Update on Main Game Progress. 4

Update 4

In this update I’ve been working mainly on the inventory system and its branching components.

The inventory got a slight graphical change from the last update. The buttons that were a solid color are now changed to have just red and blue highlights and have the words ‘MIN’ and ‘MAX’ to give the player an idea on what they do. I thought the solid color was a little too jarring compared to the light grey background.

I reprinted the inventory and drop icons/pictures. The shotgun and bolt action rifle got a slight design change each (comparing to the prototype). I remodeled large portions of the rifle to be cleaner and truer to the real life reference. Although it’s still a far cry in terms of actual real life detail, but at the current resolution and art style I feel it would be a waste of time to do that. Items dropped are now going to be animated similar to how Diablo shows the drops (very short animation were the item does a flip and then lands on the ‘floor’).

After thinking on it for a day, I decided to scrap the wheel menu. The way this game operates it would have been little to no benefit having it (other than looking cool), and it would have been a fair bit of extra work compared to the general arrow-list style menu. The inventory was given its own hotkey as that is what is going to be accessed most of the time. And since I integrated weapon upgrade functionally directly into it, there is really no need for the player to go anywhere else regularly.

I was debating on whether to have health packs or not. My original design ideas is to incorporate concepts present in classic Doom, so carrying health packs like a pussy sounds kind of lame, but we’ll see how it goes down the road. I have an idea how to implement them anyway with the current setup, so no need to worry about any major UI redesigns.

The cursor will now display the stat information to the lower left view screen when it is over an item, or other interactive object (like the upgrade buttons). I also redesigned it’s icon, I found the design from the original prototype a little too plain.

One of the crowning achievements this time around is revamping how the inventory handled placing an item on the item hold grid. Without going into a long winded explanation, I figured out a way to make the items look for a free spot before placing it on the grid with my current setup. It almost works too perfectly,..... Thus, I’m expecting something to break down the road.

I’ve implemented an upgrade system for the two damage types (that was an exhausting amount of code...) . I was originally going to have scaling values the more the item is upgraded, but decided to just keep the cost flat for each weapon grade/rarity making this already exhausting task more manageable. I’ll just adjust the drop rates for the upgrade items to get a good mix of speed and consistency. As it stand now, lower grade items take less types and amount of material to up one point on either the min or max damage values, while higher grade items with larger upgrade potential cost more items to upgrade a point.

The code for checking if the item is in the proper spot to be ‘inserted’ was a mess in the prototype. I took what I needed and restructured the way it is processed. The results are a much more responsive and robust detection for out of bounds items. I also made sure the light display worked properly. I may revisit and do some polish, but as it stands I think it’s presentable enough. The only thing left is to make code for tracked items, but I don’t see that posing too much of a problem.

While it may be a tad premature, but I’m starting to flesh out a title screen. This is so I can start implementing things like character select and continue/load saved games.

Anyway, that’s it for this update.