Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Presenting the inventory
Ironically speaking, adventure games are partially based on greed, for example, a
magpie; the player is trying to take or even steal any type of objects, no matter if he
knows about its function or not. He becomes a real hoarder, hoping that in future on
very special occasion his treasures would become useful.
Screen layouts - on an iPad the inventory panel is always available, but on an iPhone it should be
activated by the player
All the items found by the player are stored in his inventory, which works like an im-
provised backpack. As a rule, its capacity is bottomless; there is no restriction on the
number of things you can carry inside it. This is very convenient for debugging as
long as you are always sure that a player would not lose an item and would not get
stuck somewhere.
Generally the inventory is made up of several basic classes of objects:
•
A solo item
: This is an item that is required to activate a trigger, to solve a
puzzle, to begin a dialogue with an NPC, and so on. It is solid and does not
require other elements to operate, for example, a key, a wrench, a flashlight,
and so on.
•
A spare part
: Very often an adventure game asks the player to construct a
device or tool based on several other objects. To confuse him, spare parts
usually looks like solo items, so a bit of creativity is needed to determine
which object should be taken from the inventory.
•
A constructed item
: This is an object that is made up of several spare parts.
Usually it looks like a smart invention, a tool created by a talented autodidact,
and not an industrial product. This is the way to creatively wiggle out a situ-
ation with stop-gap solutions when there are no actual tools to perform the
task. The constructed item is of the same rank as the solo item.
•
Junk
: This is the most numerous class of items and, figuratively speaking,
the funniest one, of course. All such things are only shells without any actual
purpose other than to tangle the player's attention, distracting from solo items
