Am I bitting too much to chew with this map idea?

I’m currently making an FPS with an emphasis on physics in an sci-fi setting.

The story is basically you are a prisoner working off your time as a mercenary sent out to find out why a colony went silent And find it infested with bugs. Then later you find out the bugs were put there by the colonist as a security measure to keep people away from what they found deep under the planet surface.

I have been going over and over and over different ways of doing the Maps.

My original plan was to do a Metroidvania, But I’m quickly discovering this puts me at odds with the emphasis on physics.

So I’ve now moved it more towards an open experience with less emphasis on Keys and More on open exploration.

There is going to be tons of things to collect but I don’t want them to be keys anymore.

The only real key I want is difficulty.

So that said my current plan is to have a collection Of subterranean areas and have the surface area Be extremely hostile and impossible to last long in.

There will be an events in the game Where you set off an antimatter bomb in orbit That vaporizes most of the surface and makes it much more traversable.

From that point on the surface area will become a sort of transit system.

In other words you Have to Crawl through these different areas for half of the game, but on the second half you have a very large open area to fast travel with.

I’m definitely not wanting to make far cry here, but I do worry having a large open map like that might be more difficult than I’m planning.

Also, I worry that players might confuse that large area as something littered with things to do And become frustrated when it’s Mostly baron.

Thoughts?

I should also mention that thing they’re trying to stop you to get to is the last boss, which is an enormous Eldritch horror. Like a mile tall enormous. And it breaks through to the surface and you have to zip around the above ground map that you’ve been using the entire time to kill it.

Scope down until it hurts then scope down some more. There will be plenty of time for scope creep later. Maybe make the physics combat fun then worry about the map size once you’ve validated the first part.

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Not sure if you’re working solo or in a team. Or if you’re going to make the assets for the game or buy them. It’s probably worth checking other games to see the kind of quality, team sizes and time it takes. If this is a personal project I’d suggest avoiding any large open worlds. Smaller, higher quality maps are normally better and are cheaper. For example, I preferred the shopping mall in Dead Rising 1 rather than the boring town in DR4.

My gut feeling is that a project like this would probably require a team of 10 devs working full time for about three years. Also, being a FPS you’re competing against large AAA titles like Call of duty.

The physics puzzles sound interesting, I’d personally focus on that instead. Maybe just have a bunch of small puzzle rooms like portal and keep the space horror theme.

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Semi large enclosed areas, might be easier to create, than a large open world enviroment. If you’ve ever seen the large areas in Metroid Prime or Phantasy Star Online on the dreamcast, use those as some examples.

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well i already seen topic about giant maps, here are the core parts:

  1. No, you can’t make maps bigger than 2.5 square km, that won’t bug the floating point
  2. Just use many scenes connected with “seamless” LoadSceneAsync
  3. You will die in agony managing a huge scene with thousands of manual items
  4. (Don’t know if this issues if the whole part far away from origin point, without far jumps to opposite position)
    You also need to take into account the scene origin point, the floating point will bug some cm’s and even visuals if GameObjects VERY far away from 0 0 0.

Upd.
At least I checked falling for some minute or more below floor - result: It distorts and crashes.

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I appreciate the heads up about floating point. I am aware of it and as of now I’m going to attempt to recenter on my own, but failing that I’m okay with out of the box solutions.

As for team size, the current plant is solo but I’m okay spending a couple grand here or there for certain things and am not against opening the project to collaborators once I have more proof of concept.

I’m just not looking to do handshake deals.

I’d want a contract with clear language, clear numbers, clear copy right ownership, clear agreements for leaving the project, and so on.

I should also mention an environmental artist might be a consideration for something to spend money on.

I don’t think I can help you with other stuff, especially the juridical parts.

I have only 1-2 proper months in Unity, excluding fooling around and some ugly 2D platformer release, though I currently work on 3D project and first one was a big scale survival game with procedural generation that I abandoned.

My art skills are zero, if we exclude very low-poly models and 32x32 pixel art textures (on 64x64 I think i’ll find place for bunch of errors already)

Though if some reason you need a single 32x32 painted 3D object or art I can do it just for lulz with fully giving to ya and never use it myself if this is also a condition.

I appreciate the consideration but I’m nowhere Near that point.