A Day of Indie Game Development | Building Stardew-Style Object Placement!

[@DevDuck]

Thanks for the feedback about the quiet audio - I'll work on fixing that for the next video! Appreciate y'alls support as always!

[@happyjohn1656]

What's wrong with the audio?

[@shadow6161]

here one idea , create special island which have always heavy rainfall and other island will have snow and blizzard .. little bit ambience in game will be plus. adapt survival as per weather or you can combine all in one island.

[@CoffeeAI201]

I’d make the footprint image invisible, just make the tent go red when the footprints overlap. Easier to read this is coming along nicely, thank you for sharing the progress.

[@gregjensen1802]

Agree, and most definitely invisible on the existing items. Having them all show a green footprint when placing another item breaks the 4th wall.

[@johnandrews2942]

@@gregjensen1802 couldn't agree more about the 4th wall break

[@SputnikFive]

Agreed on invisible footprint, instead of green, when there’s no collision. Personally, I’d prefer making just the footprint square(s) that overlap turn red, instead of the whole tent / item. Gives the user more feedback on exactly where it is overlapping something. I’d also just have the footprint square(s) on the item being placed turn red, and not the other item with which it is colliding, like the tree, etc. So the footprint squares on all items except the one being placed would always be invisible, whether or not there is a collision.

[@romanverner]

Also agree. Plus it comes with the added benefit of not having to solve the 1 pixel detection buffer. Players won’t care if its not something that can be seen.

[@SundercoreDev]

I think the collision tiles would look better if they were just a solid green and red with half opacity, that could look clean.

[@timothymclean]

I can definitely see the appeal of marking the corners, but having the corner of _each individual square_ marked, even the ones in the middle of the collision polygon... It would be one thing if the squares were just a dev tool, but if they're part of how the game conveys where you're allowed to build, it's probably worth making a simple tileset instead of just one tile.

[@Simonemaendl]

I love that you're not limiting the object to the tile grid! As someone who has decorated two stardew valley farms (where the placement is tile based) this makes me super excited!

[@GermyJer]

Crazy that you posted this right when I've been stuck on pretty much the same mechanic in my game except i've been working on a grid based town builder so my job is a little more easy than your's. Appreciate you posting this for the inspriation!

[@avenged7ex]

I don't think the player needs to see the grid of the placeable. The mechanic isn't overly complicated, so the player can intuitively discover these boundaries simply by having the placeable item render red on collision.

[@DevDuck]

I'm kind of leaning this way too!

[@sutsuj6437]

You could write an editor tool script, that spawns in those Markers. For example, you could make one that fills a box with a certain size. That should speed up your workflow a little bit, since most things right now seem to just be a box.

[@DevDuck]

I tried this! Couldn’t get it working for some reason.

[@sutsuj6437]

@@DevDuck @tool extends Node2D const MARKER_SITZE = 16 var marker_scene = preload("res://marker.tscn") @export var width = 1 : set = _set_width @export var height = 1 : set = _set_height func _set_width(new_width: int): width = new_width _update_size() func _set_height(new_height: int): height = new_height _update_size() func _update_size(): # Remove old markers for child in get_children(): child.queue_free() # Add new markers for y in range(height): for x in range(width): var marker : Node2D = marker_scene.instantiate() marker.position = Vector2(x * MARKER_SITZE, y * MARKER_SITZE) add_child(marker)

[@lillyraisin]

@@sutsuj6437 wow some code im totally not gonna copy what do you mean i just copied all of it YOU DID

[@fonkinstubbleduck9163]

To get two objects next to each other (where it now says not possible at 10:11), you can make the collision shape ever so slightly smaller (like 0.001), so Godot does not register them as touching, but it is a small enough change to be unnoticeable for the player

[@venizz5112]

I've been watching this devlog series for quite a while now, and it's nice seeing how much progress has happened!

[@infinitenex8165]

Why not use CollisionPolygon2D? It will still be versatile and not constrain you to a rectangle, depending on how many points you add. And it will reduce child nodes added to each scene. Not to mention you'd spend less time copy-pasting nodes around.

[@Joe_Payne]

As you can see the base of the tent would be a rectangle in 3d and also the top of it wont need any collision since its up not out

[@3v1l73ddy]

The limitation to this idea I can see is that the way he's doing it isolates a specific part of the footprint to highlight as colliding with something which gives immediate feedback as to why you can't place the item. If your method was used it would highlight the whole footprint and be less immediately obvious what's colliding.

[@infinitenex8165]

@@3v1l73ddy the entity that the tent is colling with is also getting highlighted. Its clear whats in the way. Especially if other colliders on screen that are not in contact are invisible.

[@3v1l73ddy]

@@infinitenex8165 Oh yeah you right

[@iamsecrets]

Just mentioning it because no-one else will but the straw drop transition was smooth

[@ezzygd2521]

One other method for this placement functionality I have in mind that could also go independent of the engine's physics is having certain tiles hold a property of denying placement. Basically some sort of flag that says if this tile holds an object, I shouldn't be able to place something on top of it. This would save the need of creating many colliders for different objects(also using colliders would mean you have to put one on all water tiles, not sure that that's particularly efficient). I would go into more detail but I don't really have a good enough understanding of how Godot manages its tiles and objects to describe an implementation, but the general idea is that you're gonna want to be off the physics engine for this mechanic and look for more a flag based system. Great progress as per usual and good luck on the rest of your journey!

[@FUBAU]

150.000! 🎉 Gratulations, it's well deserved! Great videos, insight and game!

[@sausytime]

The quality of this video is such a huge jump to when I was viewing a year or two ago, it's so amazing to see and I look forward to more DevDuck videos in my recommendations (which I'm certain will happen with videos like this)

[@daveh5139]

Oh wow! the polish is really coming along too! I really enjoy your videos, please keep on keeping on!

[@Stetofire]

With all of the people suggesting making the entire footprint red instead of just the overlapping portion, I want to add my voice for those with colorblindness again. You *can't* rely on just color for an important game function. My suggestion is to also add a symbol on top of the preview (a big X?) to give the same information in multiple avenues. A configurable colorblind mode would be ideal, but shapes will always work for me.

[@SheepUndefined]

Absolutely this, and especially for color combos like red/green.

[@sink899]

With all of the placement collision boxes being aligned to the pixel grid, you can stop boxes directly next to each other from triggering an overlap by slightly shrinking their collision by a tiny amount, so there's a tiny invisible subpixel gap between them. That should get the behaviour you wanted at the 10 minute mark

[@Daealis]

Looking at the footprint, I'd say you could double the width and height of that square and still have a big enough footprint to place any items close enough. With that I think comes a good few bonuses: - Would save you 4x the time to create the footprints themselves - You could switch to a grid-based placement the size of the footprint pieces for placement - The footprint squares themselves could act more like collision meshes too, as long as a single square is big enough to fit a player through On the visual side of them: Making the footprint square itself invisible, but having an outline shader that is green/red? It would make the graphic far less obtrusive, while still showing the placement.

[@MrSacralidge]

Thanks for inspiring me to go work out this morning.

[@jessejburton]

Super cool video :) Love that approach for the footprint detection. I like how you can see exactly which part is overlapping (vs just not being place-able). Feels like it adds extra dimension to the world! One suggestion, if you don't want to have to duplicate all of the scenes, one trick I've used is to use a Tilemap with a single tile. Place the single tile anywhere that you want a PlaceableFootprint scene and then on _ready swap out each used cell for a PlaceableFootprint at that position. Keep up the awesome work!

[@aanbuuu]

I love ur content!

[@bernhardwerner361]

My first thought about creating footprints was to do it with a tilemap.

[@naturalfps]

Quack quack

[@comradechonky6328]

quack quack quack

[@cetvrlog]

Quack quack quack quack

[@rishabhshah8754]

Quack quack quack quack quack

[@_melts]

Quack quack quack quack quack quack

[@jasqier1060]

Hey man, I love your effort. You're really helping me creating my own game and you give me confidence. Keep doing this type of films please

[@_gamma.]

A neat placement option might be to show the grid with a fading gradient mask on the object, so you really only see the grid space and then the rest shows up when built. (Plus, you could always add an “in-progress” sprite when you get to the polishing stage ✨)

[@woody5012]

What would be cool is if when you place something, the players character goes over to "build" it, with an animation and small delay. For the tent example, as soon as you place a tent the character runs over to it and performs a pitching tent animation that maybe takes 2-3 seconds. Different objects could have a unique or generic animation, but varying levels of delay based on whatever was placed.

[@robproductionsgames]

Great work! That’s a really neat system which conveys a lot of information to the player about build collisions. One thing I might recommend if you’re worried about the “look” of the placeable items is to make the “collision tiles” white with low opacity instead of green, that way it doesn’t clash with the green of the item above it. Then when it hits something red is still perfect for when it changes. Good luck with the rest of the system :)

[@GamesBySaul]

Great work as always mate! Love the object placement system, being able to do that in any game and really make an area feel like your own is always such a fun thing to me, and I saw other comments about it, but it not being restrained toa grid is definitely super welcome! Maybe a "move at increment" tool could be good in the future, but for now this is great!

[@mhogar]

GoDot does have polygon shapes that could make creating the footprints easier and more flexible. You can still add textures to them but also a simple shader may be more effective.

[@jeffcummings3842]

Great video. For the collision issue: You could either have a separate invisible bounding box that's like one pixel smaller for each item, or you could write another (or find one) detection routine that only registers an overlap. Nice work, very inspiring too! Thanks for sharing. Look forward to more!

[@szkodnik22]

on 12:45, I think you can actually pass just a func name (not execution!) as a signal handler ( like `marker.connect("marker_eligibility_changed", _on_marker_eligibility_changed)` to the connect function instead of creating a `Callable(self, "_on_marker_eligibility_changed")`. Less code, easier to read :) Well. on a big screen of yours it's probably ok to have longer lines anyway :D Btw, I love your videos. I'm working on my 2nd game and as a professional software engineer I feel pretty much exhausted getting back to my personal projects after 8-10h of coding/meetings daily, but watching your videos motivates me a lot :) There's some relaxing vibe in it. Also I'm grateful for showing some code snippets as I also learn some godot tricks from them :)

[@satchelfrost6531]

As a suggestion for the snap fitting. I think that per-pixel is fine, however you might consider that when a player tries to intentionally place a grid next to an already existing collision box it just snaps to the edge. This gets rid of the problem of having to worry about all of the edge cases associated with whether or not they can place something at a particular location, while also making it easier for them to make a "snug" fit. Anyway, looking good!

[@DevDuck]

Not a bad idea - would be very helpful for "attaching" items together in the future to set up more elaborate structures. Thanks!

[@gameshenanigans]

Loving watching this game grow!

[@aaron_the_penguin]

Great work! Dauphin is really coming along well! One concern I do have though is accessibility - I myself am red/green colourblind (I find it hard to differentiate between certain shades of red and green), and was wondering if you could implement some other way of informing the player about invalid placement. I know it's incredibly hard to find alternatives, but something like an indicator icon or even adjusting the shades can often help - perhaps a bluer green and a stronger red? I've noticed a popular suggestion in the comments is to just remove the green entirely and only show red when there's a problem - that would also be a potential solution here. Or you could replace the green with a different colour entirely - blue is a popular choice, for example. Keep up the great work - can't wait to play Dauphin for myself when it comes out!

[@BradleyChick]

One point of feedback I would give is to make the corruption effect on things be a bit more pixelated to match the pixel scale of everything else. It could just be KZbin compression but it looks a bit too smooth to me. Counterpoint: the fact that it seems 'too smooth' lends credence to the fact it is corrupted haha. Love your vids man!

[@BjornUPG]

Amazing work. Im also starting to learn Godot and got to say its a really nice experience!

[@Skeffles]

Fantastic placement system! I have something similar in my own game and I think your approach is much nicer. I am definitely going to have to put in some thought on how to improve it.

[@linkrider2302]

Loved it ❤

[@theorigamiwizard8376]

Me:hears the notification ring *wakes up* the new Dev duck video dropped :D

[@Inktoo]

This is a really small detail I noticed, but I feel like moving placeable objects in-line with other objects may be easier and better-looking if the object's placement was on a corner relative to the cursor rather than above in the middle

[@glipplegames]

I think the footprint visuals are great for debugging but they're not needed for the player's experience. All they need to know when placing the tent is green good, red bad.

[@Icie145]

man i love this videos, keep up a good work, hope your taking care yourself well :3

[@onlysmiles4949]

I feel like the footprint system visuals almost look a little "debuggy" in a way, especially on things like the sand crab

[@CushionSapp]

Nothing really to say, but I enjoyed this video. Thanks for making and sharing it.

[@malorum]

I think the volume on this particular video is pretty low? Just me?

[@DevDuck]

I see this comment sometimes, I can’t tell if it’s widespread or not… I’ll look into it.

[@infinitenex8165]

I agree. Usually I watch YT videos on volume around 6-12/100. This one I needed to go as high as 32/100.

[@malorum]

@@DevDuck Check your audio levels in your editing software. Your voice should be around -3db to -6db and it'll be loud and clear. :) Love your devlogs, big fan!

[@generrosity]

Every person will have different sound opinions, cellphone vs desktop, headphones vs inbuilt tinny narrow band speakers, and some phones have automatic bass boost (that kills midtones). Mix in how KZbin treats adverts, and every creator I've seen gets these comments 😁 So long as your videos are consistent to your ear, it's good 👌 and we love your content as is

[@milangruner5538]

I can recommend to use is_valid_instance() instead of checking for null values for variables containing resources or nodes. In this simple example where you control the lifecycle of the variable value, it's probably not an issue. But if it's referring to something external like the player or an enemy and that gets queue_free()'ed, you will sometimes still have a value in this variable, but it's invalid since it's already been freed.

[@user-yn1oi6iv1f]

👍

[@onlineflowerstore]

for the nearby-placement-position-problem u can try to remove the corner pixels of the squares and i think it would be cool when the placable obljects were blinking in opacity while previewing

[@RialuCaos]

I think most games just use a snap-to-grid system with the tilemap for object placement, probably just for the greater ease of computing pathfinding and such. It should be interesting to see if there's any issues with a free-form placement system like this.

[@gaker19sc]

10:18 Maybe you could shrink down the hitboxes of the squares just a tiny little bit while still drawing the grid in full size. At least that's what my game-dev instinct tells me.

[@jacksondenis9052]

Add a trash can that you can toss trash into, or even a recycling bin. If you get this recycling stat high enough you could unlock a factory or plant you can build that makes recycled items out of trash. Just an idea.

[@_gamma.]

Do you have a gopro and a remote, or how do you record that b-roll? Your videos are so well edited and covering the entire day is really interesting

[@kevdwight6879]

What have you made so far/plan to make for dauphins sound design? Do you plan to make your own sound effects/music because I would be interested to see that in a devlog.

[@generrosity]

Your code is looking top notch, and would be easy to implement quality-of-life things like... if its not placeable, rechecking in a [vector from midpoints, radius, horizontal pixels based on tree bottom, etc] to see if you can and spring that instead, cheap snapping!

[@MojiiOkay]

I'd probably just make the collision tiles a green/red border around the edge rather than filled in at all. I honestly don't know that they need to be visible at all to the player. You could just make the object turn red when the tiles collide, but make the tiles invisible to the player in the game world. Still nice for debugging to be able to see them during development though!

[@supercyclone8342]

You could probably create an algorithm for automatically placing the collision tiles based on a polygon collider (or the object's existing collision)

[@StewchaKun]

I created recently furniture placement like stardew valley in godot4 very easy. For each placable item i have data what size is. For examle table is 2x1 tile which will be 32x16px. I take preview item and position it, offset it, to match the tile that mouse is over it. I create virutal rect to match the furniture size and mouse position and as you move mouse i get all tiles inside that rect and check if those tiles are available for placement. I dont even use collision check, just simple tile check, because i have tilemap data for each tile and info what is on that tile (im using it for savegame file). Its just a couple of lines of code and works like a charm. Final result is i got the exact the same stardew valley furniture placement/bulding system like that in godot.

[@ProperSnake]

Perfection.

[@matthewparker9276]

Have you considered making the placement collision scene require an area2d or shape2d child using @tool and configuration warnings, like the inbuilt collision object node does? It could make setting up collisions on future world objects significantly easier.

[@rl33t74]

An improvement to Collision Footprint would be using a Tilemap instead of single Nodes, especially if you're staying true to the size of the squares. It would also make it easy to paint big areas via the editor or code

[@rushmik]

Somehow, at opposite ends of the world, we drink the exact same protein-creatine combo

[@natanmaia3575]

Each footprint could be 15x15, centered on the tile so the borders are half-pixels. Not pretty, but won't collide in the situation the 16x footprints would.

[@RaveYoda]

Additionally, you could detect collision and then calculate the size/pos of the item you're touching and then see if you're placement item is in the bounds of the other. I'm assuming you've already considered that approach, though. =P

[@lillyraisin]

Idea: building mode all the enemies around you despawn and cannot leave this gives you free time to just bulid once you are done in building mode you can get out of it and then enemies reappear (you cannot do this during Boss fights i don’t know if you removed them by the way)

[@niksatan]

my friend George is marine biologist also

[@jacksondenis9052]

Id love rotation as well.

[@iamsecrets]

I noticed you had the art of game design card set. Do you use them much in development? I found the book to be a great reference in my projects.

[@melekRebai]

I think the placeable footprint item should be just an invisible square and when they collide the two placeable items should become red for example the tent and the palm tree

[@FutureChaosTV]

Nice video! Audio level mastered at -20db according to the KZbin tool and very, very silent almost unintelligible even at far over regular speaker volumes!

[@DevDuck]

How strange - thank you for that info!

[@3v1l73ddy]

Wouldn't you be able to write a short script to generate the footprint based on an object's collision box? Then if you specifically want the footprint to be bigger for whatever reason you can modify it but most of the work is already done. Also, Moose's tail looks like a wet mop and it's adorable XD.

[@idealistcat]

for i second i thought he gave his dog chocolate, i almost had a heart attack #dontkillthedog

[@JessesIndieView]

I recently implemented something similar in my Godot project where I can place different buildings in my 2D RPG game, positioned relative to the tilemap. I have not incorporated the detection of other collision bodies yet so this was super helpful! Awesome stuff! Check out my approach if you want to see an uglier way to do what you did, haha.

[@derDooFi]

I don’t know anything about gdscript or whatever, but AFAIU couldn’t you put an early return into _determine_eligibility()? No need to check all the markers if any single one will prevent placement. But really I have a feeling you’re going to replace the marker system with something like a custom collision polygon for each object. Also everything @CoffeeAI201 said

[@derDooFi]

oh yeah also, I may have missed this being mentioned, but did you need to do anything to your save system for this? It’s always a good feeling when an existing system already supports a major new feature like this for free 😎

[@kimmon22]

An idea of if they can place down a tent can they pick it back up and replace it elsewhere on the island etc.

[@lemonke8132]

i cant hear the video on max volume on my laptop

[@ryanbaker2762]

i basically make the same pb&j smoothie you make except i use strawberries

[@a98k]

thanks for the recipe XD

[@Rhys510]

I think get rid of the overlap square graphics and just make the object tint green or red? :)

[@cybermats2004]

i am learning programming too

[@RaveYoda]

Maybe you're already checking for type of ground during placement but if not then you might have a bug with say placing it on the water. Just stating/wondering if you checked against that.

[@brand0n42]

3:35 👍

[@AthesielIcosiel]

For putting objects right next to eachother... why not just shrink the size of the collision by 1px on all sides? No extra code needed or anything.

[@Bromon655]

Did it require a huge amount of discipline to become such a well rounded person or does it just come natural?

[@gabiedubin]

hey man , It would be cool if the game had some sort of durability system and once an item wears out you can recycle it in interesting ways, is this something you are planning to add the the game in the future?

[@neozoid7009]

These are so awesome are they real voice actors? Please make more😙😙😙

[@RobloxKnight180]

When are you gonna add another boss?

[@Smaxx]

Hm, those markers feel really overcomplicating things. You could just use a single Area2D with one or more collision shapes (polygons) under it. Then utilize Godot's polygon functions to get the overlapping polygons for drawing/tinting, which you can also increase in size to add a highlighted outline of sorts.

[@kukri52231]

You remind of Thomas Frank. I'm guessing you like his productivity content?

[@TS2007]

Add a turtle to the game

[@mrnormal7554]

I still don't get it, Can we use c# or c++ in godot, apart from gdscript?🤔 And using c# or c++ is as good as gdscript!!!

[@itay7884]

the collision system seems a bit confusing to a player

[@rmcoutinho]

Okay

[@paulosoreto695]

if it's stardew-style then you should use a grid instead of working with physics

[@mariocamspam72]

The audio mixing is questionable. You're so quiet

[@Cat_224]

Hey! I was just looking for dev… and I found you! Anyway, I’m wondering if you can please make a monkey tower defense. So you would start in a forest and you have a tree house and you have a monkey that throws grapes 🍇. You could upgrade and buy your monkeys. You can also upgrade your tree! And there would be a banana phone. There would be three letters under each number. You could call 911 which would call three cop monkeys, 1556 would spawn ALOT of monkeys. And all those monkeys would take out all the enemies on the screen. Please make it I’ve been waiting to make a game of my own for years!

[@finjel1]

The only difference is that stardew valley was good for its time

[@aleksitjvladica.]

I could not care less about your day in life, I care about the progress!

[@reecegarthwaite4905]

i thinks it’s part of the charm of his videos

[@aleksitjvladica.]

​@@reecegarthwaite4905 Cliche!

[@sabaqara636]

gay ass voice, man up a bit bro, otherwise good luck