What are your design preferences, your coding preferences, i want to know everything you want to say about making inventory systems.
I’m a simple fella, I like to make my inventories minecraft-like (?), with regular stacking and right click does this, left click does that, and dragging through it, etc. I want to change that, and hopefully you guys can give me some ideas!
Thanks for reading and thank you to whoever responds!!!
I also make my inventories like you. I made a character inventory where you can drag and drop to equip a character to different teams. I also made an item inventory where you can stack same type of items. What do you want to change about the inventory system? maybe i can also get some ideas to improve my inventory.
I’ve been playing a lot of Astroneers, and the game has a very fun and different kind of inventory. It’s an actual backpack where you have spots to put items, so you can grab them from the ground and place them in your inventory clicking on the backpack on your character.
Very very very different to what we see out there, specially with survival games.
I found over time that drag-and-drop inventories, while intuitive to use, is probably the slowest way for a player to interface with an inventory. If playing casually, not an issue. But when you’re playing games like Valheim and Minecraft (particularly heavily modded) the amount of manual inventory management starts to become a drag.
On the other hand, I think my favourite form of inventory is the kind that you don’t need to manage yourself. Games like Monster Hunter, ironically, which never requires you to manage your inventory manually. Most everything goes into same container with infinite storage. Any crafting is simply a list of recipes that you peruse, and it tells you whether you have enough of the required reagents or not.
So even though my current project has nothing to do with hunting giant monsters - but does have a lot of crafting - it ended up being the main source of inspiration for the UI design for my game. Its also very compatible with controllers, while still has fast to use with WASD and surrounding buttons.
I think in the end it probably helps to reduce the amount of manual work the player has to do, unless you have a good reason that it adds to particular experience in your game.
Same with crafting. Let the player think about just what want to craft, and what they need to craft it (and how to obtain it), rather than having to grab all those items out of different containers and haul them to a crafting station, only to forget one or two things and have to go back and get them. Annoying!
Coding preferences I could go on for ages but I haven’t the time.
Both of your ideas are good. On Astroneers its on world canvas so it gives a different kind of experience for the player to be more involved. But in the end it really depends on how you want to make your game. If you want the player to have freedom to arrange the inventory or just a visual element to show what items you own
OnDragBegin etc.), everything gets easier