[RELEASED] Survival Engine - Complete Project Template for Survival Games

Hi everyone!

Survival Engine is a project template for creating survival or simulation games!

Here are some of the features:
-Player controls (mouse click, mobile tap, and keyboard).
-Inventory system
-Crafting system
-Equipment (attached to character)
-Resource gathering
-Character attributes (health, hunger, thirst...)
-Animal behaviors (wander, escape, chase)
-Hunting and Fishing
-Farming (Sowing seeds, and plant/fruit growth)
-Combat (against wild animals)
-Item durability and food spoilage
-Storage boxes (chest)
-Bonus effects (ongoing aura effect that increases attributes or boost stats).
-Customizable Actions (streamlined way to include your own code)
-Game clock, day/night cycle
-Save/Load system

And the features that are planned:
-Item durability -> Done
-Storage boxes -> Done
-Unlock crafting recipes -> Done
-Improved build system -> Done
-Character script - > Done
-Random world generation -> Done
-Game pad controls (other asset integration) -> Done
-Dialogue & Quests (other asset integration) -> Done
-Backpack storage -> Done
-Crafting requirements -> Done
-Crafting stations -> Done
-Map (other asset integration) -> Done
-Crafting fillers -> Done
-Temperature, cold and heat sources -> Done

Note that this list may change based on popular demand. Please buy this asset for its existing features. I would really appreciate feedback and suggestions, I will consider the most popular requests.

Demo Windows: https://indiemarc.com/demo/survival-engine/SurvivalEngineWindows1.22.zip

Demo Windows TPS: https://indiemarc.com/demo/survival-engine/SurvivalEngineWindowsTPS1.22.zip

Demo Android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.IndieMarc.SurvivalEngine

Demo IOS
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1535418587

Survival Kit (Documentation) https://indiemarc.com/demo/survival-engine/SurvivalEngine.pdf

Tutorial Videos
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC0LYig0AgPT9T5IN5DCUiqQ/videos

Support
Website/email: https://indiemarc.com
Discord: https://discord.gg/JpVwUgG
(FAQ available on Discord)

Link to asset:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/systems/survival-engine-178160

 

Thank you for this engine, please keep working on it (you should add the link to this forum post on the asset page by the way, I found it accidentally) and a discord would be helpful as well.

Biomes is something that I would absolutely love to see in this asset. I would really recommend that you potentially create more assets that build on top of the survival engine. It can be a great way to sell more, I'd love to support your work on this project, since survival/simulation games are my absolute favorite ones and I always wanted to get some base code to start with. It would be great to have a multiplayer survival asset as well, that combines with this one(uses same base code etc).

I wouldn't worry too much about UI elements, since most games will be using their own anyway. Durability/crafting/maps/random world generation are all marvelous ideas.

Other interesting things to add would be portals(that transfer you around the map), season elements(wind/rain/snow etc). Maybe things like poison(reduce hp sequentially). Just some ideas.

Really hope you will continue working on this, I'd love to support your work !

 

I will keep working on it! I'm really happy that you like it.
I added the link to the page, it will appear on the next update, thank you for the suggestions!

One possibility would be to create different editions of the asset. But I would not build on top like modules, because I think it's better to have all necessary features in a single package. Instead what could be cool is to have different editions, each with a unique theme, so people can choose and pick the one that is the closest to their game, each would have some unique mechanics that is relevant to that theme. Examples of themes could be: zombie apocalypse, farm town ala harvest moon, space survival, while the existing asset would be the Wilderness Edition. Note that theses are absolutely not promises though! They are just random ideas on the top of my head, and I need to think more about this and also see what people think of it. I will of course focus on the current asset first!

And thank you again so much for willing to support my work!

 

NEW in version 1.04

Item durability and Spoilage!
Now its possible to add a durability value to each item and constructions!
Durability comes in 3 types: UsageCount, UsageTime, Spoilage

UsageCount means that the item will lose durability each time you use it, either through code (custom action) or when attacking (weapons) or taking damage (not weapon).
UsageTime means it will lose durability over time, but only if equipped.
Spoilage means it will lose durability over time, no matter where it is.

Storage (Chest)
It is now possible to build a chest and store items inside. These will be saved in the save file.

Shovel
The shovel is now working! You can use it to dig plants (to get their seeds and plant somewhere else), or to dig burried items (at a DigSpot).

Watering can
Watering can is a new item that allow you to boost plants growth. You first need to fill it at a water source, and then use it on your plants, you can adjust the speed boost as well as the duration it stays watered.

Bonus Effects
Bonus effects are ongoing effects that are applied to the character in 2 ways: either by equipping an item that has the bonus effect, or by standing near a construction with the bonus effect (BonusAura).
Examples of effects are walk speed boost, or attribute regeneration (happiness near the statue, speed boost when wearing boots).

Mobile controls
-You can now use 2 fingers to zoom in/out the camera on mobile
-You can now double tap on a item to open the action menu (the hold is still there, its just an alternative).

Tool to easily create new Prefabs
Many people said it's a bit tedious to create new prefabs, I created a basic tool (it still has room for improvement) to generate a new prefab along with its data files.
You still need to go and edit the prefab and scriptable object properties after creating, but at least the step of linking all the files together is done for you!
Use the tool in the menu: Tool->Create New Objects

New Crafting items
-A compass that will point north when dropped on the floor.
-A lure that will attract nearby animals, you can use it together with the trap to catch them.
-A statue that grants happiness when nearby
-More new items (helmets, stone armor, battle axe, carrot, rice, cooking recipes, chest ...)

Multiple minor improvements
-Crafting when the inventory is full will now put items on the floor instead of preventing you to crafting
-Crafting button not enabling sometimes bug fix
-Grass can now grow back!
-Crafting quantity: you can now set the quantity that will be crafted for an item (so you make 5 arrows at a time instead of 1).
-You can order items in the crafting menu (using the craft_sort_order param)
-Fishing will now take a few seconds and play an animations
-You can optionally let the engine generate a Selectable outline automatically instead of adding it manually
-Keyboard button to attack the nearest target (Shift by default)
-Two plants cant be sowed on top of each other.
-Added namespace SurvivalEngine to ALL scripts

 

Top-notch asset, a great way to hit the ground running with a survival game. I look forward to the update and more.

 

This sounds like a great idea, but I would still like to be able to use the mechanics if i pick a different theme. Thus, it may be nice to do something like that but have a mechanism to allow porting the mechanics from one asset to the other. Since mechanics are extremely important, it would suck not to be able to use, say a teleport mechanism on a specific theme, even though I have both of your assets. But i do love the idea about themes I would also absolutely on the spot purchase any of your assets on simulation/colony building/tycoon themes. Day one purchases for me I absolutely love those themes.

 

In any case I will focus on adding more to the current asset first, so there is no need to think about all this yet ! I'll figure out when I reach that point haha. Thanks for all the suggestions and support!

 

I wanted to share this! It may help to learn the controls.

 

You must add links to the demos in the description of the asset, because a good demo is much more explicit than text.
The Android Demo decides me to buy this asset.

 

I've always wanted to do that but when I do Unity Asset Store decline my update because of 'invalid links' even though the links are working. This is why I put the links to this forum instead, the demo can be downloaded from the first post.

 

Tutorials I created, hope it helps!

How to replace the character by your own model:

How to use the object creator tool:

 

can i change the controler to TPS? if can, is there any restricted to the original controller that i need to edit?

 

Hi! Do you plan to add firearms?

Or build a base?

 

You would need to edit the camera script and control script for that, its not a feature that I added yet. A lot of people are asking for this so I will really consider adding in future versions. Do you have suggestions for the controls it should be by default? Like free camera rotation using the mouse? In the case if we hide the mouse to rotate,how would you access the inventory? Just asking to see what would be the best fps/tps controls.

You can build constructions buildings already so im not really sure what you mean by building a base? Can you explain?
Firearm there is none yet but they should work similar to the bow or slingshot.

Hope these answers help

 

Can u add multiplayer option? or game lobby

 

Im not planning on adding online multiplayer at the moment. I want to focus on the game mechanics for singleplayer first.

 

haha i kinda guess many people will ask that. well, i dont know it is what u ask for the suggestion but if in the future u will add a tps/fps contrler, that will be a very good update for most newbie/indie developer. well for tps or fps, it depend on on the developer and u for the one who making the assets. but most of rpg gmae using a TPS contorler rather than FPS. so if u want to add one more controller type, u need to prioritize a tps controler. for accessinmg the inventory, i think it is good if using a hotkey like press "I", and then u can lock the rotate function for the player (even if u not, its still ok, there game that u can rotate the player even though the inventory is open).

hope my answer helping to develope your assets.

another question, so i only need to change that(camera script and control script )? well i laready has tps controler ready, and want to import your assets. but im seeing it will import some project setting. is it will affect other function from the controller and camera(such as inventory and iem) ,if im not adding the project setting?

sorry for the long post

 

Hi! Thanks for your suggestion of tps controls.

About your questions maybe better to not import the projects settings if posinle or that may affect the layers?
That controller would probably need a lot of code integration to work with the rest if it replaces the main character scriot because that script is important.

I'll probably work on a way to disable character controls or movement but keep the important functions like building and crafting in the next version. So its easier to do that.

 

Be careful not to implement too much in terms of gameplay, You will get a lot of people just doing asset flips, some won't even change the art just straight up sell it as is. There's another asset that happened to, not too sure what happened but caused a ton of commotion and the asset had to be deprecated. If someone honestly intends to make a game, they will put the effort, time, and money required into it to implement the missing features.

Regardless, this is a really nice asset!
The only thing I can think of to improve it atm would maybe be to store items and whatnot as a JSON file. and instead of having to create prefabs, you could set up the item as a JSON, and the game auto-creates it at startup. Then you could also expand on that and implement a custom editor window. That way we don't have to constantly create new prefabs.

Also is there a Discord for the asset?

 

Do you plan on making things like quests and enemies and npcs?

 

I second the first paragraph. However, in regards to the second one, I much prefer that the author of an asset doesn't spend resources on things where there are already multiple solutions on the store. For example, a save/load game mechanism. There are so many great solutions already that are so super easy to implement on top of this engine, that creating a new one is basically a waste of resources and time from mechanics that are tied to a survival engine and are much more interesting and new. I love combining assets to get the best out of dedicated effort. I feel it's better to use established tools in combination with each other. That's not to say that a mechanism to help initiate prefabs in the context of the engine is not useful, that's a different thing. But the actual save/load mechanism, I think it's an overkill. Similarly with AI behavior for example. There are sooo many great in store solutions, I don't think there's much of a need to reinvent the wheel.

However, things like biome creation and world generation I believe are more useful and important for the genre. Regardless, I am stoked to be trying the engine anyway and any improvements you decide to make are absolutely 100% welcome Just my 2 cents there.

 

Hello.
I am getting il2cpp build error in v1.04(Android).
In mono, it builds, but in il2cpp(ARMv7,ARM64), the following error occurs.
v1.03 was fine.
Even if I create a new project several times and test it, an error occurs.
I would appreciate if you check this issue..
I used Unity 2019.4.12f1, 2019.4.10.f1.
(This is the same problem for both Windows Unity and Mac Unity.)

-->
P.S.
If I remove SurvivalEngine/Scripts/Tools/WebGLTool.cs, il2cpp builds fine. Can I delete this file from the engine?

 

I do fully agree.
My idea was mostly to scrap prefabs and store them as JSON instead.
Not really a Save/Load but more as an alternative way to store the prefabs, that not only would be far easier to work with, and make an editor window easier, but could even allow for modding support to be easily added. Something that's not hard to do ourselves, but would be nice to see built-in.
Could even go as far as to use Reflection to add components.

 

Seems in the latest version 1.04 the demo scenes don't work, seems tons of references got lost?

 

It's 100% working, many people downloaded it. It's probably import issue, mismatch files from updating from a previous version you edited. It should work in a blank project. If there's not a lot of reference missing maybe you need to find them and fix them and put back the reference? Or if not, let me know what is the issue specifically.

Here is the fix for this file! Yes there was an error in that file. But it's only when building in il2cpp. I'm doing an update this week (1.05)

 

Strange just made a new project it's working.
even if I deleted the project settings, packages, and all assets inside the asset file and restarted it still is broken in that project.
No idea what's causing it.

 

Thank you very much for your suggestions!
I would much prefer to create an asset based on how well-intended people will use it, than trying to do things just because there may be people doing bad things. If it can reassure you, I'm uploading the demo to google play / apple store, im getting trademark and acquired domains, so that would be really hard to pull for someone trying just to flip app without changing at least the name and main art assets. Then after that if they just want to upload a reskin, I don't really see how it could cause an issue, but it wouldn't be a very good game if they don't add content. + I won't be adding any monetization so they would at least need to add that.

I'm happy to be adding a lot of mechanics, but I will also listen to feedback from people to know which one I should prioritize (based on the most popular ones). I think the key for me is to focus on game mechanics, but have little content. (missions, quests, more maps, items, acquired characters, customization etc), I think the content is important to be unique to each game. So I will be focusing on code and mechanics and leave the content to each project.

I think a save system is very unique to each project, so i thought important to add one , some people said it's the feature they liked the most in my asset because it can be complex to add and specific to each project. And anyway it's already there

 

Can you send me some information on the issue ? Maybe by email or Discord ?
There's a known issue with the package manager UI that you need to remove, so maybe it's related to that.
I also just tried 1.04 in a blank project on Unity 2019.4.11 and it's working with no errors!

 

I would suggest to wait for 1.05 coming this week I don't say anything more!

 

I've been watching what others are saying...I don't really have much of an opinion or even much of a feature request other than some sort of mission/quest npc feature where you kill so many things or go bring back a certain number of items or something like that...also maybe a zombies or bear/tiger (enemy) sort of thing where they wander around (or have a predefined range of wander) but when the player is in agro range they can chase you until you kill them and they will drop loot when killed.

I haven't purchased yet but played the demo...but will be purchasing at the end of the week

 

It's working fine on a new project, it's just that one specific one that broke down with no explanation as to why.
Even if I reset it to a perfectly blank project it still didn't work, its like that specific folder is busted. so my best guess is something was saved outside the project breaking it, but no idea what.

 

Theres already animals (including bears) that wander and will chase you when in range. You can also add loot.

And thanks for the suggestions ill take note to see if i get a lot of request for quest/dialogue.

 

Ok cool I didn't see them in the android demo. So I can make them into zombies if I wanted. That's cool

Also I see that you said tps support may be in 1.05 that would be cool. Thank you so much.

 

Haven't played with the demo much yet btw, but it would be useful to allow for the character to move while mouse button is clicked. It should be a simple event fix, but thought i'd mention it, would be a nice built in option. Right now you basically have to click somewhere to move there, you cannot just click and hold to move, similarly to dont starve, for example.

 

Will add this ! Thats simple to add and great suggestion.

 

New version 1.05 uploaded!! (Give it a few days for Unity to approve it)

Camera Variants
-Top down
-Third person
-Third person shooter (free camera rotation with mouse)

Note : the new camera variants don't work well on mobile. Use Top down for mobile.

Potions and Temporary Bonus
-There is a new Alchemy tab in the crafting menu
-Temporary bonus effects are effects applied to the character after consuming an item (attack boost, speed boost, regeneration, etc.)

New Action: Reading
-You can now add the Read action to items, this will popup a window with text.

New items
-Intermediary crafting material (rope, metal bar, gold bar).
-Craftable nut-gun to shoot acorns.
-Walls

Optimization Update
-Changed a bit how optimization work, so that objects in the distance are still visible. It seems to also have better performance than before. There is a toggle on the script TheRender to put it back like it was before.

Other improvements
-Sleeping will now speed up time
-Holding the mouse button pressed will now keep moving on desktop
-Fix issue with constructions that could be placed on top of other things or on a steep cliff.
-Fix a bit how controls work when constructing.
-You can now rotate buildings when constructing, using the same buttons to rotate the camera
-Keys 0-9 are now shortcuts for inventory
-Feet attachment on the player character now works like hands attachment (the way it worked was confusing)
-Digging using only a left click for dig spots
-Left clicking on an animal will make the character follow it even if the animal moved.
-Display possible merge actions on mobile when selecting an item in inventory
-Functions in the code to enable/disable character controls, and to hide/show the UI
-Streamlined UI code (cleaned up the code in inventory bar and equip bar)
-Fix build issues in il2cpp mode.

Halloween
-A small surprise can be found in the demo (and more if you dig)

 

This is still looking fantastic!

I also really would love to see questing, dialogues, and NPCs. It would also be great to be able to choose the character gender and maybe have options for classes. So I guess maybe a basic character creation system. That would be amazing!

 

TPS camera variant preview! Any feedback would be appreciated.

(Use the mouse right click to toggle between free camera rotation and normal cursor for UI).

 

So I don't care for this TPS implementation. Most third person cameras that I am familiar with are simply operated by holding down the right mouse button. Then when you let go it reverts to a mouse cursor.

What you have with this toggle is clunky, counterintuitive, and unpleasant, at least in my opinion. It would be nice just to be able to hold down the right button, move the camera, and let go then back to your business. This would work better for mobile as well, I think.

I am sure that some people like this toggle thing, so maybe give the option for both? I don't believe it would be terribly difficult to do that.

Anyway, I like the rest of the update… Keep up the good work!

 

Hey thanks for the feedback, it shouldn't be too complicated to change it to the way you want it with a bit of script editing. I know all games are different so I can't plan for every case, but at least with this variant its much much closer to end result for people that want that type of camera.

I'll wait for other's feedback and be happy to improve it in next version is everyone think the controls are not intuitive. Camera rotating only while holding mouse button is actually a good idea. Keep in mind the asset is made for top-down first and this was a bonus I made because people asked for it!

 

Toggle is fine in my opinion.
and click and drag is super easy for us to implement so worry about the more important things.
Every single game is gonna have different requirements, so probably better to not clutter the asset with millions of different features for each and every single type of game, It makes the asset harder to maintain and more confusing for newcomers.

 

I didn't mean for my comments to come across as ungrateful and I am sorry if they did. You asked for feedback and that was my honest opinion.

The suggestion I made is based on an industry standard that is found in everything from World of Warcraft to Final Fantasy XIV to Pumpkin Days etc.

Basically if you do not automatically attach the camera to the mouse movement, it is the standard to click and drag either the left or right mouse button to move the camera. Given that your asset is a click to move framework, using the right mouse button is the logical choice.

Just my opinion, of course.

 

As I mentioned in my above response to the creator, my suggestion is based on an industry standard. It is not based solely on a personal request and desire.

Additionally, not everyone finds it super easy to modify every bit of the code. Personally, I am a writer and a storyteller before I am a coder.

But hey, if it is super simple for you then please feel free to PM me with the modified code so that I can drop it into my project.

Better yet, send it to the developer so that he can easily implement it and make the asset more valuable for everyone.

 

You are right that i should make it like the standard by default. Some people on discord that I asked also said they would prefer the hold. I will change it like that for next version. (without making the code more complex). Its a really simple fix for me.

 

If anyone wants to try the TPS camera fix. Here are the 2 files you need to replace.

 

This is definitely much better in my opinion. Something you might consider as well is not having the mouse go to the center every time the right mouse button is pressed. It can be a bit jarring and doesn't really serve a purpose functionally.

Thank you for acting on this feedback so quickly!

Also, how would I find your discord?

 

Discord link is on the very first post.

 

I knew that… >.>

 

New tutorial video on how to use the Customizable Actions system.

 

Hi, I just played the demo version. There is a problem:
after loading the save, the object changes the rotation angle. (No matter how I put a fence or other object, after loading the save, they will be rotated to one side)
In General, I really liked your asset, I will definitely buy it.