I’m new to programming and unity, I was wondering if its worth the time and effort to come up with my own inventory system. I see there are assets available in the store that have prefabbed systems ready to drop in your game. Considering all the other work that needs to be done that I could be doing for my game, is it worth spending the time creating my own inventory system?
As a rule that I myself use all the time: Don’t use it if you don’t understand how to make it yourself. For instance: I didn’t start using Unity until I had made some basic games in more simple platforms and eventually ended up reinventing the wheel when I was trying to make a GameObject class that could do everything that Unity’s version could do.
But that’s my own S.O.P. You can use whatever asset that you want and if it saves you work it would be considered “worth it”. However; if doing so prevents you from learning about how things work under the hood then you end up making things harder down the road and more expensive as you have to buy more and more asset packages. Which is why I formulated my above mentioned rule.
Honestly; I wouldn’t buy an inventory system at all. It in general doesn’t seem like it would save all that much time for how much customization you may end up doing in the long run.
But that’s just the opinion of one crabby programmer sitting in his deep dark coding den!
I think it depends on what you want. If you need it fast and don’t care to learn much, look at the various ones (total $150 currently to buy them all, cheapest is $10 btw), see which looks closest to what you need, get it. Big savings on time. Best to get one with lots of examples and source code.
If you want to learn a lot about Unity and have the time and will, an inventory system is a great little project. Not too difficult, but for a beginner it touches on a lot of things you’ll need to know anyway to make the rest of your game.
If you work (even as a dishwasher), think of what your time is worth, what you get paid per hour. And how many hours you will spend making this. If you make $10/hour, and it will take you 1 hour to make the cheapest existing system, make it yourself. If you could reproduce the $45 system in 4.5 hours, make it yourself. If you think it will take you longer than than (probably, right?), you save money by buying one.
If your new to programming its probably not going to be very good or you may not even finish it. But if you think you could do it why not? Sure it might not be as good as some other out there but you will probably learn a thing or two along the way. Also it depends on how important it is to your project or if your just messing around learning as you go.
Fattie says it would take about a year to create my own? Is that really what’s involved in creating one of these? I’m new to programming but … a year? for one system?
Anyway, thanks for the input. Hard to choose a correct answer to this question. I’ll have to test all the suggestions out first.
