Most of the visible progress since the last dev log pertains to the completion of the inventory and equipment systems. The corresponding menu was already visible since a few weeks, but it is now fully functional. This means that it is now possible to use and equip items. In order for items to have any use, I also had to add the “stats” system, displaying various numerical stats about your character.
A few items have been added to the inventory in order to test this. Hovering with the mouse over items in the inventory will display their name and, if they have an effect, display an icon showing this effect. The items in the base inventory are, for the moment, only equipment or crafting material. To test a consumable item, you first have to go to the crafting menu and craft a few red potions, which you can subsequently drink by going back to the inventory menu.
Items can be used or equipped by single-clicking on them. Usable items will be consumed in the process and apply their effect directly. Equipment will be placed in the appropriate slot (note that before equipping arrows, you must equip a quiver).
The items can affect your stats, but the stats themselves don’t play any role in anything yet. They will become important in the upcoming battle system.
I don’t consider the inventory to be finished. It’s a nice first functional version, that will be useful to actually play the game in a meaningful way. But I have additional elements in mind, which will become relevant as soon as the battle system is done. The interactions with the items will probably change as well, moving from a basic one-click system to a drag’n’drop-oriented one.
Unfortunately, these updates do not lend themselves to very interesting tech talk, like previous dev logs did. This was a lot of work, to set up an ecosystem of classes to make the UI modular and make sure the system can be extended easily, but none of this was particularly challenging. I got to deal quite a lot with the new Phaser 3 input system, which was nice and may lead to a tutorial or two for those interested.
Aside from that, I kept tweaking the forests a bit. There are now three different types of trees, and their distribution varies based on latitude. You won’t find the same threes in the far north of the map as in the far south, and the distribution of trees smoothly changes as you travel along the north-south axis. It’s a small detail, but it’s the accumulation of such details that will eventually breathe life into a map which is mostly procedurally generated at the moment.
For the next dev log, the next milestone I had in mind was the shopping system (to buy/sell stuff in buildings), to bootstrap the trading mechanics of the game. However, recent changes in how I envision buildings to work may change the calendar a bit. I haven’t decided yet what will be the next significant step forward, we’ll see!
Jerome Renaux
I'm an independent game developer, working mainly on browser-based multiplayer online game (HTML5 & Javascript). I love to discuss about all aspects of game development so don't hesitate to get in touch!
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