What fundamentals in a island sandbox game do YOU want?

Hello, I am currently making a "Sandbox" island survival game
and I need some ideas and tips in creating a decent survival game

Heres my list so far:

Hunger
Stamina
Thirst (Might not include)
Combat System
Ocean Animals
Crafting
Smelting
Tool-Making

So that's my list so far and I might update the first version of the game
with the basics (Being, Hunger, Stamina, Crafting, Combat System, and Tool-Making)

What fundementals in a sandbox game do you think I should add and /or to
what most survival games should add?

 

A sandbox game should include actual sand. Shovels. Buckets, especially those ones with the little squares in the bottom to make turrets.

Water is cool for moats, but is ultimately optional.

Moving down the list I would expect shells and sticks. Leaves are nice too.

 

I want toy trucks and stuff. Like so you can scoop up the sand and place it elsewhere and you can wear a hardhat like you're on the job! That'd be sweet.

 

It would be nice if there were multiple colors of sand, or the ability to change sand color on the fly. Also, that magic sand stuff that holds its form is pretty awesome. It would be cool if you could add that. A zen gardening feature would be pretty relaxing as a mini game.

 

Thanks for the suggestions!

Of course I already have water in it (Might have to edit the post...)

 

Ultimately I'm teasing. Your OP makes it pretty clear what you are asking for. Its just a common topic. Searching the forums should come up with a high number of ideas for survival and sand box games.

 

These systems are fine so long as you don't make them burdensome to the fun. An aweful lot of games make food scarce, hunger and other things drain too fast, or both. Subnautica is a fun game, but survival is difficult because your hunger drains really fast and you need salt to cook most things... oh, and salt is a mineral you find in the world so the more you eat the further you have to explore to find more salt. So basically as the game progresses you spend an increasing amount of time finding food. You can make early game hard to obtain stuff, but do try to make it so that there's a way to progress where the end result is being pretty stocked up on resources so food isn't an issue for the next few game days.

Bows & stone hammers pls

So the soft world boundary will be a kraken / megalodon?

Not sure if these needed to be 3 separate list items

As for things to add... maybe players can craft a fishing cage with sticks and leaves that they can toss into the water and come back for later to solve their food problem.

I think you should also totally add in the radio system from just cause 2 so you can sell fish to get money and then helicopter order in some supplies. There's nothing like an economy to make any playstyle that's fun for the user a viable way to survive.

 

Woah now! I don't want it to be like a GTAV island game XD
But... might be interesting for another tycoon game

also thank you so MUCH for your suggestions

 

@Steelshot I love survival games so I've played a lot of them. I can definitely suggest that your early stages of development include a mode that does not have hunger/thirst/etc active, so people (including you) can get a feel for what needs to be done in the first few game days to really survive.

Survival games tend to be fun for at least a week no matter how bad they turn out, haha. What kills them the fastest would probably be too much pressure on resource management.

It was far fetched indeed But perhaps it would be useful to you to include such a thing for testing purposes. If you want to test a late game item, you can start up a new game and radio-order the item in. Then you can leave it there to be activated via console for players who want to break the game

 

Are you planning to make a survival game or a sandbox game?

For me, sandbox game is about a world with lots of things to interact but no main game goal

 

Survival island needs fishing, because it's an island after all.

Ultimately what I think every survival game needs is actual survival. Too many I have played are either no challenge from the start or very quickly get to the point of not having any challenge to keep alive. Once I've solved food and water, who cares? It's no longer survival, and those "survival chores" like farming are just overlaid on top of the sandbox. Plus, why am I building all these walls and stuff if nothing will ever come and attack me?

If you're going to go survival, put some real thought into your game balance to make sure there's actual survival needed. Otherwise your game is just more driftwood on the shores of Steam. (Sorry.)

 

Difficulty curve is incredibly important to get right for this type of game. I'd suggest a short settling in period to get used to the controls before everything starts to kill them. Then ramp up both the difficulty and the player abilities.

Increases in kind and complexity of difficulty will make your game more interesting then increases in straight scale. Once I solve the basic challenges of food and water, provide another challenge, say enemies. Then maybe disease. Then a forest fire. Then a flood. A series if different challenges that require different techniques to solve will keep the game engaging.

Players should also feel just in the edge a lot if the time. But not all the time. Provide some lulls where it looks like they might just have made it, before raining all over them again.

 

For what it's worth, "Don't Starve" is one of the games that I felt did a pretty good job on the difficulty and survival aspects. Once you get to know the game, food is less of a problem, but you really can starve to death. The monster attacks ramp up over time, with hounds that attack every so often. Be prepared or die.

As counter examples, both "7 Days to Die" and "Wurm" are both games that once you get a little farming going, keeping yourself fed is basically just a few minor chores to do. "7 Days to Die" has growing hordes that arrive at night, so building a place you can defend or hide in is becomes the important survival point of the game. Contrasting with "Wurm", where once you set up a basic homestead, there is no transition to any other danger. (PVE that is. The PVP servers have other players as the "danger".)

 

You can solve this the way it was implemented in a minecraft mod, by implementing nutrition. There can be early game food that's not too hard to get so you have food for your first few days... but there's also nutrition, so you need variety and food will have diminishing returns if eaten consecutively.

I love 7 days to die

You can integrate this with the nutrition idea so that preparing certain kinds of food will attract certain kinds of animals. If you find and prepare fruits, maybe the player will be assaulted by howler monkeys. If the player prepares meat to restore a large amount of hunger, maybe the player will be assaulted by wolves.

Then player skill and ability can be used to trap those animals and secure more food / tame animals

 

That is the thing about survival though. It's not that hard for a single person to sponge off nature. The thing that ends up really driving conflict is winter and population. Population aside, the only game I know that handles winter properly is Unreal World -actually, it might be the only game that handles crop production properly too.

The biggest thing survival games undermine is how long it takes to do ANYTHING. More often then not, making anything requires days of labor. Gathering resources can require traveling miles out each day. The thing that kills you is likely your time management skills rather than a critter (never mind that most of the big, dangerous animals shy away from people anyway).

 

Now, the radio Idea might be confusing to some players by them
saying "Why can't we just call someone to pick us up?"

Interesting suggestion... might add miniture natural disaters (Like forest fire)
for an Mother Nature update of the game.

 

All I want in a sandbox survival game is one mechanic which makes it completely different from all the others.
Not one mob, not one graphic style, one mechanic.

 

Minecraft mods thrive amongst others with the same content because their progression differs, but new stuff is always nice too.

Island survival... new mechanic... Giant monsters in the ocean? It's not a new concept, but I think subnautica is the only game I can think of where you can actually explore the ocean to a large degree and then encounter giant monsters. You could make your island floating so that when the user looks down from the edge, they see no sand or anything... but on a clear day, the light might go deep enough for them to see huge creatures far below :3