Please Note: This project did not get finished. See more here

TL;DR

Decay is an open-world multiplayer low-poly game designed and programmed by myself. Some of the features include a modular building system, persistent saving,

The Beginning

One of my favourite games when I was 16 was Rust, an open-world survival game where you fight other players and raid their bases to gain items. Coincidentally the style of the game is very close to how I wanted to make my dream game.

As a hobbyist game developer, it was always interesting looking at the underlying source code of Unity games to see how popular games worked. You can use tools such as JetBrains dotPeek to decompile C# DLL libraries, which is what non-IL2CPP Unity games build to.

Art

Check out my Twitter to see some of the posts I made about Decay artwork.

I used Blender to create all my 3D models, mainly because it is simple to use and free to use. As Decay was a survival game, I decided to create models in order of how the game would progress (wood, stone THEN metal). This means I needed a tree.

Hmm… Not enough variation… More tree.

Great! Now I only needed a couple more things:

  • Axes
  • Guns
  • Player Models (with animations)
  • Building blocks (foundation, wall, doorway, door, roof, ramp, beds) all in varying materials
  • Vegetation (with shaders)
  • …
A small collection of models made for Decay

That should be it! Just import all of the models, and we should have a working game!

Wrong.

Networking

Yes I made it multiplayer, because it isn’t aleady a behemoth task to create a fully working open-world survival game.

The networking package I used was Photon Bolt. This was because I was already familiar with the Photon ecosystem and Bolt was the latest package at the time.

Bolt makes it really easy for you to implement multiplayer into a game. They support input commands, much like many of the Source projects do. This means that instead of synchronising a position every tick, you synchronise inputs and infer the positions from the inputs:

This makes it harder for cheaters to fly around the map like you can find in games like Fall Guys and GTA 5.

Steam

I wanted to deploy the game to Steam. This was because Rust was on Steam (contributing factor to the downfall).

Rust sold 530,000 copies during 2020, and grossed $43 million during the year. Source

Also I needed a way for servers to keep track of a user’s stats, so when a user logs on/off, they maintain their identity.

There are a couple of good Steam libraries for Unity, both with their pros and cons:

Facepunch.Steamworks is made by Garry Newman, my idol, so of course I went with it. Also Steamworks.NET uses this horrible C++ style naming convention for everything:

public class SteamScript : MonoBehaviour {
	protected Callback<GameOverlayActivated_t> m_GameOverlayActivated;

	private void OnEnable() {
		if (SteamManager.Initialized) {
			m_GameOverlayActivated = Callback<GameOverlayActivated_t>.Create(OnGameOverlayActivated);
		}
	}

	private void OnGameOverlayActivated(GameOverlayActivated_t pCallback) {
		if(pCallback.m_bActive != 0) {
			Debug.Log("Steam Overlay has been activated");
		} else {
			Debug.Log("Steam Overlay has been closed");
		}
	}
}

Yuck.

The Downfall

Many factors contributed to the downfall of Decay:

  • Burning out - At the time I was studying for my A Levels, and so if I wasn’t revising or in school, I was at home working on Decay.
  • Ridin’ Solo - Turns out making a fully open world low poly multiplayer survival game isn’t achievable by yourself. Who would’ve thought.
  • Technical Debt - It felt like every time I wrote a bit of code, I refactored it weeks or even days later which was a massive waste of time.
  • Money - Pro tip: Don’t develop a game in hopes of making money.

Summary

I have learnt so much in the time spent on this project, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. The magic about learning is finding your limits, and this is a perfect example of that.

If I was to come back to this project, the scale of the project would drastically decrease, maybe by dropping multiplayer, or not implementing and open-world map.

Who knows, I may pick up the project if I find some free time.

Photos and Videos

I may move this to a separate post when I find time because I have ALOT of content on the development.

A little farm which is seen from the main menu
Scuffed inverse kinematics system