little “max” in the bottom corner of the icon or may embolden the font of the number when a stack is full. Keep up the good work !

I'm loving the series, keep it up!

Suggestion for interaction: pickup interactions trigger on all nearby objects of the same type, and the interaction text states how many will be picked up. I.e. 8 logs of wood dropped close together will each have a pop-up saying "Wood x8". If a player picks it up all pieces of wood are picked up.

The process is incredible! Loving this

Can't wait for you to get further into making this game. Good luck!

If you are looking for more juice to add to tree chopping, I recommend adding sounds. Sound design is often under appreciated

Really like seeing you devlog your dream game even though you have little experience and probably not as much time to work on it as you'd like. It's a great inspiration to us all as many people like myself are in a very similar boat that likes to sink. Keep it up man I hope it goes well for you :)

Looking awesome, keep up the good work. Inventories and their UI are a pain in the butt.

good improvements overall! not much to say other than my one suggestion in the discord server, looking forward to the next devlog

Great work!! I am excited for the next one as usual! 🤗

Developed my own inventory system recently. Man the pain and complexity behind something that seems so simple was completely unexpected :)

for picking up items, just make a large hitbox so that when the player walks into it, the item's name would pop up above it along with a prompt to press E.

I know this was a while back but if your still figuring out how the player should pick up stuff I reccomend 1 of 2 things. Either press "E" to pick up the item your looking at and "F" to pick up all objects around you for an instant. Or you can hold tap E to pick up and object or hold it down to pick up anything you look at While holding the button Best of luck :)

loving this series so far!

i know nothing about coding but this guy make it still so enteratining to watch (also has a nice voice)

I'm sure its tough to do this while working a job. Just wanted to say keep it up, it's been fun watching the journey and I'm pumped to see more!

this is great, looking forward to next episode!

Just seen your forst devlog and i really want to see were this is going, so i subbed

yo i was literally juts watching 0 and 1 and this came out today awesome and keep it up

i like that inventory better like waaaay better

This looks pretty cool! If you doubled the speed of all the swing animations, and just halved how much damage they do, it would feel so much better without affecting the actual balance. Right now the animations look pretty sluggish.

an idea I had for the inventory is pressing e picks up the item you're looking at and holding e for a period of time picks up all of the same item in a certain radius

This looks great! :D

i think this is the best devlog i have ever seen. hype

Great job so far!

Really good to see you're using our feedbacks :D Continue like that bro !

Finally. Was really looking forward to #2

I might be a little late to the party, but I think there are some quick wins you could make to you inventory’s internal model. Your current storage is using an array as the underlying data structure. This works well when considering only loading the array and inserting one item into one specific index. However, there are a lot of disadvantages to this: - figuring out stack sizes - checking crafting requirements - inventory sorting mechanisms I believe you noticed this as well because of your comment on how many for loops you are using. Generally, if you find yourself doing something like this it might mean the data structure you’re using it not best suited to the task. Consider using a HashMap instead. As an example this is how the data could be configured in Scala (I don’t know C# very well). val inventory = Map[ItemType, InventoryStack] sealed trait ItemType { def maxStack: Int } object ItemType { case object Axe extends ItemType { override val maxStack = 64 } } case class InventoryStack( itemType: ItemType, amount: Int, position: Int, ) I apologise if there are any weird mistakes or formatting issues, I typed this on an iPad.

Recommendation for that RemoveCraft() function you showed. Primarily to make it much cleaner, but also for optimization: Rather than using a double nested loop (you seem to like those :P) try using Dictionaries, with the item type enum as a key, and the current owned count of them as the value. Dictionary ItemMap; Then, if you gain a resource, like wood, just: ItemMap[ItemType.Wood] += amountGained; Same goes for subtraction. That way, when you want to remove an item in the function, pass in the item list and amounts for each, which can be done in the same way you currently are. Then: foreach (var i in items) { ItemMap[i.itemType] -= i.amount; } And that's it!

i watch alot of youtube and this is somehow the only channel i clicked the bell to get updated when you post a new video

For the tree shake I think it would be nice to have the tree more still at the very bottom/at the ground, because it is connected there, and shake more the higher up the tree. Or if it had a point of rotation at the origin where it spawns that it wiggles around on, that would produce a similar effect.

Really enjoy your devlogs! I've been doing similar work and have some advice on unifying some of that complicated inventory logic. At work I am in charge of implementing our inventory, harvesting, crafting, and refining in a networked game. I was getting frustrated always having to check if the inventory had enough resources, then if the inventory had enough space, then crafting an item. Later on I can see this problem getting even worse, having to make a function not only for each operation but for each check if that operation would work. Once you need to start transferring items between containers like an inventory to a chest you will find yourself doing tons of if checks. So I implemented the command pattern. I broke up operations to an Item Container (general purpose object that holds multiple items, like an inventory) into the smallest parts possible: creating a stack (something that fills a slot), removing a stack, modifying a stack. This allows you to implement Undo functions for each of those small operations. So something like crafting is a series of these small operations that build up in a stack, as soon as one of them fails because there was no sufficient inputs or the output couldn't fit it in your inventory, you Undo() each of the commands on the stack and stop running anymore commands. Now you can chain together any number of big or small operations to an ItemContainer and if one thing fails the whole thing cancels. No more if checks to make sure everything will work then doing, just do it and if it fails you won't have to worry about it just doing half of the transaction.

i really liked this episode keep it up i'm excited to see where it goes

adding a cartoon shader would really fit the style of the game

Looks great once again

This was a great devlog! heres a new sub. and also thank you for traching me the difference from Lists and Arrays, I always assumed they were practically the same :/

I cant wait to play the full game! keep up the good work

love these devlogs

You should add some more noise to make terrain a bit more unique if you can, for example, one part of the noise could be 2x height while another could be 0.5x, so the multiplier noise would multiply values of the generator noise. Weird idea, but it might help give more character. Also maybe you could use some mooore noise to make certain areas have different foliage colors, from yellow-ish green to blue-ish green, could also help to make some areas feel more distinct. Other than that, everything is really well-made and I can't wait for the next episode!

For the item drops, you could have an animation of all of the items the resource dropped falling to the ground, but have a small bag replace them. Then it could have a 'grab all' button or you could drag and drop what you want into the inventory

I am excited every time there is a new devlog

Hell yeah brother!!! New devlog dropped.

You should add common/rare earth metals that would be really cool! Or you could add some sort of lore to the game cause lore is what Pulls most nerds in XD Great video btw I really enjoyed it I'm can't wait for part 3

I feel your pain with getting the Inventory system to work, I spent days on it. The hardest part was dragging icons around. Managed to get a good system using an Event System and a Graphic Raycaster for the Individual Grid Layout Elements.

This looks good already!

loving the journey of this game

Hi I don't know if you discussed this but I think it would be better if the tree's had some sort of indicator when they take damage cause right it know it looks very static. You could maybe add a hole in the tree everytime you hit it as if your actually chopping it down! Or a health bar if that's the style you're going for! Love to see the progress and good luck ! :)

The trees flying through the air caught me off guard lol.

For picking up items, you can take the Borderlands approach and have Tapping E pickup 1 item at a time while Holding E will pickup all of that item in the pile

Maybe make it so you can throw items (throw, not a measly drop). Could be good for later when combat is added, or just for fun games, like “Throw Rock at Tree” or “Throw Rock Straight Up And Land On Head”.

So hyped looks so much better with the gui update now

Object pooling! You should look into that technique when spawning lots of objects (like from breaking a tree), it doesn't impact performance like spawning them all at once would :) Also... cluttered inventories are a thing most games struggle with, even big games like Minecraft, Terraria, Stardew Valley, & Animal Crossing. Some players even enjoy organising their inventories so I wouldn't worry about it too much and let it get cluttered. Maybe let them carry more of the common items like wood :)

I think it would be nice if the hotbar is on the bottom of the screen like in Minecraft or ARK. Having the hotbat below your character is more comfortable to look at than it is at the top left. Awesome progress btw

On the item picking up method, instead of picking up every item you walk on, i prefer the select what item you pick method but maybe add a feature where for example if your press shift e, you pickup every item that is the same type of item within an area or something, idk.

I started to make my inventory yesterday and it's funny how similar they are.

Good Job Keep Working on This Game

This might be too late but a good mix would be to have all the dropped items group themselves together into piles. So u only have to click one item to pick up all the items of that type. Instead of picking up one wood at a time they’re all in a group and u just pick up the pile of wood. But any other item piles aren’t shoved into ur inventory.

for the hitting of trees you could do what rust and or fortnite do, have a hittable target that increases damage done to the object with a juicy sound effect. and at point of hit a small effect of wooden fibres could burst out which also make it look and feel juicier.

you can do as Ylands, if you hold in e then you pick up all items that are of the same type as the one you hold e over

oo make it so people can craft bigger bags, and they start with 5 slots, then each bag upgrades by 5. Make there be creatures in the game that can kill off the food animals. So you need to breed animals, and protect animals, not just kill them. Make it so your character can get bigger if they eat food , and make the size of your character be able to make them take 1%less damage, and have 5 size upgrades, so you dont need to make armor in the game, unless you want to, and you can lose your size by dying. You could make it so you can upgrade your gear, by having duplicates. So lets say a sword is level 5, you combine it with 5 level 5 swords, and it upgrades. And the alternate way, is to craft your weapon and make enhance stones. But that could be a rare drop, or only spawn in specific places. I have tons of ideas for survival games. They are easy to design conceptually, because you don't need missions n junk, you just need a good environment, and rules in that environment, then ppl will spend hours playing it, if its good.

Good video :) good luck :D

In Space Enggeers, a click picks up a sigle item, but houlding the button causes items nearby to automaticly gets pickup.

... lol, i was exactly thinking about the "how about both" solution .... as one minute later gladly you really did that :D

This is just the type of game i would play.

like them alot keep making these

Lets goo another devlog

I like how to approach advice - take it in but do as you want; you'll never learn if you aint in the front seat steering the car.

3:42 an easier way to do this would be to just make the mouse cursor a 25th inventory slot, then just swap items between the mouse cursor and the clicked slot

I'd recommend seperating an Inventory class from a PlayerInventoryController class if you haven't done so already. I originally did not, and so adding interactions with new inventories(chest, loot, etc) was a nightmare. In switch so that its more modular and yesterday within an hot was able to add a hotbar and external inventory which can all interact with each others items and it only took me an hour to alter the PlayerInventoryController to interact with a new external inventory

Great stuff! Keep it up! For the pickup system why not something more like 7 Days To Die? If the player is chopping down a tree there's a near 100% chance they want the wood. In 7DTD if you're cutting down a tree the resources don't fall on the ground they automatically go into the players inventory (if there's slots available) meaning no spamming E or even having to overlap with the fallen resources. The work you've already done wouldn't all be for nothing since if the players inventory is full then the resources would still have to fall like they are now.

For the pickup situation, you could do how it is in ark, you can click a separate button that picks up all the items in a certain radius if that makes sense

You should let the inventory cover the screen rather than up in corners and possible add navigation to the crafting menu so the crafting menu isn’t always open when then inventory is

when you drop item that stacks ( like wood ) you could make it so it groups up when on the ground just like in your inventory

I think getting rid of the red box whenever you hit something would be nice, it makes it look unpolished in my opinion, and now you have the shake effect to know you hit the object.

making a game alone is a very hard job, and man, eventually the motivation will go up and down, good luck with everything and I wish the best for you!

maby you can add hide outs that were left by other survivors that died and you have to restore the hide outs that are safe houses that lets you rest and look out into the world and soak in the ambience around you it will be a place were you can buy different wepons from shop keepers and a place to sleep until it becomes morning or night

items should drop in stacks - a bunch of logs should require a single key to pick up. OR make the animation of destroying the object simply cosmetic and the logs (or other item) automatically go into the inventory instead of the ground (I favor this second solution with an easy way to drop unwanted items from inventory with hotkeys - like runescape)

ngl pretty awesome :D

I am a new UE5 game developer and a 27 year software engineer. I like your devlog video series and think I should do something like this on my channel for the game I am building. I am looking forward to watching the life and evolution of your game. great concept and looking forward to it being EA on Steam or somewhere.

Its very inspiring to see you do this and not be a professional who talks about the rocket science of inventories and the most optimal algorithm to do it. Motivates me to want to try something ambitious like this with less experience