Stu's Rusty Bucket

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Inventory Management changes

I had a bit of a inventory brainfart today.

I have realised, with a game that has such tactical combat as I am going to have, I need to drop the unified inventory management system and instill a separate inventory for each character.
Think, character A on one side of the battle field swaps his sword for a bow, character B on the _other_ side of the field say 90 squares over, swaps his mace for character As sword, so yeah a unified inventory is great when you are constantly in party mode, but when characters are split up across the map, it fails somewhere (and I’m not talking the breaking of the simulation, this is after all a fantasy crpg with magic and such).

Lets think things over.

1 - We have tactical combat that situations will call for changing weapons etc in combat
2 - You may run out of arrows and need to change weapons
3 - Wear and Tear factor into gear
4 - Different gear can only be used with certain skills
5 - The need to tote different gear around because of 4

Inventory management is a real bear in any game, there is no right/easy way to do it, I don’t much like the Diablo method, or inventory slots, only inventory slots are the easiest to implement.

Yes one of the things is this game is about killing your opponents, scavenging the loot, finding better weapons etc and unloading the junk.

There is two things to consider;

1 - Shop management, buying weapons on a per character basis.
2 - Inter Character inventory management.

My take on #1 is that you enter the shop, choose to buy something and buy it. Once you have bought it, the game should then ask you whom to give it to.
As for #2, that is a bit harder. I was thinking a split screen system. Up/Down scrolls up and down the gear in character A, button press moves it to the other side. Press left/right to switch between the two characters etc. That lets you easily trade gear between the two. This from a “Trade Gear” option in the main menu.  At the top of the screen above the gear list will be the character names, scrolling up highights the character name letting you pick another character to trade to.

I need to mock it up and test it and see how feasible it is.