I started working on Dropship (the temporary name for this project) back in January, when I was on holiday in South Africa. It is a 2D ‘Minecraft’ style, sandbox survival game, drawing inspiration from Minecraft and Starbound, two of my favourite survival/sandbox games. After getting back from holiday I kind of just left it in its git repository, not doing too much, gathering dust. Recently I had the motivation to pick up development again in my spare time.
Over the last week or so, I’ve added the following new features.
- JSON Serialization save/load system. Save your progress and quit, then load up your saved world again later. All of the game/chunk/player built items are now able to be written to JSON and persisted to disk.
- Fishing and living fish colonies that are able to breed/multiply in water blocks
- Cooking with fires + nutrition attributes on food
- Basic survival stats and UI for health, food, and energy
- Self-healing blocks – similar to Minecraft where they replenish ‘hits’ if you stop hitting them
- Water/lava with surface settling effects (liquid blocks move down and fill out voids, and once settled, surface effects are created along the surface, such as lava bubbles, or jumping fish)
I’d like to work on the JSON serialization a bit more though. There are some items that still need to be accounted for when being re-generated from JSON data on load, and there are many optimisations I could still make to reduce file size and speed of the save/load system.
If you’d like to read a little more and see some videos of the game (taken before some of the above new features were added), take a look at the game page here.