‘Dropship’ is the temporary name for this project.
Whilst on holiday in South Africa recently, I was playing with a procedural generation library for Unity, and decided to take things further with the extra time I had on my hands. I created a fairly simple 2D survival game drawing inspiration from Minecraft and Starbound, featuring:
- Procedural terrain generation with differing terrain and minerals based on depth
- Terrain chunking system
- Digging and use actions by way of Interface to allow for generic use/dig actions on various items
- Crafting and inventory system
- Simple enemies with FSM actions like: idle, roam, pursue, attack
- Cave plant growth
- Dynamic weather and day/night / light system
- Simple water/lava gravity and movement system
- Basic tree foliage generation with fractals
- Two layers of terrain – foreground/background (I like the way Starbound does this)
- Pixel Sprite Generator (randomly generated sprites by using a two dimensional grid mask)
Newly added:
- JSON Serialization save/load system. Save your progress and quit, then load up your saved world again later
- 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
I also ended up porting this Pixel Sprite Generator for web canvas/JavaScript to C# / Unity – I did it initially to randomly generate the shrub/plant sprites scattered along the surface of the terrain in the game. I could now easily use it for other sprites like monsters, rocks, weapons, and other items in game. You can take a look at my port on Github here:Â //github.com/Shogan/PixelSpriteGenerator-Unity
You can take a peek at some gameplay below, which shows me running around, harvesting some resources, crafting more complex items from the resources, and then building a simple abode for shelter with those resources. 🙂
For fun I also created a dropship landing scene using some simple easing functions and a bit of Unity’s animation system.
To help speed up development, and because I didn’t have my trusty Wacom tablet with me on holiday, I used the following to help hasten development:
- PEProcGen for Unity v 0.6 (I heavily modified this to be able to dynamically generate during gameplay and to add more of my own features)
- Unity 2D Character controller
- Monsters/Pirate pack for some of the monster sprites
- Random 2D tileset I found online for some of the terrain sprites
- Pixel Weather FX asset from store
- 2D tileset for some of the terrain sprites
- Star Citizen Reclaimer fan 2D artwork sprite from the RSi forums (the dropship)
- Inventory Master asset from store (modified this quite a bit to add more functionality)
The game is still a work in progress and has a fair few obvious bugs and issues, alongside it’s mishmash of different art styles – this is because I still consider it a prototype. It’s nowhere near complete – I might continue with it some time, but for now I am happy to have created it for fun, and to play around with coding up and creating some ideas in Unity.
Here are some more screenshots:
