Project Copper Shiner - Multiplayer Voxel Survival & Society Building

[Capsup]

For many years, I have wanted to build a voxel-based game. I have played more than a thousand hours of Eco and love games like Vintage Story and Hytale, but have never felt that there was a game that combined the tactile world and crafting of Vintage Story with the society building of Eco, as well as a fun survival gameplay loop.

So when I saw BRUTAL I was immediately excited. A modern framework that allows me the freedom to build the simulation I want in modern C#, without shoe-horning my simplistic asset pipeline into a modern Engine like Unity or Godot? Guess it's time to execute!

It's called Project Copper Shiner, because I have a habit of naming my projects after a metal and a fish.



The idea is to start with a fairly primitive survival experience, gathering resources, making tools, finding shelter and generally trying not to die. But as players progress, I'd like those humble beginnings to grow into functioning settlements with workshops, storage, production chains, trade and eventually persistent citizens who can help keep things running even when players are offline.

I want the world to show the work that went into building it. A primitive shelter should look primitive, and a developed town should reflect the materials, craftsmanship and technology available to its inhabitants.

And did I mention I'm a fan of diegetic UI and logistics gameplay?



One of my first gameplay experiments has been to make inventory a physical part of the world. Instead of having a magical backpack containing several tonnes of materials, you start by carrying a small armful of whatever you find.

If your hands are full and you want to collect something else, you'll have to put your materials down somewhere.



Materials can be stacked into physical piles, with individual pieces rendered procedurally. Different materials stack differently, and the amount you store determines how much space it actually occupies.

Eventually, I'd love for this to extend to carrying frames, wheelbarrows, wagons and warehouses. The idea is that transporting and storing materials becomes part of the gameplay, and that a bustling town actually looks like people are working in it.



I'm also experimenting with construction-aware building pieces, inspired by Eco. Walls should join neatly, roofs should fit together, and materials should look like they were actually made and assembled. Ideally, players should be able to build attractive, believable structures without needing exceptional Minecraft building skills.

There's just one small problem: I'm a solo developer.

I don't have the resources to create thousands of handcrafted assets, so my approach so far has been to generate pretty much everything procedurally in C#: terrain, trees, rocks, buildings, and even the individual stones and sticks in those piles.

There's no traditional 3D asset pipeline at the moment. I'm hoping that reusable geometry, construction rules and material treatments will let me build a visually coherent world without spending all my time in Blender. I'm not opposed to textures or handcrafted assets later, though!

It's still very early days. Most of the larger survival and society systems are ambitions rather than implemented features. Right now I'm building small experiments to figure out what works and, more importantly, what actually feels fun to play.

Anyway, that's Project Copper Shiner! I'm looking forward to seeing where I can take it with BRUTAL. Feedback, ideas and criticism are very welcome!

 

[Kiwi Shark]

This is incredible!

diegetic UI and logistics gameplay

You know how to get me interested.

I really like the ideas you're putting forward and the whole idea of a "living" feel to a town. It sounds like the kind of simulation that BRUTAL is aiming to make possible. Super cool stuff, looking forward to more updates and hopefully getting to try out whatever you put together.

 

[Taylor]

nice

 

[Terra Incognita]

Keen to see where this goes. Thank you for sharing @Capsup !

 

[Madie]

This looks amazing already
Since you've mentioned Eco, are you going to add a pollution system? Could be a nice mechanic that either forces separate living and production areas in your (mid-)late game settlement or to deal with it creatively.

How will the settlements exactly work? Like a multiplayer game or more of a mc village where it all are NPC?

 

[Capsup]

This looks amazing already
Since you've mentioned Eco, are you going to add a pollution system? Could be a nice mechanic that either forces separate living and production areas in your (mid-)late game settlement or to deal with it creatively.

How will the settlements exactly work? Like a multiplayer game or more of a mc village where it all are NPC?

Hey Madie, thanks for the nice words!

I definitely plan to have equivalents to a lot of Eco's systems, that encourages you to build "nice" towns. I really really like driving around in Eco to see the different settlements popping up. I'm the type of player in Eco, especially as a mayor, that heavily encourages my citizens to use many different stakes rather than one huge building containing everything. It's so much more fun to go to the the blacksmith store, the restaurant and the furniture shop, browsing people's items and how it all takes form over time.

Project Copper Shiner will heavily focus on the social gameplay, so you can expect way more of a multiplayer game than an MC village. My initial aim is having 32 people dedicated servers, enabling a small country of settlements. The one thing I will be experimenting with instead, is having players' offline characters act on some kind of programmable schedule, while they are offline. I want players to actively:
- Explore
- Socialize
- Build
- Progress technically
and generally making decisions while they're online and then let their offline avatar take over and:
- Move stuff to building sites and simple logistics
- Perform building actions on pre-planned building sites
- Raw materials gathering
- Simple material processing
- Run their stores like a doctor's office, where the doctor can still perform procedures

Basically: all the mundane stuff, while they're offline. I think that will really help with making villages feel alive, when its' citizens are actively doing things around town. It also helps people that might not be able to play as much as others, still feel useful by contributing.

 

[Madie]

Hey Madie, thanks for the nice words!

I definitely plan to have equivalents to a lot of Eco's systems, that encourages you to build "nice" towns. I really really like driving around in Eco to see the different settlements popping up. I'm the type of player in Eco, especially as a mayor, that heavily encourages my citizens to use many different stakes rather than one huge building containing everything. It's so much more fun to go to the the blacksmith store, the restaurant and the furniture shop, browsing people's items and how it all takes form over time.

Project Copper Shiner will heavily focus on the social gameplay, so you can expect way more of a multiplayer game than an MC village. My initial aim is having 32 people dedicated servers, enabling a small country of settlements. The one thing I will be experimenting with instead, is having players' offline characters act on some kind of programmable schedule, while they are offline. I want players to actively:
- Explore
- Socialize
- Build
- Progress technically
and generally making decisions while they're online and then let their offline avatar take over and:
- Move stuff to building sites and simple logistics
- Perform building actions on pre-planned building sites
- Raw materials gathering
- Simple material processing
- Run their stores like a doctor's office, where the doctor can still perform procedures

Basically: all the mundane stuff, while they're offline. I think that will really help with making villages feel alive, when its' citizens are actively doing things around town. It also helps people that might not be able to play as much as others, still feel useful by contributing.

Have you ever heard of a game called "Mind over magic"? It has something called room requirements, where in order for a room (which you can do with buildings) need requirements, such as being grounded, private (only 1 entrance), have windows, things like that. You could do something that like a blacksmith requires a stone furnace and cannot have tailoring buildings
While writing this it started to sound more like how rooms work in Oxygen Not Included, where buildings only work in a specific room type, and that building is required to make the room of that specific type. If you're going to look that up, look into the rooms that cannot have any "industrial machinery".

With the player to NPC idea, watch out for what happens when the player comes back. Mainly animation and action wise, make sure the NPC thing finishes before the player gets full control

 

[Capsup]

Have you ever heard of a game called "Mind over magic"? It has something called room requirements, where in order for a room (which you can do with buildings) need requirements, such as being grounded, private (only 1 entrance), have windows, things like that. You could do something that like a blacksmith requires a stone furnace and cannot have tailoring buildings
While writing this it started to sound more like how rooms work in Oxygen Not Included, where buildings only work in a specific room type, and that building is required to make the room of that specific type. If you're going to look that up, look into the rooms that cannot have any "industrial machinery".

With the player to NPC idea, watch out for what happens when the player comes back. Mainly animation and action wise, make sure the NPC thing finishes before the player gets full control

Yep, that's exactly the sort of system I would like to build to encourage proper rooms. I think I'd force a minimum size, with essentially no holes to outside and then look at the furniture inside to define it as "bedroom", "kitchen" and "industry" rooms for a start.

It would be something like the ONI rooms, but in 3d. I need to calculate the "inside" of homes anyways to know where to stop rendering rain and the like, so might as well use that data for something fun.

 

[Capsup]

Devlog #2: An Unreasonable Amount of Rocks

In Copper Shiner, I have been doing a lot of experimenting. I'm trying to turn my constraint of lackluster asset skills into a superpower, by focusing on using code instead. Everything is defined in code for the game, even assets, or so-called procedural generation.
BRUTAL offer us the opportunity to say "no" to things like a standard asset pipeline with models, materials and UV unwrapping.

Instead, I build our meshes directly on CPU, starting where we'd all start. The beginning. Since Copper Shiner is a society builder, I started simple, with something as mundane as a rock.



I don't think you understand how proud I am of that rock. It's the best thing I've ever made since drawing my first, of many, stickmen in paint (and never progressed from there.) Calling my stickmen programmer art would do them too much justice, but Hhre was a real 3d mesh I'd built myself. Entirely from code even!

So I started making a lot of them.



At some point, I started wondering: how would the player store their collection of rocks? With all these awesome meshes, someone is bound to want to pick one up and put it somewhere. So of course, I made piles of rocks:



And I kept going of course. I thought: "now that the game has rocks, what about a specific rock?" so I ended up adding a new type of rock that could be crafted with:



Yep, it's flint rock! AW YIS. So now we have not one flint rock, but TWO of them?! That means we can put one rock, on another rock and strike it with the third?



Mhmm, yes, you guessed it. We can process rock. That's awesome. So what can we do with processed rock?



Wait, what?! There's a stick and plant fiber too? Oh yeah... B)

That's the story of how I spent two weeks looking at rocks, piles of rocks and rock hammers... It's been glorious. Because now we can begin the real fun part! Figuring out how to build stuff:



The idea behind the art direction of the game is that the same simple meshes will be reused throughout the game. As players process them, they create history around them and the materials used to build with, tell that story. Plans change over time and so must the materials. So players are encouraged to plan things out, while still being open for change later. I want the models and materials to tell that story through the assets.



A stacked rock wall physically consist of the rocks used to build it (almost at least, because we can't have every rock exist uniquely, but we can approximate it and still give ourself some creative freedom). Here, an "abutted" wall to the original one, showing that it was extended over time.
I hope this system can end up feeling good for the player, without becoming tedious. And that's what the focus has been on since my last post: finding the fun in the game.

Building these walls of actual rocks that I gathered and seeing them proudly stand there. feels good to me. Now I just need to find the visual cohesion between the assets, while still conveying what they are properly. And that takes some time for someone with only the skills to draw stickmen in paint.