BuildTutto

After I finished University I wanted to dedicate to game developing again. After the BeardedBear suspension I wanted to do something different and all by myself. At the time I was playing a lot of games like Prison Architect, Rimworld, Factorio, Dwarf fortress, and other resource management game. So I wanted to do my own game.

The Idea

"Tutto" means "everything" in Italian, so the title kinda explain what the game is about.

A test environment for verify objects interactions.

In BuildTutto the main goal is to build and manage a company that creates factories. There are a lot of micromanagement aspects into the building creation like water piping, electric cable layout, lights, structural strength, weight and more. On top of all that, the player need to research and create every object starting from raw materials. Every object can be made from any materials or part, and that final object inherits the fundamental properties of its components. An example could be the electric cable object. It can be made of copper with a proper electric conductivity, but it can also be made from wood or concrete and have very low or zero electric conductivity. This is an absurd example, but it should explain the concept.

Blueprint window to research and create new objects.

I spent a lot of time researching physical properties of elements and metals to try to be the most accurate possible and give the player a great choice when planning his buildings. After blueprinting all the object needed, the player has a group of workers available to build anything he wants.

The workers unloading the truck with the raw resources.

The tech

After having played around a lot with GameMaker I wanted to try something different. Also, I was scared that a game like that was too taxing for GameMaker, so I decided to teach myself C++ through this project. I was interested in learning OpenGL too, but probably it would have been too much to learn in one project. So I decided to use Allegro as the main graphics and input library. I choose it after reading that Factorio developers used it, so I thought "If that can make a game like Factorio it should be more than enough for me". Of course after one month from the beginning of the development they published another post where they explained why they migrated from Allegro to SDL2, but it was still good enough for me and I kept working with that. It was also the first time using Visual Studio and, to my surprise, it was wonderful to debug when something was going wrong. I also like a lot of programming with just an editor and a terminal to compile, so I usually sticked with that to program features and then switch to Visual Studio to debug those.

The dynamic lighting of the rooms and roof structural support testing.

The implementation

Working on that was great, it was very satisfying and I was often working with my friends in libraries or university public areas. It was very productive for me to not being alone in my room. After almost one year of development the project was starting to feel heavy while going inevitably out of scope for a single person doing all the programming, art, and design. My family went through some financial problems too, so I couldn't afford to work on that without an income. Since it was still very, very far from a final product I couldn't hope to make a living out of it, so I had to suspend the project after starting a full time developer job.

The devlog

If you are curious and you want more information about the game I was doing a thing where every week I posted on IndieDB, so you can find a lot of details on what I was working and how I was doing it.

Workers building pipes from raw materials.

External Links

- DevLog Timelapses: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2l3kcw6wUn4Z1-cr5UMLMw
- IndieDB Page: https://www.indiedb.com/games/project-buildtutto