Island Survival Game - Devlog

[Nathano]

Hello, everyone!
As development on Eggs and Bacon ticks away, I've started working on a new idea I had. The premise is that you're a castaway on a desert island, and you need to survive.

1. You need to eat to keep hunger up
2. You need to drink to keep thirst up
3. These both affect your health
4. You can make items to make surviving easier (or hider? more fun?)

Hunger/Thirst
Your hunger is a scale from 1 to 10, and you eat to bring it up. It slowly lowers as you walk around and interact with things. If it drops below 4, then your health will begin to go down.
Thirst works the same way, except it begins affecting health once it drops below 6. Right now, the only thing you can eat or drink are coconuts, which come from a tree on the island. The coconut increases both health and thirst by 1.

Making Items
This is one thing which I feel like will make the game really fun. Right now, you can't craft anything, but there is driftwood, which will be a vital part of crafting.

Saving and More
While making this game, I have discovered how to do so many things in pulp that I never knew how or I didn't even know I could do.
One of these is saving. I decided saving was an integral part of the game, seeing as I wanted it to be kind of a real-time game, and, well, it's a survival game. This is one thing I've tried to figure out for a while, but while reading through the PulpScript docs AGAIN (If you're struggling on figuring anything out in pulp, I highly recommend reading through those, because they're very helpful and detail how to do most things) I figured it out. What I had been missing this whole time was I always tried to just use the store function, but without actually saving the file to persistent storage first. So, that's one thing that is really cool to figure out.
I also figured out how to do the thing were the player is always kept in the middle of the screen, using config.follow = 1. I plan on eventually adding more islands, fishing, etc. (Other castaways?) But first, FIRE. (also there's a day/night cycle which is really cool)

Thank you for reading!

[Lukincraft (Lunerk)]

Hey Nathano, this is an idea I've been mulling over lately, and I'm glad to see how someone else is approaching it.
I like the premise. You might need a shelter during the hottest or coldest hours, especially if you're planning to include a day/night cycle (will there be graphical differences?).
I notice the HUD shows quite a few values, and the time at the top seems to reflect real-time (is it using datetime?).
What does that 11/20 above the thirst, hunger, and health values represent?

The island seems pretty small, so a boat will definitely be needed to move around. Have you already thought about how to handle movement? For crafting, were you thinking of something like Minecraft or Terraria?

Let me know, if you've already decided!

[Nathano]

Thank you so much for the response!
For the shelter, that is something I have not thought about, but it is a great idea, since I am adding a day/night cycle!
For the HUD, it does use datetime, and the 11/20 is the current date (month/day).
I am also definitely planning on adding a boat and other islands, as I think this would be really cool to have for some extra content. And with crafting, I'm not entirely sure yet! So, with all of that, I am definitely open to any suggestions!

[Lukincraft (Lunerk)]

Glad to be of help!
If you’ve also included the day and month, do you intend to incorporate a cycle of seasons, like in Don’t Starve?
For crafting, I think it depends on how the inventory will be managed; will there be a UI? You could include recipes to be found on various islands, or allow for free combining of materials in your possession. If you want, you could even add a minigame for crafting, where you use a crank to achieve different results (though it might be a bit complicated and could risk being boring).

In any case, if you haven’t already seen it, I recommend taking a look at Minecraft on Pulp by SquidGod; it offers a lot of interesting ideas!

[Nathano]

Thank you for all the suggestions!
So, I do want to do a cycle of seasons, which I think wouldn't be too hard (switch the room with each different season). And I think the crafting would probably have some kind of UI where you can combine resources you have, and you would have to kind of try to combine different things and whatnot. Maybe there is also a "Survival Guide" that can be found which outlines all the different crafting recipes. Also, I do love PulpCraft, and at first I was thinking of maybe doing that kind of building thing, however that would be fairly complicated to save where each block is and what it is in pulp, sadly. I may allow the player to choose where they want to place certain objects such as a fire, but I'm not sure yet.

[Nathano]

Hello again, everyone!
I have made some good progress (I think), and I have made the goal to have a somewhat good game loop by the end of the year. I'm not sure if that's realistic or not, yet, but I'm going to try! Anyways, I worked mainly on a couple of things: Fire, Crafting, Enemies, and Cheats.

Fire

So, for fire, I basically decided to make a little item on the ground that you place two driftwood and some bark on, then use glasses to light it on fire. The driftwood randomly spawns when you open the game, the bark can be shaved off the tree with a pocketknife that was in your pocket, and the glasses are part of my little story thing, you find them on the island when you first enter the game. The fire must be maintained by placing more driftwood on it, or else it will die. It's only purpose right now is cooking crab meat (see Enemies), but later it will play a big part in nightime predators, and I am planning on adding a temperature component.

Crafting

This one is definitely in the works still. I would like to maybe add where you can crank to change what item is selected, etc. But, for now, it is essentially just a separate room, and there are two items that have different frames, and when you select what item you want to use, a variable is created for each item, and when you press 'A', it checks what each variable is and crafts the item. Like this:

on confirm do
if event.room=="craftingRoom" then
		if itemPlacedA==1 then
			if itemPlacedB==1 then
				if driftwood>=2 then
					ask "Craft Board?" then
						option "Yes" then
							driftwood -= 2
							board++
							store "board"
						end
						option "No" then
							say "Alright."
						end
					end
				else
					say "To make a board, you must have at least two driftwoods."
				end
			end
end
end

Right now, you kind of just have to know what the recipe is because it doesn't tell you. Maybe I'll add some hints or something.

Enemies

The only enemy right now is a crab. And it's REALLY annoying. I used THIS thread by @Kleist, which was EXTREMELY helpful, definitely couldn't have figured that out by myself. Well, I could, but it would take a long time. But back to them being extremely annoying, the reason is because you kind of have to just randomly run around whacking everything until it dies. I think this must have something to do with the "config.follow" thing because the original file works perfect, but nothing I've tried will fix it. So, I'm not sure. But, if you do kill it, it gives you crab meat! Totally worth dying over!

Cheats
And, last but certainly not least, you can now cheat! This is just a menu that can be accessed by pressing down, up, right, left, A, B. It's got all your basic stuff: get any item in the game, reset health, reset hunger, etc. This is mostly for me while I'm developing it, but I'll leave it in there.

So, I've made a good bit of progress, but there's a lot more to be done. My current list is: other islands, raft, more craftable items, fix crabs, add seasons, and add different save slots. Different save slots would be really cool, but the only way I can think of to do that would be to have separate variables for everything, which would be very annoying to do, so if anyone could think of any different ways to do that, that would be great! Alright, thank you for reading, and, as always, I would greatly appreciate any suggestions!