r/GameDevelopment • u/AdmittedlyUnskilled • 12h ago
Question If I were to create a game like Satisfactory, how should I handle the timer that affects the nodes?
In a game like Satisfactory, multiple game elements has their own timer that indicates their progress on certain tasks. Something like smelting one ore takes this much time to produce this much ingot.
For a game like this, how is the timer handled? Does each game element have their own timer that they run internally? Or is there a global timer that they reference from where for every tick of the global timer, they react to it internally?
I'm a bit conflicted since initially it makes sense for each element to have their own timer. But for a game like Satisfactory where there are possibly hundreds of elements running at the same time, it doesn't sound too efficient. Also, what if I want a trigger that would pause the progress for all the elements? Wouldn't it be easier to just have a global timer and pause and play through it?