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WIP Unnamed Uninhabited Island Survival Game

mbowen89

mbowen89

Sailor Apprentice
Hey everyone... I have been doing more and more game design recently, spending a lot of time learning Unity3D (just bought for $3000!!).

Anyways, I would really really like to know your thoughts and opinions on my idea for a game, I think it would be very fun, maybe just for a niche groups of gamers though. And of course, only if it was done right. So here is the idea.

At the core: a survival game, mostly based on an island. In the 1600s. Think Robinson Crusoe.

I literally almost want to story the main plot of Robinson Crusoe: start in England, setting out on a journey (maybe to the Brasils?), and you get on a ship. You will spend some time on this full fledged ship model out at sea, maybe helping to sail the thing. Maybe even helping fight off a pirate attack. Cool stuff like that, you know?

Until one day, a terrible storm comes up and the ship wrecks on some rocks off the coast of an island. You are hurled into the sea and wake up on the shore of the island. There are some crates of stuff littering the beach, with planks, etc. What do you do next? It's up to you! But always keep in mind that starvation and dehydration are always around the corner. To keep your energy up and stay healthy, enough calories must be consumed every day, and fresh water.

A trip to the wrecked ship for supplies seems to be a good idea... but is it a good idea in high tide with no food and water, or raft?

Fast forward ->

Get on ship, create makeshift raft, load as many supplies as possible (food, tools, gun, powder, rope, canvas, etc) and take back to shore. Enough time/strength to do another load today...? Maybe can spend the night on the ship, but it might break apart into ocean overnight... You have to decide how you would survive.

FF ->

With the hatchet and tools you have from the ship, you have created a small shelter. You don't know what or who is on this island, but you hear wild animals at night. And all that food you rescued will surely attract something...

FF ->

Use your gun and powder to shoot some fowl, and even found a goat. But you don't have unlimited supply of powder. Maybe a goat can be captured and tamed, produce milk and maybe even catch a pregnant one...

FF ->

With the grain from your supplies maybe it is possible to sew it and harvest. But when is the rainy season again? Was that a tiger I just saw?

FF ->

How am I ever going to get off this Island? This scope shows nothing but open sea, but I need to be prepared for any day there might be a ship! Is that a pirate ship? How am I going to defend myself? How long can I survive this place? Can I make it a place of relative luxury?


----------

So what do you guys think? Full island with (hopefully) great graphics, tons of trees/foliage and vegetation, open prairies with animals. Crafting/resource system that is as realistic as can be. Less inventory and more realistic moving things around as in real life.

Think it would sell? Good idea? Any ideas?

----------
Some Unity play tests I have made:

http://www.bowengames.com/wp/WP.html
http://www.bowengames.com/wp/WP2.html
 
I like that idea! If done well it will sell, but does the Unity engine do water well?
 
Yes, I would play it! Think about how to end it. In Robinson Crusoe there comes a ship suddenly.
Wouldn't it be more fun if the player finally succeded in building some kind of vessel. This building project could be
going on all the time, with improvements now and then.
Try the beginning of WoodesRogers quest - maybe you can steal something there...:onya
 
It is a potentially interesting concept for sure. Not sure if I'd enjoy having to watch my calories in a game, but survival on an island is definitely interesting.

So it is supposed to be a 3D game where you're walking around on the island and doing things?
With the whole thing being open-ended, or at least it being up to the player how to proceed on everything?
How would you even set that up? Sounds complex! :shock
 
I need to take some screenshots of the water I have in the SDK tweaked to look more like ocean waves, but here is a generic water video: http://video.unity3d.com/video/4045350/pro-feature-pro-water


As for eventual ending to game, yeah, either the play can try every day to spot a ship off the horizon with a spyglass and then start a big fire, etc... or just ignore that completely and try to build up a ship themselves, etc.

Wouldn't it be hilarious if this island just happened to be off coast of major settlement and you just had to canoe over to it in one day... but you never knew because you assumed it was just another wild island :p

As for worrying about calorie intake... well that IS the main thing to survival and what drives everything: getting food. Do I get it from bananas every day? Chickens from ship? Goats on island?

I want the player to have to think about the consequences of survival. For example: there are no chickens on the island, but there are chickens on the ship that you could rescue if you wanted. Are you going to kill and eat them right away? What if you just fence them in somewhere? Whoaa... they are laying eggs and making baby chicks! Now if I build up enough chickens I can gather eggs, eat chicken, and still have them reproducing! What if the player ate all the chickens right away, they just lost the chance (forever) to be able to do that!


I am probably overly optimistic on my ability to pull this off (at least in a shorter amount of time), but I'd like to think I would be able to. Honestly I think the open world design would be easier than making it closed. There aren't really any quests or this or that. I just have to make an open world where the player can interact with different things. I just have to script up all the game mechanics for different objects and interactions and animals, etc. And create a beautiful and realistic deserted island feeling.


Any more ideas or thoughts? :D
 
The only thing with an open world design is that you need to make sure there is enough potential coded in so you don't get bored.
Especially "survival on an island" has the potential to become very boring very quick. Because that's what it would be in real life.
Boring with dashes of frustration thrown in. A bit like my life right now. The main challenge I see in here is to make it altogether fun and interesting! :onya

mbowen89 said:
Wouldn't it be hilarious if this island just happened to be off coast of major settlement and you just had to canoe over to it in one day... but you never knew because you assumed it was just another wild island :p
Click to expand...
Indeed it very much would be! :rofl
 
You are exactly right.

Any ideas as to what I could do to make sure that doesn't happen? I think making it possible to do almost anything you could in real life will be a huge part of that.
 
mbowen89 said:
Any ideas as to what I could do to make sure that doesn't happen?
Click to expand...
One biggie I could think of is the ability to skip on the boring stuff, for example by skipping time.
That will make the game shorter, though, but you can't have years of gameplay anyway.

Also, it would be important to be able to do many different things, with so many additional randomized events
that can combine in various ways so that things won't feel like the same random events happening over and over.
 
That's another big thing I was trying to think of... how does TIME work?

I mean, even just as far as a single day goes. Do I have day/night cycles? What the heck could you even do at night? I think you should have to go to bed every day to "finish the day".

What about growing things? Does it take 10 games days or something?
 
There could be pirates or indians attack you at night or something?
 
Yeah, I was thinking it would be cool if randomly saw a ship off shore one day, and you get your spyglass out and see that it's flying a pirates flag. :D
 
Definitely have to be some attacks of some kind. And then your survival suddenly depends on...


...how familiar you are with the Home Alone films! :razz
 
There is GREAT potential in this concept.

To advoid just doing boring things, you can just have your character land on a series of islands..then maybe you can explore. This would give you chances to find new materials, new shelter, new animals, and maybe (like you mentioned earlier) pirates or whatever that you'd have to defeat or maybe just steal from.

Another thing to do would be to have a skill list, hunting (fishing, spear hunting, foraging, etc.), crafting (tools, weapons, containers, etc), working up maybe more stamina, health, resistance against uncooked foods or herbs, and combat (stealth, pick pocketing, exp on different weapons-such as more you use the bow, the faster you'll draw it back or the more powerful you can pull the string back, etc.)

Finding salvage on the shore would make sense, creating shelter up in the trees or underground in a cave (just having many choices for the player to choose from), crafting and collecting materials from animals (poison from snake fangs to use to kill pirates, teeth from animals to use as weapons, hide to create shoes to travel faster or not lose health if you have to run through unknown areas of the jungle or forest), and using real weather conditions (storms, floods, dry seasons, etc.).

For the hud or interface you could keep it very plan and simple, your pockets for inventory until you find a bag or create one, your health to be a simple meter in the corner but I think maybe just something like the screen being bloody until you heal would be good, and a messed up notebook or guide that you wake up next to (this could give the player a little head start on what to do or what to eat but also let the player put his/her notes down so if they discover a certain plant then they can reference it later, etc.)

There are countless ways to keep a player busy in a game such as this. These ideas are just off the top of my head! I love Far Cry, Skyrim, and Lost in Blue! Far Cry lets you explore anywhere and kill your enemies in countless ways, Skyrim lets you collect herbs and plants for alchemy and train in different skills to custom your character, and Lost in Blue let you salvage and maintain anything you find or create! This game could be the answer to any gamer out there that love those aspects in these and many other games! A game for the true "Survival" fanatic out there!!!!
 
Awesome ideas, awesome ideas guys!

Do you think islands should be randomly created everytime there is a new game... so you if you play again its a whole new island?
 
Randomly creating islands would be a lot like minecraft and then a player WOULD get more out of it if he/she would want to go at it alone really. But then it's NOT guaranteeing that every time will be a great game, if you've played minecraft you'd know that some worlds just suck while other are awesome. If you're really worried about that fact then you could have multiple levels. Difficulty levels wouldn't exist, just the number of starting items and equipment. But when I mentioned levels I meant different islands, one island lush with fruit and game, another with barely any, the most difficult would be one where there are only dangerous animals with barely any prey (except you), and these are just some ideas. I mean, there could be some islands where you HAVE to scavenge from pirates and their camps.

Here's some other ideas:

Islands that have huge caverns so then you can mine for ores or gems. Even more materials for trade. (I discuss this later on.)

Islands that are just covered from boarder to boarder with jungles, swamps, forests, or deserts. So now you can just spend endless time just discovering hidden temples or ruins.

Islands that are in different climates, snow to deadly heat. Having to manage your temp should be IMPORTANT. Creating some kind of platform for creating fire. Not so that you just tap certain buttons or combine different materials. Put soft tinder, make a fire stand, create a form of friction, and then if you need to have button mashing, make sure that the player earns it! Alot, ALOT, ALOOOOT of button mashing so that the player says "Thank god it worked!!!" just as they would in real life!

Islands with animals that you can tame horses, wolves, maybe midsized cats, etc. This would mean easier transport, trading, and better defenses for your base of operations. A trained tiger to guard your supplies? Awesome or what?

Islands that you only travel to only to collect certain poisonous creatures. Then you can have a armory of poisons to use against your enemies or for hunting!

Islands with even inhabitants where you can trade (But that could probably be more acceptable if you made the plot maybe about a man just trying to live, trying to survive in the islands, trying to become something or someone.) If you were to do THAT..then you could also make it so you could have allies. Recruiting people to do daily tasks, like hunting for you or gathering certain materials. This of course would mean that you'd have to pay or use supplies extra for their existence.
Having other island inhabitants also means you can have a good/evil standing in the game. Choose to save a young girl from a tiger prowling around her and her village gives you supplies or she later on leaves items at your shelter. Choose to ignore and avoid any injury from fighting the tiger but then receive NO reward. This also makes it so that players have more to gain by doing things on the island. Things such as a reputation for killing tigers, taming horses, sailing across the waters to all the islands, knowing all the herbs and poisons of the islands, ability to create and use different assortments of items or weapons, etc.

As I said in my original post, this game has so MUCH potential!!!!
 
Other idea on the islands: Make your own archipelago and have several pre-defined starting locations where the player has an actual chance of survival.
That way, the archipelago would remain the same, so the chances would remain the same. But starting on a different island would change the beginning of the game quite a bit.
And if the archipelago is extensive enough, you wouldn't necessarily even notice that they're the same islands on replaying.
 
I was thinking along the same lines...

What if at the beginning of game in England, you can choose to get on 3 different ships: one is more of a common ship with people going to the Brasils (as spelled long ago I believe) to start plantations. This ship has lots of supplies, maybe more animals, etc. Another ship is kind of in between, not as much supplies but still some stuff, and then one more of a luxury merchant ship with almost no supplies, just a bunch of worthless gold, etc. The three ships you can get on represent Easy/Medium/Hard difficulty.

Maybe for the islands idea, I could make an archipelago, or chain of islands (maybe 3). You randomly crash off the shore of one each new game. Maybe the different islands have slightly different environments and animals. Eventually maybe you can raft to another island from your starting island, expanding your "territory" and food available etc.


Ok, now tell me what you think of my idea of interacting with the environment/objects in the game:

In Oblivion and Skyrim you can put your "crosshair" in the center of the screen over a nearby object and then grab it and move it around, it bumps into things etc and interacts via the Havok physics engine. Now in most games like this, you can move stuff around perhaps but it's just to play around and maybe tidy up your player house, placing objects on a table or shelf, etc. If you are looting a cave and kill 10 guys, you can put all 10 swords in your "inventory/invisible backpack". Well that's just not realistic, is it.... What if I made two cursors, each 1/3 in from edge of screen. You control each cursor/"hand" with left and right mouse buttons. So let me make a scenario to explain my idea:

You are just shipwrecked and you swim and get on the wrecked ship. You found two apples on the floor, and you want them. You need to take them back to shore with you along with a bunch of other items... you need a basket/barrel! There just happens to be a basket sitting on this table here. Now, just like in real life, you align your right cursor/hand over the right apple, and click right mouse button (grabbing it). Now you align your left cursor over other apple and pick it up in same manner. Now you walk over to basket and place both apples into the basket. {But wait you mean I don't have a 300 item invisible backpack?!? NOOO}

{Insert constructing raft somehow here}

How do you get stuff back to shore? Well you have to pickup your basket and walk to raft and place it on raft. Along with the barrel of gunpowder and guns, etc that you "manually" placed on the raft.

So what do you think? Maybe that is stupid, maybe that only works in a couple scenarios... I am not really sure until it is play tested.
 
I'm not sure if that'd work; the description sounds to me like there is a risk of it being very tedious. Don't want that...
But who knows; perhaps it DOES work? :shrug
 
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