Hi everyone! Daryl here again with another blog post about Sugar Shack.
For this Sweet Friday, we want to talk about our past building system and how we came up with our current building system.
In the past we tried to use a “build mode” system where the player would select with the mouse where the items would go. However, it did not work at all because it was confusing for playtesters to understand how it worked and what the new controls were.
It also had the issue of breaking the immersion as objects in the world are persistent in some form (either as a pickable item or placed in the world). But now, you have this global inventory where players could drop items in there and make it disappear temporarily.
In the end, we decided to pick the same system of picking / dropping items than the rest of the game for simplicity and consistency. If you know how to pick items on the ground, you will be familiar with this system as well. However, it was sometimes cumbersome to pick-drop-pick-drop items, especially for elements like roads. For these, we made them stackable so that players can just pick-drop-drop-drop to create their roads.
To remove items, we like the idea of pulling the pickaxe and breaking what you did. It worked well and it was easily understandable. In Sugar Shack, items are not destroyed when broken, so players can easily pick them back up and place them where they wished to be placed initially.
We can’t wait to see your different worlds take shape!
We’re looking forward to our next blog post! If you don't want to miss it, follow us on social media and if you haven’t already, wishlist the game. It helps us a ton to get more visibility!
See you soon in the Shack!
Daryl B.