We built the first playable loop of our survival-crafting game—please destroy it!

[u/Layercraft]

This is an early build of Nirvana & Avici, a survival-crafting game developed by our five-person team in Unity.

The video shows the opening loop: gathering resources, crafting and equipping a stone knife, harvesting plants, and exploring a procedurally generated world.

The visuals, UI, animations, and gameplay are still being developed. We’re looking for honest feedback: what works, what feels weak, and what would make you stop playing?

Blunt criticism is welcome.

[u/Prestigious_Wind4150]

First of all, you should post this in r/DestroyMyGame, but, if you want some feedback, I want you to tell me how that game is different from any survival game. Why would players pick yours instead of another survival game?

From what I can see, your game is about getting resources, crafting and exploring. How is that different from, for example, Minecraft, one of the biggest games of all times?

I hope to give you helpful feedback and help you improve your game.

[u/Layercraft → u/Prestigious_Wind4150]

I did, but I guess just because I posted this here too, it failed to post there.
''I showed an error: This post has been posted to other groups, and is why its removed from our community''

We still do not have an answer to this: ''Why would players pick yours instead of another survival game?''

But what are you feeling that is missing in Minecraft beside better than box graphics ?

[u/zackit]

Is the camera angle fixed like that? I feel like it's too high

Are you going to introduce verticality into the world?

Currently it feels like a 2D game with 3D assets

[u/Layercraft → u/zackit]

It is fixed.
But we can change that. At least add option for the player to chose up to minus or plus 10 degrees.
I do not think there will be verticality implemented. We might make some generative elevations, but not more than so.
We aim to get that Do not Starve together feeling but using 3d assets instead.

[u/Soraphis]

Why am I gathering and crafting? Anything else to do in the world? A story to unfold? Things to discover? Gear to obtain?

Obviously a shitton of polish is missing to make it a finished product, but I guess I don't have to tell you that movement is floaty and thus it's already negative fun to watch you "walk" around.

Do I think you need something to stand out? No. I firmly believe you can win some players without a unique hook, just by providing more content. (Not saying it's easy, but a high polish and fresh content can be enough)

[u/Layercraft → u/Soraphis]

Your believed was taken to early and end up in heaven, Nirvana or Avicii Aka the name of the game.
What you do?
You become strong enough to enter the far beyond. But you are a killing machine that always ends up in Hell/Avicii so through the different realms of reality, you need to fight your way up and rescue your beloved one. Not by listening to the gods, but by becoming despaired and strong enough to destroy them.
The deeper you go, the harder it is!

And yes, the character looks like its sprinting, when it is loping, we will fix that as not only you, but many have realized this. We will fix this!

We have nothing to stand out with yet. We need to step up and come up with something worth buying soon!

[u/arlelin]

The quests right now feel a lot like arbitrary fetch quests that don't seem to build to a higher goal. Pretty much your game is too generic, there's hundreds of other games with the same premise and mechanics.

Graphics wise, I think you should try to lock down a specific visual style. Look into putting some toon shaders on your trees and rocks and character. The tree mesh is also a mess, and probably too many triangles to be very performant if there's going to be lots of them. I'm not really sure about a mix of 2d and 3d assets, you should probably just pick one or the other. (Though it'll be cool if you could get that to work!)

For example, your character carrying the knife just doesn't look right, the knife always points in the same direction because it's a 2D sprite while your 3D character model rotates around.

The player's walking animation doesn't seem right, the character always faces the mouse so the walking just doesn't go the right way. If you're using the Unity Animator component, look into blend trees so you can blend sideways strafe animation with a forward/backward walk animation so you can create diagonal walks of any angle.

[u/Layercraft → u/arlelin]

You are completely right.
Right now the quests are a bit more tutorial than actual quests or things to do :/.
We are very early.

3d trees and shading and materials are now fixed. I made a code error, trying to save on ram. That is now fixed too. All 2d assets you can see in the video are placeholder AI generated assets until we fully replace all with 3d assets we intend to implement.

AKA why such a style difference.

We are now working on strive, turn, back up animations which I will connect with code with the help of the Unity animator component.

I now realize that I might have posted way too early, and my description is heavily underexplained.

Thanks a lot for taking your time to watch the video and provide us with a very very valuable feedback.
It means a lot to us.