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Table of Contents

Notice: This is an incomplete GDD attempting to represent a complete version of this game, most of which is likely not happening for a while, if at all. For a complete roadmap on what is actually realistically planned, see the “Roadmap” at the bottom of this document.

Elevator Pitch

Design, build, and decorate a cabin with friends, strangers, (or alone) in a community-focused, labour intensive, cozy architecture construction sim.

Quick Summary

• Design cabins, collect resources, craft resources into items, place items into designs.
• Host worlds to the public and make new friends or keep it to a controlled friend group.
  • Make your own designs or work together on the same designs for additional productivity
• Webfishing inspired
• 3d low poly art style
  • COZY COZY COZY VERY COZY
• lofi-style music
  • perhaps some country/ folk vibes as well
• Low stakes survival for productivity boosts.
  • Eat food, drink water, Maintain comfort, & remain inspired

Game Philosophy

• Players should be pushed to do things together, rather than split up
  • Avoid “Minecraft Syndrome” in which everyone playing ’together’ promptly split up and spend hours of gameplay without ever seeing each other
• Players should be rewarded for idle time, and spending that time with others as much as they are for active construction
  • Aim for Webfishing players sitting around a pond, friends at a campfire vibes, or sitting and watching the sunset
• The Journey is as important as the destination
  • The fun of the game is watching something you and your friends put time and effort into grow into something neat.
  • something something friends along the way
• Immersion
  • Yes.

Core Systems

Multiplayer

• Server authority is determined by world ownership
  • Creator is designated the owner of the world and given full permissions
  • Owner can designate roles and permissions to other members
  • Ideally, If you’re running a world, you can control and designate pretty much every permission there is.
  • Defaults (for public lobbies):
    • Owners can ban anyone at any time
    • Strangers joining can fully impact world (gather resources, craft items, place objects) but not architecture their own buildings until given proper roles.
  • Technical implementation:
    • Server-client model
    • Server hosted on Owner’s PC or elsewhere, remotely controllable by owner.
    • Further Specifics TBD
• Full world rollback/ history within local save files
  • Use git as backend
    • We’re open source so we can just use git (GPLv2) as a part of our source code mwahahahaha
  • Serialize world generation and track diffs
    • Ideally users can specify how much history they want to keep and rollback if necessary
    • This is a tough problem, but I want people to be able to open their worlds to the public without worrying about griefing.
  • Allow for in game merge conflict resolution (pipe dream)
    • display world state through spectator-mode viewport, and allow users to toggle between diffs (a/ b/ both/ neither) and see their outcomes & accept their preferred outcome.
    • Allow two offline players to play on the same world then resolve any conflicts after booting back online.
      • Offline changes should automatically be uploaded to central world if user is trusted, however merge conflict resolution uploads should require confirmation from owner/admin by default.
    • Without this, offline play on a world will be limited to the world owner.
      • Could also stop-gap an “offline token” that can be handed around among players that gives sole permission to play offline.
    • More importantly, allow bans to roll back griefers’ actions with minimal impact to the work of others.
      • eg: if you ban a griefer and rollback the past in game day, everyone loses progress. If you just roll back the griefer’s behavior that risks breaking stuff (eg: they placed something that someone else placed stuff on) Merge conflict resolution gives a best of both worlds approach.
    • Not coming on release, but I do want to design with it in mind.
• Land claims?
  • Unsure about this feature but it might be nice to have for some people.
    • Off by default
  • Allow players to claim land.
    • prevents other players from editing claimed land
  • Scope creep: whitelists/ blacklists
  • Owner can still edit claimed land but will be informed that they are doing so.

Resource Gathering

• Resources must be gathered by hand by aid of simple tools.
  • Plant and cultivate trees and crops
    • requires seeds, water, and time.
    • hoe/dig earth, place seed, and wait.
    • process is sped up if watered regularly.
  • Chop trees with axes and saws for wood (two player saw minigame anyone?)
    • Trees must be felled, then cut up into carry-able pieces to take back home for crafting later.
  • Mine rocks with picks for stone and other minerals
    • similarly, rocks must be broken into carryable chunks with a pick then hauled home
  • Forage for food and other assorted items.
    • take a walk and gather up what you find along the way
  • Gather water
    • use a bucket to deliver water from a stream to your cabin
    • store it in a barrel to store it for longer
• Gathered Resources must be stored if not immediately used.
  • can just be littered on the ground, organized in piles or placed in specific storage structures
• Inventory limited to tools and small items.
  • Larger items must be carried
  • multiple people can carry items in order to move faster.

Construction

• Players with appropriate permissions will be able to architecturally design buildings which will display as a incorporeal wireframe.
  • Object placement systems similar to no man’s sky or satisfactory
  • Individual pieces can be placed onto this wireframe by anyone, building up the design piece by peice.
• Grid-based design.
  • Non-physics based.
    • Shit will float (I’m not that crazy)
  • Figure out some way to combine object colliders when placed together to avoid performance nightmares
  • Allow breaking off the grid for tryhards
    • Optional, try to design systems with space to add this later on though
  • Allow certain items to define custom subgrids that are prioritized over the world grid.
    • Enables storage mechanisms (eg: packed wooden plank storage)
  • Allow item-based grid focusing
    • eg: by default building items should be placed on the world grid, but decorations should be placed on a subgrid
    • Subgridded items should be children of the object with the grid

Crafting

• Players can craft simple items into more complex ones.
  • Whoa mama wooden planks
    • Holy fuck
  • Resources into tools
  • iron ore into nails beautiful
  • cooking food
  • making instruments and trinkets (Whittling minigame?)
• Generally, inputs -> minigame -> outputs
  • More people make minigames easier/faster
  • Broad strokes, spiritfarer crafiting, but higher fidelity
• Crafting types
  • Raw crafting
    • Similar to the minecraft crafting table in your personal inventory
    • useful for crafting small stuff as you go
  • Station crafting
    • Requires a workbench or an item of some sort.
    • More involved, & more difficult
    • Allows creation of more specialized items or just bulk versions of hand crafted options.

Survival & Vibes

• Players will have a series of statistics that all contribute to a greater productivity stat. The more these statistics are looked after, the faster your movement speed, crafting speed, gathering speed etc…
  • Hunger- Eat food, bar goes up
  • Thirst- Drink water, bar goes up
  • Comfort- Increase by investing time and effort into improving quality of life
  • Inspiration- Increase by crafting things or taking a second to stop and smell the roses
• No big punishments for not maintaining stats, just lower productivity and some visual effects
• day night cycle
  • Nightfall results in drastically reduced visibility and productivity
  • Encourages players to gather around a campfire in the night time
  • Alternatively, add a “campfire boost” that greatly increases productivity as a function of other players in the area when they visit a campfire.
• Most actions should be significantly easier with multiple people rather than just one.
  • More than 2x easier; it should not be META for 2 people to do the same thing separately rather than work together on the same thing.

Monetization

• Game will be free and open source (GPL probably, due to git dependency)
  • This game will be made for communities. Friends who want a place to hang out, and strangers looking for new friends alike.
  • I’d like it to also be made by a community.
  • If you find value in the game, give back by working on the project yourself.
• Additionally, players can optionally pay for feature bounties to fund project development
  • eg: if you want fishing mechanics, you can put $20 on that bounty that will be paid to the developer who completes that feature.
  • Official bounty channels might additionally take a small cut off bounties to help fund the main project.
• Finally, donations will be accepted as well.

Roadmap

Tech Demo

• Host-able multiplayer
  • Bare minimum to make it work.
  • No perms, no online discoverability
• Tier 1 save system
  • built on git
  • should be hyperscaleable to handle the mountain of features that I’m going to throw at it down the line
• Resource gathering
  • just wood
• Crafting recipies
  • wood -> planks
  • planks -> stairs, flooring, walls, roof, doors.
• Construction system
  • Only implementing world grid, no subgrids
• Productivity stat
  • determined by Inspiration and campfire mechanics.
  • No Comfort, hunger or thirst yet

Minimum Viable Product

TBD

1.0.0 Release

TBD