The Item Conundrum

A total re-write of the design document is about 30% finished, there is 4 major topics (Items, Character simulation, Combat, NPCs), and the first of them is pretty much done, the absolutely bad-ass item system.

You might be wondering.. Wait, why re-write design document after development has been started? Long story short, it’s all because we decided to switch from 2.5D top-down perspective, and turn it into a full third-person game… I will be elaborating on this topic in the upcoming video, which I will for sure start after I’m done with the concept art for the map (which should be after making 8 more pictures of different locations, )...

So, let’s go back and take a moment to really appreciate how broad a concept of “items” can be. Well, at least in context of games, we immediately start to think about a good old inventory system, things to collect and loot, and then wear or be selling them in bulks to npcs. That system, one just like every game has, we already implemented… But for a Biological Simulator game it’s not even remotely enough…

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For almost a month I was facing a great challenge, a dilemma of taking the nature, physics, chemistry, biological processes and putting them into something rather simple, yet realistic enough for our task to mimic nature, and also design it the way that it wouldn’t explode our brains when we try to implement it into the game.

“Item” in Planes of Existence is a very broad concept indeed. A banana you harvested from a tree, is an item. A tree growing in a forest - is an item. The air in a forest - is an item. A water in the puddle you just walked by is an item. Even that rock over there, is also an item. Every item can be interacted with, picked up, thrown, used, if your characters knows how to use it, even eaten, if it fits into your throat.

Then the question arises… You see, in games, usually, every item that is usable, that action is scripted in some way. For example, a potion adds you +100 hp, food replenishes your hunger bar (for survival games), et cetera…  How do we even program every little way of interacting with such a huge amount of items? It has to be a completely different approach!

Let’s take a bar of chocolate for example and start to think about it! Surely you know you could eat it, for that you need to remove the packaging of it, and put it into your mouth, then chew/swallow… Great! Now we just do similar thing for our simulated character, we put items in their mouths and swallow them. However, if you ever had dogs, you know that giving them chocolate is an extremely bad idea, simply put - it’s unhealthy for them, toxic rather. Every species have their own digestion speciality, their own set of enzymes. Things that are OK for one species, can be dangerous for others. We needed a system to describe effects of digestion, and also separate it for different species and diets. So while it’s in the stomach, it will go through the process of digestion, and affecting your character’s health, be it in good or bad way.

But it doesn’t end on just consumption of food. After all, our game is not just about working as a poop making machine, rephrasing, “being an alive creature”.

If you were to take that delicious scientific test sample of the chocolate bar I mentioned before, and put it next to something hot, it would, of course melt, freeze it, and it will become a solid blob. Apply mechanical pressure, and get crushed chocolate flakes… submerge in radioactive sludge? Sure, but don’t ask me why it started glowing. Zap electricity through it? Umm… I actually never tried that.

This system is called Metamorphosis. It is about changing different states of item, or even converting it into something else entirely by just using forces of nature. In real life this happens all the time, the best example would be heat + water, aka ice-water-steam, solid-liquid-gas, elementary physics class stuff.

You might be wondering why do it in such a complicated way, and not how, say minecraft and other survival games have done it “put ore into a furnace and get an ingot way”? Well, in minecraft (at least vanilla) you don’t have a flamethrower and you don’t have telekinesis+pyrokinesis in your toolset either. We have a dynamic heat spreading system, items have a section dedicated to thermodynamics and combustion just for that reason. Something like a campfire modifies the ambient temperature, and every item around it reacts as it should react… And same process applies to radiation, fundamental(magical) energy, pressure, electricity, fusion, acceleration, damage...

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I haven’t even started how item system connects to weather, oceans, swimming (buoyancy), explosions, or what it does inside character’s bloodstream or even rectum if it gets there… But it would make a post of epic proportions, so I think, better to keep it as a story for another day… Plus, Hopfel is already working on implementing it into the game, and that is far more preferable than telling stories, because you guys will be able to see it all in action at some point :}

Huge thanks to everyone contributing to the discussions about item properties and mechanics in our Discord channel, it’s always a lot of fun to interact with people and talk about design like that. If you’re not in our Mischievous Oasis channel, please do get in, Patreon should automatically invite you as soon as you connect it with your Discord account... And of course, huge thanks to all of you, our dear Patrons, supporting the project on such high and awesome levels, allowing us to come up with various crazy and detailed ideas and get it all into the game... :}

PS: Don’t forget to leave a comment if you had the strength/time to read the whole post xD