Sorry for the English, this is a translation of my article with a google translator!

Original: https://dtf.ru/indie/195073-po-stopam-raft

I'll start with a preface. I am a programmer with quite a lot of experience, and I like to play games. Behind my back I have many projects, both personal for interest and orders for freelance. I've never blogged, but I decided to try what it's like to be a writer :)

Inception

Well, now to the very essence of the post, you all know the game Raft. I have never been particularly interested in it, but recently I decided to play it (the last time I played its alpha, and then only a couple of minutes). And so I launched the release version, and realized that this was not at all what it was at the beginning, a lot has changed in the game, but one thing has remained unchanged, it was the most simple, but brilliant game. I have always loved Survival games, and always wanted to create my own with an open world, I even tried a couple of times, but I realized that the development of what I want will take years, and if you take into account work and other aspects of life, the idea immediately flew into the trash can. Until the moment I understood the complexity of projects, I managed to do a bunch of everything:

• Craft
• Construction
•  Player 
• Life Systems 
• Land transport 
• AI animals

Well, and a lot of other things, I was even going to post a small demo on various sites, a couple of screenshots were saved:

t's a pity I never finished the demo :(

But the time has come to return to Raft'ing, as I wrote above, this game became an example for me that a survival game does not have to be something super complicated or radically innovative. After playing a little, I realized that if I had not set myself the goal of making my survival game the way I wanted to do it, but slowed down and released it in stages with less content and introducing it in updates, then now it would have been finished long ago. The fear of losing time and harsh criticism with a collapse in ratings on the same Steam killed the project. But now I decided: “why not make an easy raft-style game”.

Many will now think: "Again some clown is going to  a clone."

Partly yes :) But who said it was bad? I'm not going to stir up the topic with the raft and water. I decided to do something of my own (maybe there is already such a game somewhere, but I haven't seen it), since I like sci-fi bullshit, and everything is cosmic, why not make an action zone in space.

let's start

As soon as I had the opportunity, I immediately began to write down all the ideas on my board and in a notebook.

When I sat down at my breadwinner aka my pc, I immediately began to think about the most important aspect: "And what should I do this on?" It made no difference to me which engine to choose Unity or UE4, I understand both. The choice fell on Unity, after weighing everything:

• Unity is easier for my laptop, and I am a samurai, I have an eternal path, and I have to work wherever possible
• I like C # better
• Mountains of content in the Asset Store (visuals, well, plugins like DOTween)

Well, in general, I created a project giving it a super stup.. cool name Remains. I came to him based on the "plot" that was born in my ... well, there.

"Story"

Everything happens in the orbit of a planet (not the earth, just a planet, it doesn't matter), our character is mending something in open space, a ship is flying next to him, waiting for a gesture to finish work.

Further, the ship moves away from us, and a series of explosions occur on the planet, which contributes to the creation of a powerful wave that smashes the station that we were repairing, and everything around. Thus, the character remains alone, from here and the name Remains, for English men I will immediately ask you to notice that I am not quite normal and I put an "s" at the end so that there would be supposedly a lot. number, because suddenly I will make multiplayer, and why not.

Beginning of work

As soon as I created the project, I immediately started thinking about the visual problem, because if I make 3D models from scratch, then I will not live to see the end of this idea. Well, as a typical game riveter, I went to the AssetStore, and I didn't have to search for a long time, I immediately chose the Polygon studio asset. These guys make very useful models, although they have to be optimized in some places, they are the best.

After purchasing their asset, I started thinking about different mechanics. There were a sufficient number of them, but half had to be deleted at once, due to the fact that they did not fit into the idea.

I also found a model of the planet and a skybox, in Photoshop I put a couple of effects on the texture of the planet, well, it turned out like this:

First, I decided to implement mechanics from raft, so that there would be a filling.

I quickly realized the inventory, I decided to limit myself only to the inventory that is always visible to the player, without opening the button.

Then I added the player's life system.

• Health
• Hunger
• Oxygen

I decided not to add thirst to the game.

Then I started implementing the crafting system. Always loved to make this kind of system.

This greatly accelerated the development, because without such menus, I would have to go into the folder with the config files of the items, create each one separately. For this Unity is a huge plus.

This is how I got a craft menu. Damp, but still.

And also added POST processing

It has always been a disease to do post-processing, in a project that has nothing

Controls

I implemented a standard first-person character, everything is as usual, but this is a game about space and here the character must go out into the open environment to collect loot. And at this moment I had questions about what kind of controller should be in space.

First of all, I implemented the controller rotating completely around itself, that is, the player had no restrictions on the Y camera.

But soon I decided to abandon this type of controller, for several reasons:

• Unusual, which is not very convenient
• It's hard to combine this with simple gameplay
• It is necessary to make the transition from this mode to the normal mode inside the ship, and now I will write about this

The main reason for abandoning this mechanic is that when the player returns to his ship (where there is gravity), he needs to somehow make the transition from free mode to normal mode. And this is a lot of problems, if, for example, the player will fly into his ship upside down, then you need to turn his character into the required rotation for some time.

For example, a player flies into a ship with a rotation of (180,20,60), but for a controller with gravity, you need, (0, 20, 0), and in order to set these values, it takes some time, which will take away the player's ability to move ... And I am counting on simplicity and ease. Mainly because of this reason, I decided to make the system like in the game Breathedge

Such a controller completely solves the problem of transitions from outer space to a sealed spacecraft.

Resources

Since I am doing a raft-like project, there must be fleeting resources. I implemented them by creating 2 zones that spawn objects and let them fly.

At the time of creating this, the problem "Space is black, and objects are black" arose, and I immediately thought that I needed to highlight them somehow, I wrote down a small shader to create a glow effect through Emission and Bloom in post processing.

Now the objects are at least slightly, but visible

Building 

Well, the construction system is painfully commonplace, it is the same plus or minus everywhere. And I also decided not to come up with something super new.

Everything is as usual, there is an object, you take it, and with its help you build any structures.

In my case, the subject was Blueprint (only I have it orange xD)

One of the most convenient things that we have ever come up with is a selection menu (the menu should be round, but something went wrong)

The construction itself works as usual, I decided to take the system to build right away, rather than use the design as in The Forest, when you put a layout and pour resources into it.

This indicator in the center shows what resources are needed to build. There should be an icon in the center, you get the idea.

Well, this is how it all looks in practice:

Result

It turned out to be a pretty interesting project, at least for me.

This is my first pseudo blog, I hope it did not hurt anyone's feelings. And if anyone has something to say, I will be happy to answer in the comments.Thanks for attention!