Happy Friday!
Well, I've started importing my inventory code into my main game file which is great. It's all nicely contained in its own layout with its own accompanying event sheet. But this made me realise something: I had put no form of saving or loading system into the inventory, so as soon as the player closes the game, any changes to their items were *poof* gone.
Now, I'm sure you'll agree, that's not ideal. Thankfully, when I developed the random encounter system, Nepeo put together a couple of functions for me to save and load probability tables as shown in this tutorial. So I at least have this starting point, and I'm hoping to update the Inventory Tutorial and project by the end of next week. Basically, the inventories will be saved to a dictionary, which is then saved to local storage and reloaded when opening the project. Just need to make sure it all fits together.
In last week's blog, I was discussing what mechanic I'd tackle next in this project, and to me, the logical continuation is a crafting system seeing as it will have to integrate directly with the inventory. But that in itself brings a lot of questions. What should the system look like? Should it use recipes? Should these recipes be displayed somewhere? Will this mechanic be entirely optional to the player? The list goes on.
So for this, I am currently in the research stage. This will probably end up as several tutorials seeing as there are SO many ways of defining a 'crafting' system (see this DHQ paper if you're interested in what I've been reading to do this research.) But I'll probably start with a simple "drag one item onto another and create something new" sort of thing, akin to the mobile game Alchemy. Then I can look at more complicated designs and ideas and figure out if they're really worth my time creating in Construct.
In the meantime, keep an eye out for the tutorial update and I'll be back with more ramblings next week.