Adding a Crafting System to my Survival Game | Devlog #2

Crafting is a key feature for any survival game so it is important that I get it done early in development. It also gives me a chance to improve upon my inventory system.
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[@joltedjon]

It's nice seeing a devlog of someone who isn't totally experienced with this because It feels a lot more relatable

[@ulicesisaia]

Yeah, sometimes I see a gamedev that makes half GTA in 1 week and I feel like a monkey smashing a keyboard hoping for the code to work properly

[@laxmax85]

ayy oneshot profile picture!

[@joltedjon]

@@laxmax85 Yeah oneshot is such a good game!

[@laxmax85]

@@joltedjon yea it was so awsome it inspired me to become a game dev

[@3sc4p1sm]

They all like that

[@Peldonn]

words cannot explain how excited i am for this game

[@mxq_wh1teangel288]

Words can not describe how disturbing your profile picture is

[@cactus3051]

intresting

[@alansmithee419]

@@mxq_wh1teangel288 I was about to comment something similar. XD

[@Peldonn]

@@mxq_wh1teangel288 thank you

[@braadsko4445]

@@mxq_wh1teangel288 what about mine?

[@EcthelonEvendil]

When it comes to picking up items, I would recommend that you can press e to pick up an individual item but have another button you can hold to just hoover up whatever you walk over. Best of both worlds.

[@overphildev]

That's a good idea

[@blunderbuss3943]

Or just make it so if E is held for like longer than 1 sec, it just starts picking up everything.

[@kigamezero8636]

Or E to pick up new items, but pick up duplicates automatically (unless weight will come into play eventually)

[@NozomiClips]

Have E pick up anything you're standing on, as long as your cursor doesn't hover over another interactable. This way you still only have one button to do item pickup, but it behaves different depending on the context in which it is used. Also obviously keep picking up when E is held down (with a bit of delay if the first item was picked up with the cursor).

[@slBrelaz]

Or automatically pick up resources from stuff you chop down, and require e to pick up stuff that you drop or other people drop or chop down.

[@ahaks7269]

"Make work now, make pretty later." -OverPhil 6 words of wisdom right there.

[@papasmurf5042]

I’m looking forward to where this series goes! I can tell a lot of work goes into these, and I’m so thankful that you keep us up to date with this journey!

[@blacetec2376]

I would recommend to give the small items on the ground a larger "hitbox" for picking them up. I already saw you struggling to pickup that pickaxe, imagine having that while actively playing.

[@typeguard]

I can seriously understand why inventory management can be such a bitch to make work correctly. Even though I've never made such a system, I could think of so many edge cases... I'm sure you'll hit many more bumps with it later on and end up re-writing it more than once. Good luck! Looking forward to the next dev log.

[@overphildev]

Yeah I definitely expect to have to rewrite it at some point

[@moose6459]

@@overphildev Same boat. I feel pretty comfortable my system handles all the edge cases... though it comes at a cost of being very unoptimized. Nothing wrong with couple hundred switch statements and couple thousand if else

[@jpalz]

this devlog is incredible because its following the exact development process i followed when i was learning game development. I'm pretty excited to see where i could have gone if i kept going after i got bored!

[@anniesheldon3692]

in borderlands 2, you could pick up all the loot at once in a chest by holding down the collection button. I think it could be a fun way to collect a pile of resources in a survival game, considering that its pretty easy to have a bunch of resources lying on the ground that you do want all of. the farming thing im most interested in is seeing a plant have different stages and 'grow', I hope you pick something that has fruit on it like strawberries. Planting trees and saplings might be easier to program tho. great devlog series!

[@benjaminswee-shaders]

nice break down, great to see the growth and how your game dev is improving

[@tserof7564]

Just a small thing, keep the stack size cap but maybe get rid of the indicator that say _ /50 and just have it say the amount in the stack and not the maximum as well to me it makes it feel like a clip of ammo instead of materials, if you want to keep a way to show the stack is full may put a little “max” in the bottom corner of the icon or may embolden the font of the number when a stack is full. Keep up the good work !

[@ly0nslife]

Well done mate, I'm mostly impressed by your devotion to do this and how you make the time to do this. Coding, recording, editing, a lot of people would have given up a long time ago

[@Failfer]

I know this was a while back but if your still figuring out how the player should pick up stuff I reccomend 1 of 2 things. Either press "E" to pick up the item your looking at and "F" to pick up all objects around you for an instant. Or you can hold tap E to pick up and object or hold it down to pick up anything you look at While holding the button Best of luck :)

[@overphildev]

Yeah haven't thought about it in a bit. I think once I release a demo people could help me figure out what would be best

[@slashersc]

imo the "gather objects when you're near them" is the right choice but make sure to make the distance required for gathering a little more so it wouldn't be frustrating

[@Dorian.473x]

Really good to see you're using our feedbacks :D Continue like that bro !

[@DailyClips92]

i know nothing about coding but this guy make it still so enteratining to watch (also has a nice voice)

[@nolimit3281]

Developed my own inventory system recently. Man the pain and complexity behind something that seems so simple was completely unexpected :)

[@overphildev]

I know right. Who would've thought it would be so complex

[@yurifranca2995]

Im in love with your work, keep doing it man, you're now one of my inspirations!

[@StewartW12]

I like ARK's approach to picking up items. Press 'E' to pick up an item. Press and hold 'E' to pick up anything you mouse-over. Press 'F' to pick up everything nearby, or everything nearby that is the same type.

[@eikek1321]

yo i was literally juts watching 0 and 1 and this came out today awesome and keep it up

[@Neepo7000]

i like that inventory better like waaaay better

[@alexandery9436]

If you are looking for more juice to add to tree chopping, I recommend adding sounds. Sound design is often under appreciated

[@Simon_Laserna]

Suggestion for interaction: pickup interactions trigger on all nearby objects of the same type, and the interaction text states how many will be picked up. I.e. 8 logs of wood dropped close together will each have a pop-up saying "Wood x8". If a player picks it up all pieces of wood are picked up.

[@Simon_Laserna]

Additionally, show only the pop-up on items you are looking at.

[@jeanluca2512]

i think this is the best devlog i have ever seen. hype

[@DabbeliuJR]

Just seen your forst devlog and i really want to see were this is going, so i subbed

[@mictony999]

for picking up items, just make a large hitbox so that when the player walks into it, the item's name would pop up above it along with a prompt to press E.

[@nokyap4638]

i watch alot of youtube and this is somehow the only channel i clicked the bell to get updated when you post a new video

[@CameronPenner]

This looks pretty cool! If you doubled the speed of all the swing animations, and just halved how much damage they do, it would feel so much better without affecting the actual balance. Right now the animations look pretty sluggish.

[@karthikraja8858]

Wiseman once said "Cutting down trees gives you logs, not planks" - Gandhi

[@middlemac8248]

I cant wait to play the full game! keep up the good work

[@stickworldanimated9545]

Will it be on steam?

[@overphildev]

That's the plan

[@crab9852]

Really like seeing you devlog your dream game even though you have little experience and probably not as much time to work on it as you'd like. It's a great inspiration to us all as many people like myself are in a very similar boat that likes to sink. Keep it up man I hope it goes well for you :)

[@stickworldanimated9545]

Same

[@loboddomy9692]

Recommendation for that RemoveCraft() function you showed. Primarily to make it much cleaner, but also for optimization: Rather than using a double nested loop (you seem to like those :P) try using Dictionaries, with the item type enum as a key, and the current owned count of them as the value. Dictionary ItemMap; Then, if you gain a resource, like wood, just: ItemMap[ItemType.Wood] += amountGained; Same goes for subtraction. That way, when you want to remove an item in the function, pass in the item list and amounts for each, which can be done in the same way you currently are. Then: foreach (var i in items) { ItemMap[i.itemType] -= i.amount; } And that's it!

[@overphildev]

Yeah I do like my nested loops. Your way seems much cleaner though so I might have to try it

[@stickworldanimated9545]

You should add common/rare earth metals that would be really cool! Or you could add some sort of lore to the game cause lore is what Pulls most nerds in XD Great video btw I really enjoyed it I'm can't wait for part 3

[@NXVIINXVII]

this is great, looking forward to next episode!

[@kthelemon]

You should add some more noise to make terrain a bit more unique if you can, for example, one part of the noise could be 2x height while another could be 0.5x, so the multiplier noise would multiply values of the generator noise. Weird idea, but it might help give more character. Also maybe you could use some mooore noise to make certain areas have different foliage colors, from yellow-ish green to blue-ish green, could also help to make some areas feel more distinct. Other than that, everything is really well-made and I can't wait for the next episode!

[@MrMonkey4fail]

I'm loving the series, keep it up!

[@aliiiics]

I might be a little late to the party, but I think there are some quick wins you could make to you inventory’s internal model. Your current storage is using an array as the underlying data structure. This works well when considering only loading the array and inserting one item into one specific index. However, there are a lot of disadvantages to this: - figuring out stack sizes - checking crafting requirements - inventory sorting mechanisms I believe you noticed this as well because of your comment on how many for loops you are using. Generally, if you find yourself doing something like this it might mean the data structure you’re using it not best suited to the task. Consider using a HashMap instead. As an example this is how the data could be configured in Scala (I don’t know C# very well). val inventory = Map[ItemType, InventoryStack] sealed trait ItemType { def maxStack: Int } object ItemType { case object Axe extends ItemType { override val maxStack = 64 } } case class InventoryStack( itemType: ItemType, amount: Int, position: Int, ) I apologise if there are any weird mistakes or formatting issues, I typed this on an iPad.

[@yolloplays5041]

Finally. Was really looking forward to #2

[@philip9698]

So hyped looks so much better with the gui update now

[@Community-Compute]

Hell yeah brother!!! New devlog dropped.

[@DanPos]

Great job so far!

[@dennisdivett2398]

Hi I don't know if you discussed this but I think it would be better if the tree's had some sort of indicator when they take damage cause right it know it looks very static. You could maybe add a hole in the tree everytime you hit it as if your actually chopping it down! Or a health bar if that's the style you're going for! Love to see the progress and good luck ! :)

[@itzjhay3387]

loving the journey of this game

[@daniniamut1362]

I am excited every time there is a new devlog

[@lukeoreilly464]

Object pooling! You should look into that technique when spawning lots of objects (like from breaking a tree), it doesn't impact performance like spawning them all at once would :) Also... cluttered inventories are a thing most games struggle with, even big games like Minecraft, Terraria, Stardew Valley, & Animal Crossing. Some players even enjoy organising their inventories so I wouldn't worry about it too much and let it get cluttered. Maybe let them carry more of the common items like wood :)

[@lukeoreilly464]

I remember making my first 3rd person game where you could pick up items... I made it so you could pick up the items individually if you look at them, and if you're not looking at them it picks up the closest item to the player. I also used a cylinder as it gives more leeway if you're looking near the object... It's the best of both worlds but was also a pain to do haha

[@aandrus9645]

This is totally inspiriting me right now. I wanted to hop onto Unity and see what assets I can make, let alone begin making my own survival game with unique mechanics that set apart from other games. Nice work!

[@overphildev]

Good luck!

[@KochalochGames]

Looking awesome, keep up the good work. Inventories and their UI are a pain in the butt.

[@pullpull2779]

I think it would be nice if the hotbar is on the bottom of the screen like in Minecraft or ARK. Having the hotbat below your character is more comfortable to look at than it is at the top left. Awesome progress btw

[@overphildev]

Yeah I agree I need to play around with a few layouts and see what looks best

[@Lyxilytical]

good improvements overall! not much to say other than my one suggestion in the discord server, looking forward to the next devlog

[@lilboiUK]

I feel your pain with getting the Inventory system to work, I spent days on it. The hardest part was dragging icons around. Managed to get a good system using an Event System and a Graphic Raycaster for the Individual Grid Layout Elements.

[@Koellenburg]

... lol, i was exactly thinking about the "how about both" solution .... as one minute later gladly you really did that :D

[@aaroanttila2537]

3:42 an easier way to do this would be to just make the mouse cursor a 25th inventory slot, then just swap items between the mouse cursor and the clicked slot

[@overphildev]

Wow that would have been so much easier

[@ThatPersonJustRoaming]

an idea I had for the inventory is pressing e picks up the item you're looking at and holding e for a period of time picks up all of the same item in a certain radius

[@tylrpage]

Really enjoy your devlogs! I've been doing similar work and have some advice on unifying some of that complicated inventory logic. At work I am in charge of implementing our inventory, harvesting, crafting, and refining in a networked game. I was getting frustrated always having to check if the inventory had enough resources, then if the inventory had enough space, then crafting an item. Later on I can see this problem getting even worse, having to make a function not only for each operation but for each check if that operation would work. Once you need to start transferring items between containers like an inventory to a chest you will find yourself doing tons of if checks. So I implemented the command pattern. I broke up operations to an Item Container (general purpose object that holds multiple items, like an inventory) into the smallest parts possible: creating a stack (something that fills a slot), removing a stack, modifying a stack. This allows you to implement Undo functions for each of those small operations. So something like crafting is a series of these small operations that build up in a stack, as soon as one of them fails because there was no sufficient inputs or the output couldn't fit it in your inventory, you Undo() each of the commands on the stack and stop running anymore commands. Now you can chain together any number of big or small operations to an ItemContainer and if one thing fails the whole thing cancels. No more if checks to make sure everything will work then doing, just do it and if it fails you won't have to worry about it just doing half of the transaction.

[@RobertsMind]

I am a new UE5 game developer and a 27 year software engineer. I like your devlog video series and think I should do something like this on my channel for the game I am building. I am looking forward to watching the life and evolution of your game. great concept and looking forward to it being EA on Steam or somewhere.

[@overphildev]

Go for it! I find making these devlogs a lot of fun so if you were thinking about doing it too that would be great

[@consciencecuber]

Can't wait for you to get further into making this game. Good luck!

[@laxmax85]

I started to make my inventory yesterday and it's funny how similar they are.

[@ant-mf6kl]

The process is incredible! Loving this

[@lelandcbw]

Great stuff! Keep it up! For the pickup system why not something more like 7 Days To Die? If the player is chopping down a tree there's a near 100% chance they want the wood. In 7DTD if you're cutting down a tree the resources don't fall on the ground they automatically go into the players inventory (if there's slots available) meaning no spamming E or even having to overlap with the fallen resources. The work you've already done wouldn't all be for nothing since if the players inventory is full then the resources would still have to fall like they are now.

[@commanderofthewind]

Maybe make it so you can throw items (throw, not a measly drop). Could be good for later when combat is added, or just for fun games, like “Throw Rock at Tree” or “Throw Rock Straight Up And Land On Head”.

[@Navebackwards1]

The trees flying through the air caught me off guard lol.

[@overphildev]

Caught me off guard too lol

[@Anononomdjdjjdn]

I think getting rid of the red box whenever you hit something would be nice, it makes it look unpolished in my opinion, and now you have the shake effect to know you hit the object.

[@overphildev]

Yeah that's just a way for you guys to see that i made them bigger. I'll probably make them invisible soon

[@redstone997]

Nothing really wrong with leaving things looking unpolished this early in development.

[@ajaxwastaken]

On the item picking up method, instead of picking up every item you walk on, i prefer the select what item you pick method but maybe add a feature where for example if your press shift e, you pickup every item that is the same type of item within an area or something, idk.

[@griffinbrooks6748]

This was a great devlog! heres a new sub. and also thank you for traching me the difference from Lists and Arrays, I always assumed they were practically the same :/

[@Yeerok]

This might be too late but a good mix would be to have all the dropped items group themselves together into piles. So u only have to click one item to pick up all the items of that type. Instead of picking up one wood at a time they’re all in a group and u just pick up the pile of wood. But any other item piles aren’t shoved into ur inventory.

[@overphildev]

It's never too late. I think thats a good idea

[@smurfyplays4134]

Its very inspiring to see you do this and not be a professional who talks about the rocket science of inventories and the most optimal algorithm to do it. Motivates me to want to try something ambitious like this with less experience

[@FanaticFYT]

For picking up items, you can take the Borderlands approach and have Tapping E pickup 1 item at a time while Holding E will pickup all of that item in the pile

[@jmanpink1132]

For the tree shake I think it would be nice to have the tree more still at the very bottom/at the ground, because it is connected there, and shake more the higher up the tree. Or if it had a point of rotation at the origin where it spawns that it wiggles around on, that would produce a similar effect.

[@MrPicklejuice98]

For the item drops, you could have an animation of all of the items the resource dropped falling to the ground, but have a small bag replace them. Then it could have a 'grab all' button or you could drag and drop what you want into the inventory

[@MrJulioseto]

Great work!! I am excited for the next one as usual! 🤗

[@doctorjcw5857]

oo make it so people can craft bigger bags, and they start with 5 slots, then each bag upgrades by 5. Make there be creatures in the game that can kill off the food animals. So you need to breed animals, and protect animals, not just kill them. Make it so your character can get bigger if they eat food , and make the size of your character be able to make them take 1%less damage, and have 5 size upgrades, so you dont need to make armor in the game, unless you want to, and you can lose your size by dying. You could make it so you can upgrade your gear, by having duplicates. So lets say a sword is level 5, you combine it with 5 level 5 swords, and it upgrades. And the alternate way, is to craft your weapon and make enhance stones. But that could be a rare drop, or only spawn in specific places. I have tons of ideas for survival games. They are easy to design conceptually, because you don't need missions n junk, you just need a good environment, and rules in that environment, then ppl will spend hours playing it, if its good.

[@DillanWilding]

Personally, I've had frustration with auto-pickup items because if you drop an item to pick up a different item sometimes it'll re-add the item you dropped to your inventory but if it's limited to things you already have in your inventory then I think that won't be a problem. Alternatively you could track things you've dropped to only auto-pickup things you haven't dropped.

[@Gunami.]

adding a cartoon shader would really fit the style of the game

[@nacho37909]

This is just the type of game i would play.

[@dazcarrr]

question: how "in-depth" is the crafting going to be? take the trees - is the system of directly gaining planks from trees going to stay with some probably more polished animations, or is the game going to make you pick up logs and process them?

[@overphildev]

That's a great question. I'm sure I'll add more polish to it

[@Zerz000]

you can do as Ylands, if you hold in e then you pick up all items that are of the same type as the one you hold e over

[@boopidap4634]

i love this series, i want an idle animation. Thank you

[@overphildev]

Just for you

[@stickworldanimated9545]

Wholesome

[@friezerogamer1125]

Bro makes it look easy 💀 keep up the good work man

[@theaveragecodplayer5918]

for the hitting of trees you could do what rust and or fortnite do, have a hittable target that increases damage done to the object with a juicy sound effect. and at point of hit a small effect of wooden fibres could burst out which also make it look and feel juicier.

[@FroisonControl]

items should drop in stacks - a bunch of logs should require a single key to pick up. OR make the animation of destroying the object simply cosmetic and the logs (or other item) automatically go into the inventory instead of the ground (I favor this second solution with an easy way to drop unwanted items from inventory with hotkeys - like runescape)

[@arctiformgames]

Nice work! Inventory really is the worst to set up. Just redid mine recently and it was not fun. I use dictionaries for holding all my items. Not sure if there one is better than the other, though. But I finding helpful because I have scriptable objects for a lot of my items so it's easy to assign the item a special ID that I can just reference. Glad to see you getting through the grind!

[@mosquito2712]

making a game alone is a very hard job, and man, eventually the motivation will go up and down, good luck with everything and I wish the best for you!

[@billybnd]

loving this series so far!

[@jamesconlin5099]

maby you can add hide outs that were left by other survivors that died and you have to restore the hide outs that are safe houses that lets you rest and look out into the world and soak in the ambience around you it will be a place were you can buy different wepons from shop keepers and a place to sleep until it becomes morning or night

[@dukegame1435]

Good Job Keep Working on This Game

[@mrfatratera3778]

This looks great! :D

[@radw4ladder495]

I just had a great idea what if you built your base with supplies you get and then during the day your collect supplies and you’ll be safe but when it becomes night time hoards of enemy’s steer attacking you and so you have to hope your base is strong enough or something like that but like they would just raid and destroy stuff so you’d want to add defenses like wooden walls or like later in the game you could make small turrets or like traps and then you could also get better weapons idk it’s just an idea

[@yourcommander3412]

I like how to approach advice - take it in but do as you want; you'll never learn if you aint in the front seat steering the car.

[@marfews4701]

You should let the inventory cover the screen rather than up in corners and possible add navigation to the crafting menu so the crafting menu isn’t always open when then inventory is

[@SuperJrKing]

In Space Enggeers, a click picks up a sigle item, but houlding the button causes items nearby to automaticly gets pickup.

[@GreenDu333]

when you drop item that stacks ( like wood ) you could make it so it groups up when on the ground just like in your inventory

[@beastbomber2316]

Use this to check for when to spawn the player. Except replace boolVariable with a variable that is set true when the island is generated. yield return new WaitUntil(predicate: () => boolVariable);

[@papaspoonrattler2802]

Hey OverPhil! This vid just popped up in my recommended and loved the video, but I got two things: 1) Instead of picking up individual items (whether auto-picked up or pressing a button), I would try grouping them by like intervals of 5 or whatever. The reason for this is cause spawning a large # of objects takes more time and hits performance, and picking up each one can do the same. Idk if you have a split stack method, but would probably need it after writing this piece. 2) Your "Make Work Now, Make Pretty Later" is huge....if only my brain would do just that :| I would just like to say too, I feel your pain on creating an inventory, except I did mine with lists

[@overphildev]

Yeah I think having items combined on the ground would be good. I already have the logic set up since you can drop a stack so I just need to get them to combine on their own

[@moose6459]

I'd recommend seperating an Inventory class from a PlayerInventoryController class if you haven't done so already. I originally did not, and so adding interactions with new inventories(chest, loot, etc) was a nightmare. In switch so that its more modular and yesterday within an hot was able to add a hotbar and external inventory which can all interact with each others items and it only took me an hour to alter the PlayerInventoryController to interact with a new external inventory

[@cakeeatingpirate]

It would be cool if the item icons were transparent

[@oofmangienzmen558]

For the pickup situation, you could do how it is in ark, you can click a separate button that picks up all the items in a certain radius if that makes sense

[@justacasualcarrot4140]

I really love this so far, bit i think the animations look a little stiff, maybe that can be fixed by incorperating the legs of the player into the Animation? Idk how hard that would be but just a suggestion :D

[@razrastudios]

You could do what ark does for picking up with a key to pickup all of them near the player

[@overphildev]

I like this idea

[@goldendodo.]

You know what this game needs unity particle effects

[@overphildev]

Just waiting on dani tutorials to make a video on it, that shouldn't take too long right

[@fictionalgaming912]

I feel like a switch case statement would be better instead of constantly doing nested loops. I would experiment with that instead of doing many FOR then IF then another FOR then IF ELSE - switch from a performance stance is far more efficient than your current setup, but gotta see if you could do that with your current crafting system. 10/10 like video and cant wait for more