Dwelvers - Creature Inventory and Stats news

For the last week I have been working more on the creature modding, it is an never ending circle it seems, the more I enable it the more I have too sidetrack and make extra features and mechanics to make the game as intuitive as possible.

With the possibility to equip the creatures I had to enable options so that the player could equip the creatures in game as well. I don't want the player to be force to choose equipment for every single creature he have, that would be to much micro management and would distract the player from the game's real goal.

I added a little extra option on the creature card, a "I" which would be for "Info" or "Inventory":

A side note, I am not that satisfied with the creature card appearance and will probably redesign it at some point in the future.

So if the player press the "I" then he will enter this menu:

Here the player can see a more informative screen about the creature he has selected, and by just clicking the arrows or the creature images up top the player will be able to choose what ever creature he wants to check out with just a couple of mouse clicks. This menu will also be reachable from the bottom bar in the game (next to "sell", "rally flag", etc).

To the left in this image the player can see the creature statistics, there we have Name, Level and Attributes. We also have the creature needs, like hunger, rest and alcohol level, this frame is expandable depending on how many needs this creature has.

In the centre the creature in focus is the one that we are checking out, here the player can click the rotating arrows to be able to see him in all angles. Just like in the creature videos I presented last week.

To the right in this image we have the creature inventory, here we can see everything that this creature has equipped. And by clicking on one of the slots we will get an extra pop-up frame which looks like this:

When clicking the right hand the player gets a couple of weapons to choose to equip the creature with. (I changed the creature as well to get more variations in the screenshot )

These weapons to choose from also have a number connected to them, in this case both the axe and the sword has the number 2, this means that the player only has 2 axes and 2 swords in stock. If the player don't have a weapon in stock, then the weapon will not be visible here, the same goes for armours.

As I said earlier, I am not that fond of forcing the player to equip all creatures, this should happen automatically. I solved this by adding icons in the top right of every equipment slot as seen here:

The "Cross" means that this creature can't equip anything in this slot, most of these crosses will go away later on when I make more armour for the creatures.

The "A" means that the creature can auto equip this slot, this will make the creature always go searching for the best armour in stock and replace it with his current if the new armour is better.

But, as I don't want all the armours and weapons to be to linear in strength, it will be hard to just put a number on them saying that one armour or weapon is better than the other. Once we start introducing more armour and weapons some of them will have special attributes. Like boots with extra running speed, weapons with area damage, helmets with extra hp regen and so on. These weapons and armours will be pretty unique and therefore the player would maybe like to equip them on certain creatures, that is where the "M" = "Manual equip" comes in.

The player will be able to toggle between the "A" and "M" by simple clicking on it, once the "M" is active the creature will never remove the armour assigned to him.

As we will have a lot of armours and weapons in the future I am not that interested in mixing them up with the inventory space because it will just get too messy, right now it looks like this, but it will get much worse in the future:

Also, weapons can be way to big to be stored at the storage room as seen in this screenshot:

Therefore I am looking towards a solution presented by Sebt at the forum: Forum.dungeondwellers.net
The metal works room will be renamed to armoury, and the player should be able to build weapon and armour racks to hold these items.
Another post made by SeriouslyUnserious on how to produce these armours and weapons caught my attention as well: Forum.dungeondwellers.net
So by the next week I hope I have gotten the armoury up and running at some capacity