Building Inventory Items – Sprites

I talked a lot earlier about making a beeline for your MVP – do as little as possible to get your MVP off the ground, then flesh out stuff later. I’ve been slightly bending that the last few weeks. Thinking about code endlessly can be stressful and I needed to do some work on the game that was more mindless, so I’ve spent the last week just building out sprite assets.

To be fair to myself, there has been a slightly valid reason. It turns out that to properly build something like the inventory menu, I need to code things like scrolling through menus, sorting items, and opening and closing categories. To properly do this, I need at least two dozen different items in the player’s inventory. While I could just set them all to have the same sprite, I wanted to test that I could manipulate inventory sprites properly as well. Soooo, I built out a bunch of sprites. It turns out this has been good, because in the the back of my mind I’ve been rethinking how I’m going to suck in item data to make it more extensible.

The whole “2-bit” nature of my sprites has been interesting. On one hand, they’re fairly easy to create because I get to only work with two colors (three if you count the negative whitespace from black), which means there’s only so much pixel-perfect tweaking I can do. If a sprite looks awful, it doesn’t take much time to scrap and redesign. But on the other hand, it’s hard to make it look good for exactly the same reasons as listed above. Plus, there aren’t a ton of online resources I can use as a starting point from places like Open Game Art.

I’ve also started thinking about economy, but the conclusion I’m starting to come to is to not worry about prices right now. That whole thing is a sticky mess and properly balancing it is going to be arduous. I think I’ll only need to start thinking about that when I get to things like random loot tables and relative rarity of items.

Up next: Building the external CSV’s that contain item data, sucking those in, displaying those items on the map, allowing the player to walk over them to collect, and displaying those collected items in the player inventory.