By Small Fish
What is My Summer Cottage?
My Summer Cottage is a Finnish survival simulator. Want to relax in a sauna? Go fishing with your friends? Hunt local wildlife? Then this is the experience for you! It blends the normality of your average day in Finland with ridiculous random events to create a dynamic world for the player to explore.
If you're interested and want to read more, our blog goes into further detail regarding the development process:
The Good
The transition to the scene system was a breath of fresh air compared to the previous s&box entity system. Being able to drag and drop events, shop items, NPCs, etc. directly into the scene and instantly test them sped up our ability to pump out content for the game. Features like the character creation would’ve been extremely difficult and time-consuming to make in the entity system.
The ability to create editor widgets and gizmos also proved to be extremely useful. We could make gizmos to position items on the player’s hands, tools to generate icons, or widgets to display prefabs with specific components; all without needing to run the game.
From day one, we knew the game would heavily rely on ActionGraph. This meant that if we misjudged how stable it was or what it was capable of, we would need to scrap it all and go back to the drawing board. ActionGraph ended up being extremely stable and reliable; it even received major updates during the competition, which massively sped up our workflow! Not to mention, even the artist could pitch in! Shout out to our Small Fish intern, Ziks.
The Bad
A big map resulted in everyone working in one main scene. This was a huge pain as other people’s changes sometimes didn’t load correctly, so we would always override each other's work. There has to be a better way to work on the same scene. It was more manageable with the entity system due to hammer prefabs, but the new scene prefabs don’t share the same advantages.
Particles are now an afterthought, you don’t feel like an artist anymore when creating them. The new component-based particles are also missing many features and the results are underwhelming. Component particles have their uses but we are hoping they’re not the be-all and end-all. A standalone tool for creating particles would make for the best experience, some kind of particle graph, perhaps.
Conclusion
Every single Small Fish member started working with s&box in 2021. We have been there to witness the engine evolve and undergo major growing pains. Out of all the iterations, working with the scene system has been the best experience by far (not just because we won £10,000). Not to mention, the scene system is only a few months old! We are excited to see where the next few months take us as Facepunch continues to refine the development experience.
