Game Projects

Basic Stuff

2D fixed screens, same engine as Minds.

Very lore-heavy from the outset like Minds.

2d rudimentary survival/crafting game. Mostly want to be able to test out drillr animations + shatterloop's entity system. The game takes place on the eponymous Wild Pig Island and (with a boat and some means of navigation) other islands.

Heavy heavy focus on exploration -- the goal of the game is bringing unique stuff back to The Bunker that you find -- this improves the Civilization there and will also improve your gameplay to some extent.

Basic Lore

Some kind of oceanic world that used to have a thriving civilization, there was some big disaster and people fled into underground bunkers.

These bunkers are very very fallen technologically but are self-sustaining. A rite of passage is to go up to the surface world and check it out -- the ritual is maintained so people can one day return to the surface world. In your case the world is actually habitable again, though difficult to survive in.

Instead of being one person, you're a collection of young islanders going up to the surface with whatever technology the bunker civilization can provide -- the session fails if you die or don't bring back anything of value, but otherwise improves the civilization and saves its progress.

To support this aesthetic, all world changes are deleted when you die and you'd have to go out a second time as someone else.

Things can also change over time, the implication being that time passes in between young people having Rites of passage, or civilization working with the new materials.

Gameplay

So this stuff out of the way, the actual gameplay looks like:

Coming out well-fed, you have to survive as long as possible and bring back things of value or plant Automatons that can harvest things of value you've discovered (like Ore veins). The more you do the better, as the world changes between sessions and more time will pass.

Early game things of value are pretty close by, but your technology is also going to be very very low-level stone age and suck horribly.

The world is procgen, but changes over time rather than seed. Basic geographical changes (like island shape) will vary but much more slowly than things like animal nests or tree distribution.

All discoverable items and animals/flora/etc are handcrafted. Their location definitely isn't.

With the civ angle (and Automatons occasionally needing replacements as additional mission objectives), the game is half strategic and half survival, which is an interesting blend.

Bunker Civilization Technology

The bunker civilization's technology is pretty weird:

They have environmental suits that are highly useful at existing in hostile environments. They are however rare so you won't get access to them until the civ has a means of making new ones, outside of the occasional Rad Storm where you need an anti-rad suit to move around -- these events keep your location locked and have you do other useful stuff like plant or mess with Automatons. If you die, another person has to come out and retrieve your corpse -- and the event won't end until all dead suits are back in the bunker. Some vague radio contact will alert you to where they are though.

If a corpse is in some impossible location and/or you're dying a lot, it makes sense to being powerful artifacts that do various things to clear the way, however these use thr same power sources as Automatons and so make those break. If you run out of those you can pitch servers at them which cuts down on your technology level instead. It's possible to go all the way back to level 0 like this.

Basic Tech Tree

You need to be able to get rock flakes that can make various tools by hammering rocks percussively. Yes, it's this kind of survival game.

Woodcutting, firemaking, leading to improved fire-hardened tools.

With fire and clay, pottery.

Pottery allows you to move water, boil it, make soups, etc. Improves things quite a bit. Also better fire pits.

With pottery you can render animal fat into oil, which is a component or Torches. With clay you can also make charcoal.

Torches allow you to explore Caves, which is where you'd find metals, that then have to be processed with pottery/charcoal into a useful form.

Metal improves the heck out of everything, but the selection on wild pig island is poor, you need a boat to get to better ones, which also have crystals and such.

Boats require woodworking and clothmaking skills. Navigation requires refined copper metals and lodestones to make rudimentary power sources that would power rudimentary scanners. Going out without this is a generally bad idea.

Other islands will give you better metals and crystals which allow the old technology to come back out -- you could then use environ suits to explore other areas like underwater or inside lava, the extreme cold at deep levels of caves, etc. These unlock the last tier of resources needed for the Civilization to emerge and the game to be won.

Game Scope

It looks like the overall game scope is pretty low, which is a good thing. Definitely still a medium sized project but not too many mechanics/etc to worry about, and a clear game goal.

Tech unlock requirements

To permanently unlock a piece of technology, you need two things:

You need to be able to do the technology successfully some set number of times. The skills here are puzzles based on the realistic technology and require sourcing materials from your environment finitely.

You also need larger Sources of the raw materials under the control of Automatons which some session has to actually put in place on things like rock piles, dense forests, etc. These also need to be maintained for various reasons.

Between sessions, the underground civ will actually refine the technology a lot, so you come out with a master level skill on it / can do it automatically, and your tools won't break, etc. Whereas the ones you make yourself are gonna suuuuuuck.

So a starting game session might look something like:

You learn how to percussively break rocks to make Flakes by using rocks you find randomly in your environment.

You find a good Source of Hammerstones and a good Source of Anvilstones. You plant Automaton Seeds there.

If you try to return with just the skill, everything's going to be forgotten and the world itself will reset so you can try again. If you die in the process, same deal.

On the next session:

You come out with unbreakable/unlimited hammerstones and anvilstones, so you can make flakes at will.

You use flakes to cut wood into Handles, firesticks, etc.

You plant Automaton seeds in dense forests so there's always wood available later.

You might need to repair old Automatons. This is a constant maintenance thing.

Then on the next session:

You have handles and firesticks available and/or the unlimited means to make them.

Your flaking technology reaches level 3, which means you can make flakes automatically

Thus...

You start at level 1 of a technology, where you have to Source materials manually and also solve the puzzle to do it successfully.

With sourcing, a particular tool reaches level 2, which means the raw resources are unlimited and unbreakable. You still have to solve the puzzle, but you get unlimited attempts.

After another successful session, it reaches level 3, where making it is automatic (you don't have to solve puzzles). Or you might just have an unlimited amount available.

So the gameplay loop consists of:

Exploring whatever areas you can with the technology you've already unlocked.

Sourcing limited supplies of new materials.

Doing the crafting puzzle with those new materials and old materials successfully.

Finding unlimited sources of new materials to plant Automaton seeds so the process levels up.

Returning to the Bunker with what you've discovered.

Surviving along the way. It's a lot easier to survive once you have some technology unlocked -- the issue is things change over sessions in the beginning, so berry bushes might wilt, freshwater sources run dry, etc. So until you have reliable technological means of getting food and water you'll spend time sourcing those things and just overall living off the land as you explore.

Time system

In the lore, the immortality tech has gone absolutely haywire so everyone has very short lifespans and very high metabolisms. So you need a heck of a lot more food and water, which makes the game more challenging. This can eventually be fixed with biotech sourced from flora/fauna, but that's a ways out.

The time system increments as you move around, mine or whatever. You're not going to die of old age, but food will definitely be a concern and your biogastrics aren't set up to handle non-fresh food (which explains that piece of lore), so without fresh-preserving tech you can't really stockpile berries or w/e.

Water is a different issue -- you don't have a way of carrying it until you source animals and/or coconuts. You'll run into carry capacity issues with those even at level 3 -- your Carry tech doesn't allow you to store fresh food and water, because it outrageously ages things, being a bubble in spacetime and all. Earth or wood materials/etc are perfectly fine though.

So like with level 3 coconut flasks you can carry an infinite number of coconuts so you don't have to source those, but you can't use them to store an infinite amount of fresh water in your Carry.

Crafting Puzzles

A note on crafting puzzles:

I'm not sure what the actual mechanics are yet, but the actual puzzle is seeded by the locations of the sourced materials, so players can definitely find procgen-fixed puzzles that are harder or easier.