DevLog 11: Unique Crafting System

Finally, it was time to add a proper crafting system to the BLASTRONAUT game. However, when I started looking around for inspiration, it turned out that in most games the crafting is pretty clunky. Furthermore, in 99% of the games crafting is completely menu-based which pulls the player out of the game and breaks the immersion.

STEP 2. Animating all the crafting buildings will also be important because it allows showing the player that the machine is working. After animating the fire in the furnace, they became much more lively.

STEP 3. Designing the interaction. The goal here was to allow the player to queue up some jobs with minimal effort. And for that, the player interacts with the buildings as usual, but instead of receiving the finished goods immediately, it would take a bit of time and the player is free to leave and do his business elsewhere.

So far so good, but this is where the bigger problems begin to appear.

STEP 4. Solving the issues.

• The first issue is that if the resource number grow a bit larger, it can begin to overlap with the number on another machine. This was relatively easy to solve by rearranging the UI a bit.
• The next issue was about how to get the finished resources back. There are two common ways to do that:
  • Drop the resources on the ground and the player picks them up by walking by.  Although it seems to be a fun approach it doesn't suit, because in a multiplayer game, the players will accidentally begin to pick up each other’s stuff, and it will cause chaos.
  • The resources get stored inside the machine and the player has to take them out.  This increases the complexity a bit and also requires adding another button, but it was the best I could come up with.
• And the final issue was how to reconfigure the machine to produce something else. All I could think at the moment was to add another key that opens the configuration mode.

So after trying to solve these issues, my first solution looked like this. And I know it looks confusing.

And eventually, I improved it a bit by moving the F button right next to E. It looks a bit cleaner but is still really confusing.