This game

I wanted to write a little blurb about this game so anyone who finds this knows why it is in the state that it's in when I uploaded the first version here on itch.

The vision for this game was an overscoped version of a tutorial by codemonkey where we create a cooking game and then we add multiplayer to it.

I decided that my version would resemble something like the hunger games. 2-8 players spawn at the beginning and see the countdown...

3.. 2.... 1....

and just like in the movie there's some items there in the middle of the arena where everyone spawned. Some players will instinctively take the axe, others the fishing pole and this can result in some early game takedowns.

Now, as we look at the current version of the game i've set up a tester library just north of the cornucopia.

This tester library contains every single item in the game. well, except for the boss armor set that you can only get from killing bosses and maybe crafting it with the materials they drop.

here you'll see that we intend on:

• Mining - to obtain metals for smithing projects such as armor, ammo and utilities
• Woodcutting - to obtain materials to create base items required for all things. Wood can be used for anything from ammo to kindling for your hearths and furnaces. Also plays a major role in crafting items such as buckets.
• Fishing - the player will need to manage their survival stats such as hunger and thirst in this rendition of the hunger games. It makes sense to have intentional resources for the players to sustain themselves on. Fishing will require help from cooking to make these items useful.

now that we've outlined the gathering and production skills, their uses and intended purposes i'd like to look into gameplay. Players are forced to do things one at a time by the "in hands" selection system. When the player interacts with an item that is not a tool it takes up the player's one inventory slot which is their hands. Players can obtain bigger inventories by finding or crafting bags to store items in. However, the single player inventory will showcase the importance of other features such as time to burn for cooking recipes. 

I would expect in multiplayer that one player is cooking say a fish, a loaf of bread and at the same time cutting another fish into sandwich bits. Well, when another player shows up: our character will need to do something about all of the items they have strewn about the building they're occupying. This can give the second player a crucial opportunity to steal some food they desperately needed and get them back in the game by either fighting the chef player or running away from them considering their abundance of supplies.

anyone who's made it this far through this wall of text deserves to know there are 2 buildings placed randomly on the map each time the map is generated. One is essentially the kitchen, and the other is the forge. this way you can make yourself some armors as the armor tables in the library are not actually functional.

I would expect chickens and bears and other woodland creatures to be roaming the map for players to fight and claim resources from. Don't mind the floating resources to the west of the library, these are intended to be part of the game but are probably missing some crucial crafting part of the programming.

which brings me to the final part of the first dev log for this game:

The fancy table

While nearly finished with the library I had realized that the initial tables having only one inventory slot wasn't exactly going to work with my single player inventory slot in the cases that I need say 3 items to be combined.

And thus the fancy table concept was born. I'm hoping on you, the player and the reader to help me decide if the fancy table is worth all this effort i've put into it or if i should scrap it and start working on doing 2 item crafting. anyways, here's the scenario:

To make an arrow we need

• Arrow head (smithing)
• Arrow shaft (fletching)
• Feathers (combat)

And so the plan with the fancy table was that I could put all 3 of these items on the table and use my alternate interact to craft the three items together.

In my opinion this would make for other scenarios like combining flour and water work in the same way.

I'm now thinking that simply having a single item in my hands and a single item on the table might be a good way to handle this entire process. By simply making a single extra "unfinished arrow" item type we can skip the 3 item combinations and just work in 2 item combinations up to the  2 iterations of 2 combinations which equates to the 3 items.

Perhaps we'll see more updates of this game yet. Post your thoughts and suggestions and ideas and experiences!