Inventory

Published February 10, 2011
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Little bit of a slower day today. Got the inventory system up and running, you can pick up/drop/move around items. Works for storage chests and boxes as well, though I still need to make an actual chest graphic. There are a couple issues I need to work out still, including creating an intermediary drop object to handle animating dropping an item in the map. Currently, items just appear there. Also, at the moment items just drop in a random scatter around the player. Might need to work out a different placement pattern for it.

The current inventory screen isn't much:
screen.jpg


That thing that looks like a rock is actually a treasure chest. And it has stacks of wood in it. Stuff like that happens, ya know? At least this one isn't floating out in the water like a whole bunch of the other test treasure chests I spawned to see if the system works.

I did design the system to allow any number of inventories of any size, though, so if I choose to implement multiple bags it shouldn't be a problem. I am kind of re-thinking my previous stance on item stacks, though. It kind of depends on how I structure my resource supply chain. If it turns out the player has to process and re-process resources a lot I might let them stack. I'll have to see how it pans out once I get a little further along with the crafting system.
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Comments

Servant of the Lord
Stackable resources is very important if you do alot of processing. I don't want to click on a stack of logs one by one and say, "cut into planks". I want to just select a stack and say "cut the entire stack into planks". But just because items stack, doesn't mean that [i]every[/i] [i]item[/i] has to stack. You could different stack limits depending on the "size" of the item.

Battle axe? Not stackable. Wood? Up to 10 in a stack. Herbs? Up to 20. Arrows? 15 to a stack. (for example)

If you take this route, a few tips to make things less annoying: Always show the number of items in a stack right next to the item. Don't force the user to click on the item to see them amount in the stack. Don't show the number '1' on a stack if that item isn't stackable. Also, when a stack is 'full' color the number in the stack a different color (like yellow) to let the user visually know that it is full.
February 10, 2011 06:42 AM
yckx
Or if you decide not to let items stack, perhaps you could have some control for when the player goes to process items, in which the number of items to be processed is given. Maybe have an up/down control on the process-item dialog itself. That way you can have both a limited inventory and player convenience.
February 10, 2011 07:46 AM
JTippetts
I think I'd like to reduce resource processing as much as possible. I've currently enabled items to have multiple "charges", so you could, for instance, drop a stack of wood and a pile of ash in the workbench and hit the button, and it'll give you a Wand with, say, 30 charges. In light of this system, I think yckx's suggestion makes the most sense, since I won't have much of the "process sticks into boards, process boards into planks" and instead will just use raw resource types in recipes and give controls to create 1 or more of the given recipe.

Although, it's not really too much of a stretch from here to turn "charges" into "number in stack".
February 11, 2011 03:15 AM
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