Files
Cinderwild/docs/ROADMAP.md
Paul Bailey 67bf85523d M1d: creatures, hunting, weapons, food buffs and the hide cloak
- Rabbits, deer and boars with procedural meshes and animated legs, a
  state machine (idle/wander/flee/charge/dead) and heightmap steering that
  avoids water, cliffs, the world edge, trees and buildings
- Spawner keeps a habitat-based budget around the player (6/4/3)
- Melee needs a weapon or tool (club, spear, axe, pickaxe); box sweep hits
- Wooden spear (thrust or throw) and crude bow with draw-scaled arrows;
  projectiles stick in the world as saved pickups
- Carcasses: E to butcher for meat, hide and embedded arrows
- Boars charge and gore when hit; hurt flash and a brief healing pause
- Cooked meat gives Well fed (faster stamina and healing); buffs saved
- Hide cloak: wear for warmth, saved, goes in the grave on death
- Feathers as meadow pickups (appended, existing save ids unchanged)
- New test_creatures_combat suite; run_all.sh gets a per-suite time limit
2026-11-04 10:55:44 +00:00

3.7 KiB
Raw Blame History

Roadmap

One milestone ≈ a chunk of working sessions. Each ends with something you can actually run and see. Timelines assume solo dev + heavy AI assistance, steady (not full-time) pace.

M0 — World skeleton (single-player) · ~2–4 weeks

Goal: walk around a lit, atmospheric terrain. Prove the look.

  • Project scaffold, git repo, docs
  • Godot installed, project opens
  • First-person / third-person character controller (move, jump, mouse-look)
  • One flat/heightmap terrain chunk with a material
  • Atmospheric lighting: directional sun, sky, volumetric fog, tonemapping
  • Place one low-poly tree + rock to set the mood
  • Done when: you load the game and walk around a Valheim-ish lit field.

M0.5 — Scenery & world bounds (done)

  • Mountain-rim boundary (steep cliffs + invisible wall + respawn safety net), covered by tests/test_boundary.gd
  • Procedural terrain shader (grass/dirt/sand/rock strata/snow), lake + water shader
  • 5 procedural tree types, faceted mossy rocks, cliff outcrops, bushes, logs, stumps
  • Streamed wind-animated grass + flowers; cloud sky; swimming

M1 — Survival loop (single-player) · ~3–5 weeks

Goal: the core game verbs. Detailed plan in docs/SURVIVAL_DESIGN.md (phases M1a–M1d).

  • Resource nodes: chop tree → wood, mine rock → stone (M1a)
  • Inventory + simple hotbar UI, chests (M1a)
  • Crafting (recipe: wood → tools / building pieces) (M1a)
  • Pause menu, title screen, world slots, save/load, autosave (M1a)
  • Health / stamina / hunger / warmth, day-night cycle, fire fuel, cooking, foraging, torches, death + grave (M1b)
  • Weather (rain, storm, snow), wet/shelter (M1c)
  • Snap-together building: floor/wall/door/roof/gable, resource cost, support + collapse, dismantling (M1c)
  • Bed spawn point and sleeping, resource regrowth (M1c)
  • Creatures (rabbit, deer, boar), hunting, club/spear/bow, butchering, cooked-food buffs, hide cloak (M1d)
  • Wolves at night, hide armour, more recipes (later M1 polish)
  • Done when: gather → craft → build a tiny shelter, single-player.

M2 — Multiplayer · ~2–4 months

Goal: self-hosted, authoritative, 2–8 players.

  • Refactor state to server-authoritative (single-player becomes loopback server)
  • Headless dedicated server mode (--headless -- --server)
  • ENet transport, client prediction for local movement, interpolation for others
  • Replicate resource nodes, inventory, building, health
  • Persistence: world save/load on the server
  • Done when: a friend joins your self-hosted server and you build together.

M3 — Addon SDK + sandbox · ~2–3 months

Goal: the differentiator. Easy, safe mods.

  • Embed sandboxed Lua VM in the server
  • Capped API surface (events + safe world queries/commands)
  • Per-addon CPU/time + memory quotas
  • Addon manifest format (declare items/recipes/prefabs as data)
  • 2–3 example addons (a new craftable item; a "welcome" message on join; a custom spawn rule)
  • SDK docs for modders
  • Done when: a modder drops an addon folder in and it safely adds content, and a deliberately-malicious test addon is contained (can't read files, can't hang the server).

M4 — Content & polish · ongoing

  • More biomes, creatures, items, building pieces
  • PvP / raiding rules, building damage
  • Better UI, settings, controls
  • Audio, music, weather
  • Packaged builds for Win/Mac/Linux (+ Mac signing/notarisation)

Honest overall estimate

A genuinely playable self-hosted survival game with a working sandboxed addon SDK is roughly 6–12 months of steady solo work with AI help. The M0–M1 vertical slice (a few weeks) is what proves the concept and keeps you motivated.