For a long while now our game designer has been racking her brain trying to come up with a new, comfier way of building things in a 3D game world.
Now that we’ve figured it out (more or less), we figured we’d jot down a list of core problems and solutions for them, along with what we detest about the way Minecraft did construction.
The Problems
1. When trying to lay down a continuous series of blocks, you inadvertently run into the issue of not being able to place a block unless there’s something to place it on.
You’re then forced fidget with the camera to resolve the roadblock. Fortnite handles this problem with an enormous grid and automatically adjusting object positioning.
But Elteria isn’t Fortnite, and instead of enormous objects, we’ve got voxels, which on one hand grant higher levels of construction control but on the other, well, cause problems like this.
2. Elteria has no first-person view, which further complicates things when building anything and trying to position blocks just right.
3. Removing blocks is another problem -- not an enormous one, but still frustrating.
The overall goal is to make construction comfortable while avoiding game design contradictions, such as muscling in on digging territory occupied by the Dig ability, which is used to dig into the ground and various natural voxels.
The Solution
We immediately decided that construction during combat was not the way to go, so we’re focusing on out-of-combat construction, allowing players to build houses, huts, fortresses, and various mechanisms, whether on their own or with and for their guilds.
Here’s how it works. Once the player enters Build Mode, he or she summons a wisp that flies out into the game world, with the player’s camera attached to it in the first-person mode.
This allows for faster and more comfortable construction efforts, giving the player the ability to more effectively position and view blocks from various angles.
One thing we did borrow from Minecraft and similar building games is the Block Palette, which allows the player to place voxels, seeds, and blueprints in the game world.
While controlling the wisp, the Block Palette substitutes the player character’s other abilities.
Meanwhile, removing blocks is going to cost energy and have a minor cast time, giving the Dig ability a distinct advantage when applicable.
All in all, these design decisions should smooth out the building experience and even provide the foundation upon which we should be able to implement auto-aligning blueprint use and other additional quality of life improvements in the future.
That’s all for now, but we’ll let you know as soon as new construction capabilities are ready to test out (hopefully within the next month or so), by which point the crafting system should also be ready to go in its initial state.
Cheers!
