Dream Game

Wilderness Survival (Placeholder name) is a first-person explorative sandbox crafting game that follows a player's journey to adjust to the sudden disaster of being stranded on an island and survive.


Inspired by stories like The Castaway by Robert Zemeckis, Suicide Island by Mori Kouji, and The Hatchet by Gary Paulsen.

Gameplay-wise it takes inspirations from minecraft for its crafting system, roguelike elements that creates tension and drama to simple decisions, and open world explorative games like Skyrim and Minecraft.

Ideally it would have four seasons that change the type of flora and fauna available and have an effect on your character as well.

Skill-based crafting that doesn't become a quick-time event or a thoughtless mini-game.
Crafting would be less abstract so that killing a rabbit would yield you with more or less what you would get if you actually gut a rabbit. Bones, meats, and hides at least.
Inventory system will be realistic too in the sense that you need to realistically lug around your equipment.

Combat is difficult to do well but the closest thing to what I like and think it is appropriate is monster hunter, but less.. over the top.

Story-wise it is told implicitly through the environment and the players craft their own story by using the game similar to FTL.

 Visually I'm thinking along the lines of Dear Esther. Something grounded in reality and never strays far from it. It can have fantastic looking scenery, just don't want it to delve into fantasy or use alien plant-life. I want things to stay within the realm of earth.


Any suggestions and comments would be appreciated. I am also thinking if this could work as an RPG of sorts then the combat would become easier to handle, but I'm still not too convinced that if it becomes too heavily numbers-based, it might make it go in a weird direction.

EDIT: I got another idea where after you reach a certain level of sustenance, you will find  a storage of glass bottles, pencils, and papers. You can send messages by writing your message and send it to others and you might get or not get messages from other players (online messaging kinda) but you would have to search the coasts for the bottles.

Or maybe glass can be a craftable item. 

EDIT 2: Another idea is that you can sustain injuries on your leg and such but you would need to be able to communicate that to the player without making it a flat-out percentage bar because absolute certainty about where something works or that takes away from the illusion and the confusion that would come with ones well being. You can understand that you are in pain that you might be pushing it but you don't really know the breaking point where something would go wrong. So when you fall from heights, an indicator of the well being of your leg could be from fine, okay, to the spectrum of dangerous. Healthy - Tired/Weathered - Injured - Soreness. Maybe find a better criteria of status. 

Regarding Level Design

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134949/learning_from_the_masters_level_.php

Hey y'all hope you had good holidays. A great article from gamasutra. I think we should start getting ideas together and prototyping a simple game because from what I hear, you learn the most while actually working on things.

I propose we set deadlines for ourselves because if we have infinite time, we might end up squandering it and that'd be counterproductive to the overall effort.

And as we decided, we'll do the indie game studies though we could and should dip into the easily accessible NES, SNES libraries for games because those are proven design-wise and we can learn a lot from them. It'd be helpful to have a sort of compiled notes on game design, level design, and all related functions.


Let me know what you think and hope you guys have a good new years eve and new years.

Game Engines

I have been researching different game engines to use to create games on.
I toyed around with a couple of them (Gamemaker Studios/Unity) and feel that Unity would be a better platform to create games on.
I have found a great indepth tutorial/course that teaches the basic mechanics for using Unity.
Walkerboy Studios
It just seems that there are more tutorials/guides for using Unity, that makes it more appealing to me.
Also, here is a general informative blogpost that has much information regarding game development.
Pixel Prospector Indie Resources
When I get the chance, I'll post about a game idea I have had for the past couple of months.

Alright, good luck everyone with work/school/finals.

Quick Update

Hey I just wanted to make a quick suggestion regarding the status of the blog.
I realize that most of us have a busy schedule due to finals/school/work from here on out in December.
So I am proposing the idea of postponing our weekly indie game playthrough.
I realize that holidays are coming up soon as well.
So I was thinking about restarting it next year.
Let me know when you guys would be free.
Also, I have been playing Hotline Miami, and it is fucking amazing.
When you guys get the chance, make sure to pick it up, especially with the Steam winter sale coming up soon.