Home Domes - Economy, Interaction, Building and Farming System

The Build Mode and Farming systems are closely intertwined in gameplay, and they have some similarities in their functionalities.

I created a build system for players to be able to place objects, and then interact with the different items that they have placed within the world. The system draws a dummy or 'ghost' object so that players can preview the placement of objects with the layout of their homes, and shows a dummy character interacting, which shows the player where a character will interact with the object(this also helped me use the character preview as collision to prevent spawning objects in an orientation/location that characters would not be able to interact with an object appropriately). Some objects have multiple character interaction 'slots' so for example multiple characters could sit in different places on the couch when slot(s) are occupied. Objects can be built using the resources that a player's colony has accrued. Once an object is built in the world characters are able to interact with them(some objects don't have interactions and are purely decorative). The objects are their own blueprints that share a common parent, and are set up so that items can be added or edited easily by designers in Unreal Engine. All of the objects are placed on a grid system(except for objects that are required to be placed on a surface), and can be rotated at 45° intervals. Each object or subclass of objects can also be extended to have unique attributes, such as with the farming system.

Plants are placed using the build system, and require seeds to be 'purchased'. The farming system I built allows the player to grow their plants to be harvested to gain food, and seeds/textile materials for use in the game's resource-based economy. Plant growth is regulated by each of the different plants only being allowed to be watered after a certain amount of time has passed. Plants can also be replanted or replaced when they have been harvested, which uses a UI system rather than using the build system.

The game's economy is entirely resource based and does not have a reserve currency(aka no money). To some extent this was an experiment on my part to try out what having a non-market based economy was like in a game. This barter-like system also leaned heavily on the Community Aid Network, which I constructed based on the idea of building a sense of community with other Domes as they tried to survive together on the Martian Frontier. Unfortunately I believe that the game economy systems ended up being overly complex, not well explained, and were more likely to be confusing than fun or interesting for players.