Hello!
So as mentioned last week, we are back with fresh dev-log no.2 :)
Today we’d like to share with you our current inventory design. Or rather a character status screen combined with inventory. In CLS we’d like to go a rather old-school way of presenting the UI in the form of nice 2d, ‘hand drawn’ elements - inventory below and dosimeter last week where examples of this approach.
Below you please see the screen as it looks like now.
PART 1: Inventory screen
Obviously you see a lot of different bars and details on it.
Let’s break them down one by one:
In this screen you can see the items which are currently equipped or are being worn by the player. This area is divided by the parts of the body - so we have head, torso, legs, hands etc.
Each individual part of the ‘armor’ player wears delivers him some level of protection against outside dangers. These protections sum up - making the global protection the player has.
Some items also get damaged from the same sources (the more something protects players from certain damage source - the less it will get damaged from this source). When item gets worn down - its protection capability and other values drop-down. The combined protection the player has is presented below this screen in the form of bars:
Now going to the right side of the screen:
Aside from providing the player with protection, the clothing also provides him with means to carry his equipment around.
Each armor piece may provide a certain pattern of slots - which are able to accommodate items of various sizes which the player ha decided to take for the mission or picked up along the way.
As you can see we get detailed information in regard to the weight of the clothing pieces and items placed in its slots - which gives us the total weight of the section.
Note the bag on the bottom - this is the bag which player carries in one of his hands - thus the extra slots provided. This means though that he won’t be able to use two handed tool now. In such need the bag can be dropped on ground and will then work as portable stash.
These bars and values represent how effectively the character is able to move around and perform actions.
Total efficiency (TE) is the most important thing here - it is a result of character’s combined encumbrance (in relation to his personal ‘max convenient weight’ limit), his satiety (which drops down with time, based on characters activity) and accumulated radiation dose.
Total efficiency can also be directly boosted or lowered due to temporary effects (such as coffee or chemicals).
The value of total efficiency not only governs how fast the character gets tired doing stuff (every action or step has a certain stamina cost assigned to it which is affected by TE) but also certain animations or oven movement speeds or camera inertia are connected to it.
Finally in the top-left you can see the character’s overall health - which consider as general ‘possibility to go forward’: combining both physical and psychological factors into one bar.
Above are a short bio on the hero we are currently playing as and some general information on date, time and accumulated funds.
PART 2: Item descriptions
Now - the inventory contains items. When you hover your mouse over a certain item you see this:
These are item description windows containing all the information you need regarding the piece of equipment.
Note that the contents are contextual - the type of information given depends on the type of item you’re looking at. In case of tools it will provide information about its purpose or whether it requires any sort of fuel to operate (like certain cleaning agents), in case of armor its protections, wearing convenience and slots provided.
So - that will be all for today :)
What do you think about this inventory system design? Please share your thoughts in the forum thread dedicated to suggestions on the game:
Steamcommunity.com
Take care and see you all next week :)
Take care Liquidators and see you all next week :)
CLS Team
