Our plumber is still on holiday, so I’m back again to satisfy your curiosity after the last devlog. We ended it with two questions: “How will the water be connected to the sink and faucet, and how will the faucet reflect changes in water flow?”. And that’s exactly what we’re going to cover today.
Let’s start with how you actually place a sink in the first place. We spent quite a bit of time thinking about how to introduce a sink into the game world. We didn’t want to use the existing furniture-moving mechanic (see Devlog #8). We felt that combining these two mechanics could make it confusing to tell when you want to just move a fixture and when you want to connect water to it. So we came up with the idea of adding a special package. Yes. A package.
Inside this package is our sink, all packed up and ready to go. Once you’re holding it, you can walk up to the wall and a transparent model of two small pipes will appear in front of you along with a white, cube-shaped outline of the sink. When you press the left mouse button, the box will be placed.
But wait... Where’s the sink? We’ll get to that in a moment.
The next step is connecting the pipes.
We’ve added an important feature to our wall-pipe system: two different types of pipes: blue for cold water and red for hot water. Pretty intuitive, right? Just like fire and water. Exactly like in real life. But don’t worry - you won’t get burned. ;) (yet)
Now you need to connect the blue and red pipes to the two angle valves outside the wall. The mechanics for placing and connecting the pipes work exactly the same way as before (see Devlogs #5 and #6).
Once you’ve done that, you can hover over our box again and hold the left mouse button. Once the little loading circle around your cursor fills up... BOOM. TADAAAAM! The sink magically appears! It's possible that in the future, the assembly of each piece of equipment will consist of several consecutive steps, but for now, the magic will have to do.
But we’re not done yet. Our sink still isn’t connected! To do so, you need to look inside the cabinet. This puts you into what we call Inspection Mode.
Inside, you’ll see your connected pipes and two new dangling hoses. Those are the ones we need to connect to the hot and cold water valves.
First, click on the ends of our pipes to install the angle valves. Then grab the end of one of the hoses, pull it over, and connect it to the appropriate one. But that’s not all! You still have to tighten it! And then do the same thing with the other hose.
And voilà! Our sink works! What’s more, depending on which which pipe is faulty or shut off, the faucet will accurately reflect the lack of water coming from that supply. This way, you’ll be able to figure out which pipe might be leaking!
We wanted installing a sink to feel like a small minigame. This lets us step away from the larger game world and focus on the little details - the hoses, the angle valves, connecting the hot and cold water supplies etc. The goal is to recreate the whole process as realistically as possible. Sure, we could have simply added a “Press E to install sink” button. But what kind of plumber would you be if you could connect an entire sink to the water supply in three seconds? It’s details like these that will define our Plumber Simulator!
And that’s all for today! See you next time, plungers!