Devlog #7 My pockets have pockets

Hello there,

This week has been a sole focus on bringing the inventory foundations to life. I used a tutorial for this one by devloglogan. It looks like he hasn't posted a video in a very long time, but this one was almost everything I needed in one easy to follow tutorial: 

https://youtu.be/V79YabQZC1s?si=TwZAnJToBJAeADkJ

Inventory

https://kappa.lol/o38Ssl

It started with getting the UI lined up. Creating the containers to handle the UI and then adding some starter items and giving them some hover metadata that displayed the name and description when you hover your mouse over it.

https://kappa.lol/Ep70sC

I then moved into the meat and potatoes of it all. Setting up the code for moving items inside the inventory, handling stacking, swapping, max item stack size. Then setting it up to allow for pickups to add to the inventory and dragging items out of the inventory to result in dropping them. I also got the first iteration of the world storage unit up and running and capable of transferring items between itself and the personal inventory.

https://kappa.lol/z17tpK

Finally, all the pieces came together, I added a simple health export that allowed a consumable item type to interact with it when used, created a med-kit item and now when you use it, it increases the player’s health.

Alongside this, a hot-bar with hotkeys for the number keys 1-7 were added. It displays any items in the first 7 slots of the inventory at the moment, this will change to be its own inventory space potentially. Lastly I added the first iteration of the restricted inventory slots aka equipment slots. As you can see in the video, it's set up to accept only armor type items. 

To be honest, most of the week's work was translating the tutorial into my project, so I don't have a lot to discuss on this one, I'm just happy to be over the initial hurdle of the inventory design. As I said before, most of these systems are foundational. This means that they are in the most basic iteration of existence and are hugely subject to change and improvement. It also means they exist currently in single player form only.  A lot of the systems I'm putting in are foundational from tutorials to give me the framework to expand from once the foundation is solid, that's when the more interesting details will get implemented.

I wanted to get this in place so that I can get the multiplayer and database systems tied into it at the appropriate code locations. Now that the systems exist, I now have a general idea of where to target the code additions to tie in the database to the inventory. It will also need to be set up to be authoritatively handled by the server when providing and subtracting items.

That's the upcoming week's project, getting it all working through the database and in multiplayer. This will be done before I push the next update to itch.

Following this, I'll need to get the mining system and the production system squared away. This will give the player the initial tools for crafting a weapon and it's ammunition from scratch. I think after that I will finally get to work on the combat system. The plan is still fluid though, I'm just focusing on what makes most sense to me to get a playable experience soonest.

Of course this will rely on having some form of at least proper playground to enjoy that experience and consistent art to go with it, I'm still working on finding someone to handle that portion of the game.

But that's about it for this week.

Until next time.