Scavgame (temporary name) is a singleplayer scavenging shooter where you go into various maps searching for loot and quest objectives. Inspiration from Escape From Tarkov, Stalker Anomaly, ZERO Sievert.
The story and theme is a type of alternate-earth (there's parallels to real life, but the world and countries are fictional) science fiction.
NPCs give you story quests, procedurally generated tasks, trade items, give you information, and hopefully play a part in the world outside of shops too.
Boring history
This project technically started somewhere around 2017-2019 or perhaps even earlier. I've had various ideas about a game that revolves around the scarcity of resources. To me the most fun part of many games is the "hobo phase": when you're starting out and have very few things and every item that you find matters. I wanted to capture that into a whole videogame.
I had 2 or 3 separate but vaguely related ideas, one was to make a survival game based in some kind of dilapidated crime-ridden shanty town of Africa where every bullet is precious, another was some kind of Project Zomboid-like game where you defend and upgrade a walking mech that functions as your home base, another was an open-ended Fallout-like sci-fi RPG located in a dark forest. I never had a very clear vision for any of these ideas though so they remained in the back of my mind for a long time.
After playing ZERO Sievert somewhere around 2023, it finally clicked: I had been too focused on the idea of exploring a single world, one of the game ideas above even had the idea of carrying a teleporter that allows you to connect back to your base, but what I was truly missing was the idea of traveling from a "home" map directly to other maps.
Development has happened in short bursts where I work on the game a lot for a couple weeks/months, then get demotivated for one reason or another, and then repeat some months later. Here's an abridged development history, made possible by my habit of posting progress on imageboards:
This is more or less where I stopped working on the project, probably because I got too much into the weeds testing alternate ways to implement weapon recoil and aiming mechanics and not making much progress as a result (the following screenshots/videos go up to 2023-06-09 and they're all about recoil and aiming). The next video I have is from 2024-05-23 where I added trees, then inventory, then props and other miscellanous things.
A bunch of other things happened in the following months: UI stat bars, a lot of inventory improvements, ability to loot NPCs and furniture along with a random loot drop table system, ability to talk to NPCs, ability to travel from map to another, new sprinting mechanic, experiments with fog of war, floor decals, particles and weather, etc. Necessary things but nothing too interesting to look at.
The last video I have from that time is about improving item manipulation and inventories, 2024-08-13.
Why "from that time"? Well, everything up to that point had been software-rendered by writing pixels manually, which is extremely slow and I didn't have a good way to scale or rotate graphics or do any kind of special effects. I really started needing a proper renderer, so I decided that it's time to move to the GPU. However, making GPU renderers has always been the bane of my existence, and that's what caused me to stop working on this project again.
In 2025-03-31 I found the inspiration to give the rendering of this project another shot, over a couple weeks I managed to move to the GPU but it was a very clumsy and limited so I lost motivation again. At this point the bottleneck was mostly my knowledge about how to design a renderer because I have no idea how to organize all the data and state changes in an efficient but flexible way.
Around 2025-10-14 I had designed a new renderer which was much more flexible and powerful, and by 2025-11-30 I had ported this game to it and implemented a new wavy grass effect. The next couple weeks went to tweaking rendering, finally inverting the vision shadow, implementing equipment/item/inventory related mechanics, and other miscellaneous things.
2025-12-09 is the last video before I lost motivation again, probably because I was demotivated by the renderer still not being as good as I want it to. I dropped in for a bit every couple months to do some little tweaks and optimize the renderer and experiment with audio, but nothing very meaningful.
I did manage to make the entire game loop run in <1 millisecond in the end, so the optimizations were decently successful. That sounds good but I consider it merely decent because the way I judge performance is by comparing my game's CPU/GPU usage shown in the task manager relative to Stardew Valley's. My game hovers around 2.75%/6.5% respectively, both of which are more than Stardew, and I don't even have any kind of lighting system yet.
I also found out that doing nothing causes 1.5% GPU usage, so there's probably a lot of OpenGL overhead that wouldn't exist if I could switch to DirectX. That might have contributed to my lack of motivation. I once tried DirectX but threw it into the trash as hard as I could for reasons I won't get into
Current status
Scavgame is starting to resemble a game, but it's definitely nowhere near playable yet. Some critical features are missing before I can even start making the game's content.