Equipment

The next item to tackle was the ability to equip and unequip items. For this, I needed to first create stats that would be adjusted on equip and unequip. Cue more delays as I tried to come up with a reasonable system here at this point…

I was able to come up with some stats I think are pretty reasonable. Next, I had to decide on layout. Being a UX Designer by trade, I wanted to make this (and every) screen intuitive. The idea is that you have your equipment slots on the left, the selected category’s items in the middle, and how the stats are affected by a specific choice on the right. The only difficult piece of coding here was in getting those stat changes on the right to show up properly. For those, I had to have the game know what your current stats were, the stats for the piece of equipment already occupying the target slot, and the prospective piece of equipment that would replace it. Later, this will get more complicated when I have to account for unequipping items with slots that hold other items, but for now this is fine.

Remember, the goal at this point isn’t to cover everything, but to get to a working game as quickly as possible. To that end, I don’t plan on covering the “status”, “skills”, “collections”, “factions”, or “notes” screens for a while. Next here in menus will likely be “quests”, but I’d like to handle combat first. So next up, I want to generate loot tables now that I have a healthy number of inventory items. After that, I’ll tackle procedural cave generation for the first dungeon. I plan for most dungeons in the game to be procedurally generated with a few premade elements dropped in.