Devlog - April 3rd 2022

New scavenging/looting mechanic

This week’s focus was on getting the new scavenging/looting feature/experience as complete as possible. I made great progress on it this week and did initial performance and gameplay tests which also had promising results. The performance does not seem to be affected a lot which is a good thing. This means I can showcase the mechanic in this week’s devlog. I will keep an eye on its performance to make sure it also works well with a large amount of objects in a future version of the game. The system in most cases replaced the old furniture inventory system. Previously furniture like a dresser had an inventory for each of its drawers. Interacting with this single piece of furniture meant that a UI for the inventory and its contents would need to be displayed which breaks the flow of the game since this task is done very often and fairly frequently. The constant switch between the first person view and the inventory UI negatively impacts the immersion and lessens the fun in scavenging. The new mechanic replaced this UI approach with a physical container that you can see the contents of right in the first person view. This means each item is physically inside such a drawer or cabinet etc. A system like this has many benefits but also comes with drawbacks and performance risks. The added immersion, better gameflow, better overall look of the environment due to more items being visible are only a few benefits of such a system. The increased amount of objects in the actual scene instead of simply some data inside an inventory does add additional load on performance and other calculations. Also the furniture pieces need quite a bit more work to be prepared for this system as each drawer or container needs to properly represent the visual representation of the furniture. Previously a drawer only required one hitbox that allows the player to interact with it since items could not be placed inside and the drawer could not be pulled out and pushed in properly. Now a drawer does require all the different sides to have accurate colliders for this system to work correctly which does add a good amount of extra load on the physics engine. Like mentioned above the performance appeared good from my initial tests but further monitoring is required to ensure things don’t fall apart down the road. Those few examples are also only a couple out of many that I had to deal with to make this system work well and reliable. I think that the current system is in a good enough state to be prepared and included in the next tech demo. This third tech demo will be the primary focus on the coming week where bug fixing and small feature completion will make up the majority of the tasks I will be working on. I hope to be able to have the demo available for the coming weekend. If you are interested in joining this round of tests please reach out to me. Like the previous demos this one will also primarily focus on tech testing and not actual gameplay.

Notable tasks this week:

• Finished and integrated first version of new and more immersive scavenging/looting mechanic
  • Updated furniture collision for accurate item spawning and container interaction
  • Added new functionality to furniture such as drawer and door interaction
  • Integration with save/load system
• Added new art style to more objects used by the world population
• Lots of bug fixes

Wishlist on Steam

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That’s all I got this week. I hope you are all doing well.

Stay safe out there and I’ll see you next week.