Greetings all,
I am currently working on an inventory system and I have a few questions about reality vs. convenience.
The inventory system will have a basic crafting system, and realism dictates that the items being used to craft must be in your hands. Will it frustrate people to have to move things from their pockets/pack to their hands in order to make stuff?
I am also considering making items stackable, the pro being an easier to sort through backpack, with the con being each time you move a stacked item, a pop-up window will ask how many of them you want to move. Playing Worlds of Ultima:The Savage Empire, this annoyed the bejeebies out of me. My largest pack would hold up to 28 items, in a scroll window.
The character has pockets on their clothes, and a pack or 2. If they change clothes, the items in the pockets stay in them, so the player might lose them if they lose the old clothes (You can put changes of clothes in a pack and leave the pack behind to chase an enemy, only to have your pack stolen while you are gone…). Only four things will ever fit in the pockets, so they would need to be moved to the ground (directly, no need to pass through hands) and then the clothes changed, with the items then put back into the pockets. This would be made clear in a tutorial, but I just wonder if that is too much micro management.
Obviously making and testing each design is required, but I thought some good advice might save me some time and work.
Thanks for your time.
I say screw realism when it comes to inventories, go for what is intuitive and fluent. As far as stack-able items go why not have a hot key to select just one out of that stack? Or a small button next to each item stack that you can click to take just one of that item.
I don’t get why you want to be realistic with putting the items in the player’s hands. If the player has all the needed ingredients then on the menu to craft something just click craft and the items should automatically be used. You can at that point have the player to an animation that simulates actually handling the items.
thanks for your reply, and i made a menu which appears over the inventory icon to let you choose taking one or all of the items. your idea was helpful.
as a blender user, i can say that trying to remember hotkeys is not fun. when i have 3940390 players, maybe, but i think my game will be more “one week fad”, if it sells at all.
The game is semi-turn based, and what you are doing/holding when the enemy attacks is a key point of the gameplay. For example, it takes time to change out of wet clothes,and if the enemy find you at just the wrong time…
That is why i thought about realism, but perhaps today’s gamers dont want realism. they just want the next point and click, no need to think.
It is, but it’s a comprehensive book on game design.
Fortunately, it’s broken into discrete parts pretty well (specifically, ‘lenses’ for looking at your game.) Don’t try to read it all at once; try a lens or two at a time.
I suggest you play some WoW both raw and with various well-liked inventory mods and decide what you like and would work best for your game.
No need to reinvent the wheel or spend a bajillion hours thinking up, implementing, and testing different systems when the big guys and their huge modding community have already put more time and money into UI decisions like these than most indie devs have available for their entire game.
This is great advice. If a problem has already been solved by someone else, and their solution is readily available under your budget, buy and implement it. It’ll be faster by far than rolling your own.
First - as stated in the post it happened in, someone else had linked that book to me, before! Sorry about that, no harm was intended (or, hopefully actually done).
I am amending my post with the following information, per Eric5h5s redactions: