Lumber Tycoon (Unity)
Nearly 2 years have passed since the last blog post I wrote, and a lot has changed. I am going on to be a senior in college this upcoming fall semester, and realized that I haven't been practicing my coding skills like I should be. I previously used a game engine called Stencyl, which is a wonderful little program, that allows you to create small games. While there is nothing wrong with that as many successful developers use Stencyl such as the creators of Dunkers or Magic Mansion and have earned a nice shiny penny from them. However larger games are much more "fragile" in order to have it run smoothly, an ample amount of time must be put into the optimization of the game and very few developers have done this well, the main exception being Ghost Song which looks like an amazing game. Therefore I'm not saying it's impossible to create a large polished game on Stencyl, I just believe there are better options which became very clear when I started making the updated version of Lumber Tycoon in Unity. Which brings me back to my first point, Unity allows me to learn and become more proficient in coding which will help me in the future unlike Stencyl. Unity is used by all kinds of developers including AAA companies this not only showcases it's power, but also could open up job opportunities in the future.
As for Lumber Tycoon, its very much based on the same principles of my first game: chop trees, make them into planks, sell the planks, buy workers, build a house etc, although this version will be much more visual. There will be animations for chopping the tree, the tree falling, workers can be hired and move from tree to tree rather then just incrementing your wood every second without any visuals. Building your house is no longer just a preset house; foundations, walls and ceilings can be bought and allow the user to create their own personalized home.
Currently the game consists of:
-A large terrain, with a script to randomly spawn trees.
-A player in first person with the ability to chop down trees.
-Workers coupled with a very simple AI to run and chop down trees.
-Three placeable objects, the foundation and walls which snap together and a sawmill.
-The player must load logs into the sawmill and can grab planks from the other side.
-Woodcutting level and experience system (different trees will yield different amounts of logs but can only be cut when they reach the required level.
-GPS (Minimap)
Upcoming/Ideas:
-Need to include vendors (Axes, House Building, Workers)
-Rare materials, these rare materials can be used to create special items such as a GPS or Portal
-The portal will take the player to an underground dungeon that is filled with crystal trees
-Need to improve the AI of the worker
-Inventory System
-Plenty of different objects to allow the user to fully personalize their home.
I thought about making the workers having the option to upgrade their speed and woodcutting skill, however I think a better option (thinking outside the box) would be to require each worker to live in a house. In order to increase their productivity you would furnish their home, and based on how nice their furnishing is would determine how fast and efficiently they could collect logs.
I am a little nervous about releasing on Steam though. All my other games have been free flash games, so if my game lacked content it wasn't a big deal considering players didn't pay for the game. However now this concept of people spending money on my game, I don't want them to feel like the price is higher than the content I provide.
If you made it this far and are interested in the game, comment something specific that would want to see in the game or just your thoughts in general. As always thanks for reading!
