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Post by WitchRolina on Dec 22, 2018 18:25:46 GMT
After a few discussions on discord, we've got an initial pitch for how to handle inventory in the games. Here's a visual aid showing the gist: ![](https://i.imgur.com/KTySe5y.png) The original games had a 5x3 grid for all items in a character's inventory - Dark Dawn changed this to an 8x2 grid, providing 16. I personally like DD's approach more here, and advocate using a 4x4 grid. The advantages to using DD's 16 instead of the GBA's 15 set is that equipment takes up less overall inventory space. In the GBA games, equipment could take up at least two thirds of a character's inventory, while the current proposition caps it at half. This is done in two ways - first with taking into account the space taken by a full set of equipment: The 8 pieces of equipment are the 8 used by the Golden Sun games themselves: Weapon - one of the weapons an adept can wield Shield - arm gear. Shields, Gloves, Armlets Helm - head gear. Helms, Hats, Circlets Armor - body gear. Armor, Garb, Robes Boots - leg gear. Greaves, Boost, Shoes Undershirt - undershirts such as Mythril Shirt, Running Shirt, Silk Chemise, etc. Ring - jewelry. Rings, Periapts, etc. Misc - other items, such as the Trident in TLA, and Umbra Goggles in DD. Second, we change how psynergy tools work. There were a ton of tools in the GBA games, and they couldn't be sold or dropped. They essentially became an "inventory tax". There's a couple ways we can fix this. First, limit the Kinetic spells (Hand spells - Move, Lash, Slap, etc) to what the characters know innately. Second, provide tools for each of the 16 base elemental spells, and no more. Third, have a separate "pouch" specifically for these tools - 4 tools slots for each character. This gives us 16 slots in the inventory to remove these tools, exactly enough to remove any inventory tax they may provide. Finally, there's key items. In Golden Sun, these items (ex: Bone, Black Orb, Elemental Stars, Glyph Book, etc) would sit in a character's inventory and just... take up space. Taz had the idea to have a separate inventory for these items, and I find myself in agreement. These items are regularly part of puzzle solving and exploration, so having a separate inventory for all of them, rather than having to search through each character's inventory to fnid it would provide not only a source of player convenience, but also keep the these items from being part of an inventory tax on the player. I'd say 16 slots (a 4x4 grid) is enough, and that it's the role of level and quest design to make sure that we'll never have a need for more space than that. We'd want to keep this as a 4x4 grid for the sake of unified UI design. When it comes to inventory, what we want is to have enough space for the player to need to do a bit of inventory management for the sake of strategy, but not so much that it becomes trivial. At the same time, we don't want so little that it becomes trivial. Here's an example: ![](https://i.imgur.com/0Xx3VeO.png) Here, we have a character with a mostly open inventory for treasure/enemy drops, a character with different weapons based on what kinds of enemies they're facing and a few offense items to toss around (ex: Oil Drop), one with mostly recovery and healing items, and one with a balance of offense and defense. These serve as examples of late-game inventory examples. My idea here is that early on, this will be much less of an issue. Slowly but surely, the player will need to pay more attention to their inventory (early on, mostly just to remember to head to the shop after a few areas, much like in the early parts of GS), but about half way through the game they'll have notable access to all equipment types, consumables become more plentiful, and they might want to start thinking about what they bring with them. Another thing to think about is whether or not we do variable max values for consumables. There's a double reason for this - the first is to encourage some of the rare but more vital items (ex: Water of Life) to be spread around a bit more. The other is one of balancing - when it comes to 30 Herbs vs 30 Vials, the answer would be pretty clear which to go with. So, here's the talking points we need to discuss: - Is the Inventory System, as it's been laid out, worth adopting, or should we refine it a bit more?
- Do we keep the stacking rules of the GS games (consumables stack, non-consumables don't), or change our approach?
- What should the max stacks be, and if we have variable/weighted stacking, what should the variability be?
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Post by WitchRolina on Dec 22, 2018 18:31:40 GMT
So to answer the questions I laid out myself, here's my personal responses:
1: I really like what we put together on discord. I think it solves the problems we have with the inventory taxes, but without being too generous. It's a good balance, IMO.
2: I think we should keep it - consumables stack, non-consumables don't. I also don't think it'll often be an issue, since... well, it's not very common to have multiple of the same non-consumable item on a character anyways, especially given how Artifacts in GS tend to be unique/semi-unique.
3: Though we could go with GS' 30, I rather like 25 as the absolute max. The reason why isn't logical - it's just purely an OCD-kinda thing. 25 is a square number, so I just like it more. It's more orderly. I do like the idea for variable max stacks, but I'm not married to it. I'd say to have it be a rarity tier system or something:
Item Tier 1: 25 Max (Herb) Item Tier 2: 20 Max (Nut) Item Tier 3: 15 Max (Vial) Item Tier 4: 10 Max (Potion) Item Tier 5: 5 Max (Mist Potion)
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Post by Falgor on Dec 23, 2018 20:08:54 GMT
1: We might need to change it IF at some point in the future we find an interesting and original idea to include to items, but otherwise for what we have now, I'd say this is good enough.
2: These stacking rules make total sense, so we should keep them.
3: This is the one I feel we need to think about the most. Having variable stacking is an interesting idea, but the implications of them should be taken into account: What does it mean for the players to have access to "only" 5 copies of an item like the Mist Potion, for example? Wouldn't it limit them too much in possible combat strategies?
It kinda depends on how we'll choose to balance our items, too: with the way the HP scaling (?) worked in GS, I know I ended up never really using Vials and Potions, while Herbs are used a lot in the beginning of the games (it might also be due to the fact that walking made the characters gain their MP back quickly).
As is, taking the GS items as an example, I'd say that for having both enough "room" with the most powerful items and keeping pleasant round max numbers, we could use: 50/40/30/20/10 for the tiers. Leaving a stack of 50 or 40 for items that won't be useful after level 10 is reached is imo not a problem. It could also make the players think about how much of these the players really need, making them manage their coins more carefully.
Alternatively, tiers going 30/25/20/15/10 also works really well.
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Post by WitchRolina on Dec 23, 2018 20:31:21 GMT
What does it mean for the players to have access to "only" 5 copies of an item like the Mist Potion, for example? Wouldn't it limit them too much in possible combat strategies? Well, yes. That's rather the point. If they can give 30 copies of every powerful item to each character, it trivializes the item. Think back to the end of TLA - when you could buy mist potions at the Prox Shop. Suddenly these changed from clutch items you use in a pinch to being massive healing you pop like candy. I mean, what else are you gonna spend your max money on at that point, right? The combination of keeping these items more scarce, as well as having lower caps on single characters is twofold: Powerful items aren't seen as being trivial by the players due to lower inventory counts It subtly gets the player to spread out their inventory on important things. Sure, you could let a player hold all 10 waters of life. But if that character goes down, you'll wish you'd have spread it out. You'll rarely need more than 5 anyways, thus the idea to cap the strongest items at 5 so that they're spread out. The restriction winds up encouraging smarter play without actually needing to punish the player. I am also vehemently against raising the cap - so the idea of starting with 50 is right out with me. Remember that if split across all characters: 25 x 4 characters = 100 copies of an item Many games with shared inventories cap items out at 99, so using that as our upper limit, while not as generous as GS itself, is still roughly as generous as many mainstream RPGs. Remember that these caps are per character by multiplying your values by 4 and thinking about how that affects the game.
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Post by Taz on Jan 13, 2019 3:42:57 GMT
1. We're being MUCH more generous than Golden Sun, while still keeping the same feel. Being a major contributor to this system, I of course am going to be in favor of it, but we should always be asking ourselves how to improve upon what Golden Sun did so that it feels revolutionary, not outdated, to newer players.
Prime example: Isaac would always be the default character to receive any given item, regardless of the circumstances. This means if you wanted somebody else to get the item instead, you would need to go into the menu each and every time to have Isaac give it to them (provided you wanted to keep his own inventory organized).
While it WOULD be thematically appropriate for Talia to play quartermaster on her adventure, I feel player experience takes precedence, and must ask what, if anything, can be done to improve upon this. Do we have a menu similar to the shops asking who gets to receive each new item, with an option to remember this choice for subsequent copies of that item? Perhaps this option to default to a specific character is on the menu for each given item? Or would we have some kind of "smart" system that tries to stack redundant items wherever possible, gives found weapons to the character who can wield it that has the most seniority, that sort of deal?
At any rate, maybe we should consider bringing this up with the Programmers in the meeting tomorrow, even if only to get their own insights on the inventory system.
2. I too am on board with stacking being for the consumables specifically.
3. Personally, I'm biased to multiples of four, so a 20 max stack sounds sane to me. That being said, Rolina makes a darned good point about having variable stacks, with none any higher than Golden Sun's 30. Count me in on the rarity/power tier system idea.
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Post by WitchRolina on Jan 13, 2019 3:47:32 GMT
In GS, it's the left-most character who gets items. For me, that meant Ivan, then Isaac, then Mia, the Garet in my adventure, as that was my character order. I think that's simple and easy to do, so it'd be the best order of operation for acquisition. Since you can reorder the party in GS, and I have no reason to believe that wouldn't be the case in our game, I figure we let the player decide how they want to sort their team - based on agility (how I do it), based on character acquisition, or based on inventory space - or however else they choose to sort it.
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Post by Anggel on Feb 2, 2019 16:27:22 GMT
Answering those questions.
1 - I like this system. A 4x4 system of inventory is pretty nice, I like the numbers and the tidyness of that. I also like the way that is it divided in a area of tools and a different pouch for key items.
I thought of dividing the main inventory section in 2 halves (8 for only for equipping purposes, and other 8 for items). That is a good idea when it comes to make the menu more organized. However, this also limits the possibility of the final user to experiment with the inventory (you stick the player to only have 8 items, whereas in the other way, you are free to experiment).
2 - If the game in the end has two diffculty modes (i.e. post-game difficulty) or another feature with it (set it via options if you wanna try a challenge), it would be interesting to add the feature of make the consumable items not to be stacked. Thus, the player will think twice when it comes to strategy dealing with enemies. But by default, where it comes to the normal game, the consumable items should be stacked.
3 - Rolina's approach of tier items, because some items with a high fixed stack would make boss fighting easy if not well balanced. But here's another pitch. Imagine that the final game has a series of 16 collectable items, that if you exchange them all in a latter part of the game you get unique items, those would be stacked too for convenience as well.
In fact another pitch. It would be interesting to have consumables that are also collectables (boosts stats maybe if you eat them/do an action). But if you exchange later in the game, you get perks (items, equip, unique magic for each character). Those items would be portraiyed in the game as consumables, but some NPCs may hint vaguely about them. With this approach, we feed post-game possibilities (because there would be a case that the final player has consumed them all wasn't aware so will replay again, and maybe, this would synergize with post-game difficulty if made).
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Post by WitchRolina on Feb 2, 2019 20:14:39 GMT
To respond:
1 - it's not technically divided that way, that's just how the numbers end up. Those slots aren't reserved for equipment per se, the same way they aren't in Golden Sun - you can equip psynergy tools until you have a full inventory in TLA, or you can just go with the four basics and skip everything else after all. Or just have all consumables if you're doing a nekkid run. The point is that you have 16 slots - and it's up to the player to fill them. I just design around the idea that the player is choosing to equip at least semi-optimally (thus, the assumption of a full equipment set by endgame).
2 - I feel that not letting consumables stack is unfairly punishing to the player. I'd want to have a larger inventory, or would want to remove equipped gear into its own section if that were what we were doing.
3 - Those collectables would be considered Key Items by our classification, and thus wouldn't be put into character inventories, and as it's involving the variable stacks idea, I'm not sure I understand what this is trying to pitch. Could you explain it in more detail please?
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Post by Anggel on Feb 2, 2019 21:33:36 GMT
To respond:
1 - Yeah, I know, just said that I was thinking of dividing the inventory becuase I saw that semi-optimal approach, but that would be counterproductive because you won't let the final user of the game to be creative when it comes to personalizing the inventory. I had pointed it up just to say all the ideas that came to my mind, even if I didn't like it to allow further discussion if applicable.
2 - As I said, by default, the consumable items should be stacked, and also following your approach, depending of rarity. But what I tried to explain is a pitch to increase the difficulty if in the future we try to do a very hard difficulty mode. Make an option to not let the player stack items aiming to the hardcore players of the game.
3 - Yes. Suppose you have some fruits that are secret optional key items in the story and also are collectables (could be any other thing, fruits for easiness). Secret because you don't know all the info about these key items. Optional because it's not relevant to the main story, thus not a important key item per se (the player musn't know the true purpose by that item description). Key items because you use them for an important purpose, like key items.
You can find them throughtout the story and that item would be described as like:
"Fancy Fruit X. It's multicolor, and with a shape of a star. If you eat it you get a random minor boost in your stats."
As you can see, the description hints the normal usage, but not the secret usage.
Suppose there are 10 fruits, if you collect them and you eat some and don't keep them throughout the story you can't exchange them later to some fancy items/equipment/spells that are optional. However, some NPCs can hint you vaguely about those fruits and not to eat them.
That is the pitch. It's a mechanic to incentivate the players that have mistakenly used those items to replay the game to find about those secrets.
When it comes to the inventory placement, those items should be normal items and stackable, but also plays secretly the role of a key item later in the game because you can unlock secret things with it. I hope I had explained it better.
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Post by germaniac on Feb 5, 2019 14:45:26 GMT
In GS, it's the left-most character who gets items. For me, that meant Ivan, then Isaac, then Mia, the Garet in my adventure, as that was my character order. I think that's simple and easy to do, so it'd be the best order of operation for acquisition. Since you can reorder the party in GS, and I have no reason to believe that wouldn't be the case in our game, I figure we let the player decide how they want to sort their team - based on agility (how I do it), based on character acquisition, or based on inventory space - or however else they choose to sort it. This is something I'd change from GS. In GS when you receive a stackable item you already have a copy of, it'd go to the leftmost character with an empty slot first regardless of who has . I think it'd save time for the players if the game would just check if the party already have a copy of the item and, if any, give it to the leftmost character who has the copy. Another option is to prompt up a choice box each time you receive an item (which can be disabled).
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Post by WitchRolina on Feb 8, 2019 2:14:12 GMT
Anggel: That... sounds like a quest designed to sell player's guides. I think that'd prove rather unpopular with the players, especially since something as simple as a misclick could ruin an entire playthrough's effort. Obscure quests like that did used to be popular, but there's a reason they're not common anymore. germaniac: Your first option is something I like, the second sounds like it'd be annoying as hell. Honestly though, I think GS handled it rather well - at this point we're merely tweaking nitpicks. There's also cons to the idea - not everyone wants these things to stack, since a more even item distribution may actually help strategically. Perhaps the best option is to have a menu option - to choose between giving to the leftmost character or the leftmost stack, and letting them decide what they prefer. I think we'd be safe to default to leftmost stack, though, since that'd default to what I understand as being the most common playstyle.
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