Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Items & Inventory

In my last report, I prevented player navigation in the dark, then started working on the inventory system for The Dungeon Under My House, my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project.

I continued the inventory work this past week.

Sprint 2024-7: Intro sequence game play

Planned and complete:

• Party member can carry items

Unplanned and incomplete:

• Allow player to search objects in room

I started the week my rendering the inventory slots for individual party members. For now, each party member can have three items in their inventory, and you can see it in the HUD.

And I created a sprite for the Flashlight and made sure that it displayed in those slots if a party member had it in their inventory.

That worked when I temporarily coded it in, but the next thing was to have furniture in the room that the player could search and find items such as the Flashlight.

So I created the concept of Furniture. Right now, everything in the room is just drawn as part of the background, but now you can click on something such as the bed in the bedroom and get a description.

Now the other interesting thing about Furniture is that it can have its own Inventory. I had trouble getting things to persist properly until I simplified my code and data structures a bit, unfortunately.

So by the end of the week, I still needed a way for the player to view a given furniture’s inventory slots, then allow the player to take items and put them into their own inventory.

I imagine that this week I’ll find the former is straightforward but the latter will require some effort to handle edge cases and user interface issues.

For examples of things I anticipate needing to worry about, how should the game respond if the player’s inventory is full? Can the player transfer items to the furniture as well? Can I create an interface that allows someone to either use the mouse or a keyboard?

Thanks for reading!

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