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Features and Modules
These tasks would complete the initial design round before coding anything in earnest or pursuing art or engine development.
- Complete entire Design Stage
- Assign tasks for stage 2
- Post basic design for feedback publicly
This round implements the most basic functionality in real-life code, exposing logical problems and testing assumptions.
- Build flat, simple world map of limited tile types and no features
- Write methods for a single character, a single type of animal, and a single type of plant with some loose items
- Test wandering and basic food acquisition and inventory control
- Implement user commands for movement and gathering
- Write methods for basic skill development for a simple world
- Implement console commands
- Reevaluate design for prejudice and attempt to reduce or generalize
Here on in, each round has three parts. The first is an artistic or ongoing design path, the second is based on interface and mainly client logic, while the third is based in back-end accommodations and large scale logics. They are aligned for reasons of comparative purposes, the workload in each round is not intended to be consistent or evenly shared.
Development can split here, allowing for some initial art work and more informed concept art generation or commissioning.
- Icons for all existing object classes
- 2D Character concepts
- Icons for all primary actions
- Concept modelling for entities and structural components
- Outline restrictions that may be imposed on art direction based on design so far
Before including other characters (which balloons considerations for process, knowledge, and skills development), we need to have a good handle on how crafting will work in the simplest cases.
- Design crafting UX for items and structures
- Code crafting methods for wearables, tools, and building materials
- Develop tests against knowledge and inventory for available crafting options
- Develop tests against ingredients and skill for crafting output
- Stub out modifiers for traits and skills based on held or worn items
Begin designing simple concepts for characters.
- Propose concepts for character models
- Mock up designs with various wearables, tools, weapons
- Sketch related styles for some animals
Some sort of conflict resolution is needed for many areas of the game including hunting, defending against wildlife, and PvP actions like battles, murder, and mugging.
- Encode critical character and item traits for combat
- Build shelter characteristics and stealth/detection methods
- Set thresholds for aggro+detection to initiate and end combat series
- Allow animals to fight over territory, even hunt each other
- Locate character skills for initiating combat series
If the world is persistent, the characters will need to have a persistent existence in the server that can be updated and synced with the client. A consistent data model will allow for simpler coordination.
- Categorize methods that can be left to clients, those that must be shared, and those that can only be trusted on the server
- Document possible requests and updates
- Determine minimum exchange required for emulation of multi-user worlds
- Align back-end data with front-end models
Extend popular concepts to other entities - animals, plants
- Design evolvable models for various animals (grazing, large and small herbivores, omnivores, flying?)
- Design evolvable models for plants (turf, grains, flowers, briars, berrys, nuts, fruits, lumber)
- Consider possible interactions and visible cues for level of shelter, concealment, movement
- Characters
- Establish any variation in generated player characters
- Describe character specific behaviors
- Initialize starting traits, levels, and skills
- Organize inventory control
- Draw methods for priorities, motivation, and growth
- Design personality and reputation
- World
- Describe the most simple playable world map type
- Catalog possible surfaces, soils, and features
- Identify methods for calculation of distance, movement, pathfinding
- Determine types of attachment to world (soil, plant, debris, animals)
- Active Entities
- Catalog types (plants, animals, characters)
- Outline shared methods and behaviors
- Generalize traits, levels, and skills
- Define patterns of growth for each class
- Establish inventory and internal diversity
- Consider iconography for sets and subsets
- Items
- Describe general types and discovery methods
- Determine interaction with inventory system
- Evaluate existing methods for crafting
- Establish basic traits for all crafted items (quality, condition)
- Clear divergences for special types of items
- Attempt to align crafting with skill/knowledge tree
- Structures
- Create classes for crafted items which impose on the map
- Determine requirements for interactions between structures (outbuildings)
- Decide minimum requirements for building any structure
- Construct rules for dilapidation, hardness during attack, possible disasters (fire), or other degradation
- Extend to vehicles subset
- Social Engagement (in and out of game)
- Evaluate possible in-game communication (message, chat, open speaking, menu-driven)
- Describe reputation system and connect to characters
- List possible social gaming connections, sharing, auto-posting
- Wander down the linguistic path of language acquisition
- Programming
- Discover existing AI system to manage goals and behaviors
- Evaluate possibility of staging style of map/tiles or other game feature as development progresses
- Determine initial development environment and game engine
- Consider a persistent world with constant AI and users who may have any number of avatars active in the world at once
- Mechanics
- Describe the process of exchanging items between characters
- Draw out fighting scenarios: combat, hunting, predating
- Design system for collecting character opinions/commitments for elections, consensus, collaboration
- Explain how to plan for a character to enqueue activities, schedule daily actions, or set short-term priorities for building a structure or completing a large task (build house until hungry, collect seeds until > 200, work in the shop every morning at 8)
- Consider machine-learned behaviors or at least adjustments to priorities based on the user's interventions
- Interactions
- Make first pass for HUD, possible character views
- Describe movement, combat, gathering, crafting, interaction controls
- Explain developing worldview, changes to art as skills are gained
- Evaluate game experiences as automated, fully coached, and one-sided
- Art
- Determine general feel of game menus and characterizations
- Begin massive list of needed icons for interactions and classifications
- Identify some solid concept art for further consideration
- Environment
- Review similar games built with the same engine
- Review survival-type games, persistent avatar simulation games, and crafting games
- Compare platforms, developer, and design process