Taking inspiration from what I think was an intentionally silly piece of artwork, probably meant to poke fun at various dungeon based games inventory systems, I decided to try and address the issue head on by essentially creating a game that had “no inventory system”
view the image HERE...
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http://www.waynereynolds.com/
Like the inspirational image...every piece of equipment the player had could be seen on the character weather he carried it in his hands, wore it on his person, or if it was attached by some other means. The bottom line though, is that the player could easily see all that he owned at a glance, without having to scroll through a menu or look at an inventory grid.
I came to realize that any game that could do this, and animate well, could potentially have the power to both create and maintain a high level of immersion, and keep the player connected into the game world for longer periods of time.
While doing some research, and discussing inventory systems with a friend, he pointed out that many of them could get out of hand, and explained how had played a game that actually allowed him to carry a very large and unrealistic sum of items as well as 6 additional backpacks full of even more items.
By default my game wouldn't have the problem of being unrealistic in that respect. But it would prove to have issues of its own.
The first of these being the amount of items that could be carried.
6 backpacks and hundreds of items was never the intention. But the space I was working working did seem kind of limited. At current count the most items that can be carried by the player are about 6. which admittedly isn't very impressive.
The next issue was dealing with the placement of each item.
With this issue I had to work within several rules that could potentially conflict with one another.
- Does the placement of the equipment make logical sense?
- Is it the item located in an easily recognizable place, so that the player could easily identify it as well as its use?
-Is the item in a place were it can be accessed quickly, and keep associated animation times short? We don't want the player character to be vulnerable for very long periods of times do to overly long equipment usage animations.
Currently progress on this inventoryless system is working and looking good, though the item count may have to remain small.
The biggest issue to overcome is the sheer amount of character animations that have to be done to pull this off.
2 comments:
I'm trying to think of games that had more realistic inventory. Maybe Resident Evil. The inventory on that was infuriatingly small. It certainly made the game much harder.
Game with six backpacks - Any modern MMO RPG follows this format.
From Everquest (prolly earlier but that's as far back as I go) to WoW.
I think it was Dungeon siege where you actually got a donkey, he carried the vast majority of your gear for you. It was kinda cool but ultimately quite frustrating (you need something and he's not accessible/ some fucker kills him).
We are kinda of in a spoiled state of mind and an over indulgence of the 'loot whore' mentality. This spreads back to old school pen and paper RPG, I remember a group I was in where the firs thing we did was pool our money to buy a bottomless bag so we could loot more and generate more in sales later.
Trash or Vendor loot is the primary method of increasing your money in an modern RPG, MMO or otherwise. You gather up all this crap solely to sell it when you next reach civilisation. With this income you can then buy proper goods, even if it's just food and water.
The concept of weight is one of the first things discarded in a modern 'casual' Tabletop game as no-one can really be arsed with the un-fun counting of kgs of weight you have on you and that it doesn't exceed your CON x 3 etc.
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