Devlog apr 25 - Item management and save system

Welcome to the second April devlog!

This period we have worked on creating a framework for item management:

We have added some icons to the character popup, showing any equipped items. The character can pick up items in chests and other containers in the world.

Here, the character interacted with a chest. On the left, above the ability icons we have added some dark icons indicating the different types of items the example character could be wearing. On the right we see two items in the chest: A sword and a club.

Right clicking an item will bring up information about the item.

In this overview, we can see the stats given by the item. We can also see a brief description of the item

An example of an item with multiple modifiers, some positive and some negative.

If you equip the items, your stats will be modified accordingly. 

As shown in a previous devlog, the stat can be clicked to get a breakdown of the various modifiers currently affecting the character.

Pressing a rebindable key will open the inventory screen, which is very similar to the looting screen, but it will show all the items you have. Another new addition to the game is sound effects. Two different sound effects will play when equipping an item and whenever an item is added to the inventory. This will help the player understand what happened if for example they click an item by mistake.

Since we were working with sound, we decided to also add a bit of music. Unfortunately I'm not sure how to show it in a devlog, so you'll have to trust me that even just a bit of music and some sound effects greatly enhances the ambience of that game.

The other thing we worked on in this period is saving and loading your game. So we have created a new menu for that

As with the controls menu, this design is temporary. We will re-design the look of all menus at a later date.

The player can rename their save files, but the game will suggest a default name of "Save1". If that's taken, it will suggest "Save2" etc. Pressing the Save button will create an encrypted json file with the saved data. 

Here is an example with more save files. Eventually we probably want to add some sorting of the files. For example they could be sorted by story progression so later files will be shown first. 

The plan is to show more information about each save file in the menu. For example we could show character experience points or the current map to help the player remember what was going on in each save file.

Once we add more functionality to the game, we will make sure to also handle any new information in the save and load systems. The system could also be expanded with quicksave or autosave functionality in the future.

That's all for this period! We'll be back with the first May devlog on May 9th. Talk to you then!