Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
MANAGING INVENTORY
Adventure games have always required the player to pick things up and carry them
around until they're needed later. Most games present the player with a visible
inventory mechanism—usually a box that pops up on the screen and shows every-
thing that the avatar is currently carrying. A box with a fixed size on the screen
creates a natural limit on the amount a player can carry. When the box is full, she
can't put anything else in it unless she takes something out first. It may help to
give the avatar a natural container in which things can be carried—a backpack,
saddlebags, or the like—so that the inventory mechanism is a close-up view of the
container and its contents.
NOTE
You can allow
the avatar to carry
an unlimited number
of items just for the
humor value of it. In
Haunt
, a noncom-
mercial text adventure,
the player could walk
through a haunted
house wearing a
wetsuit and carrying
a stereo, an antique
chair, an oil painting,
and anything else he
found.
The player will need to stop frequently for inventory management tasks, so you
should make adding, removing, and viewing inventory items as easy as possible.
You could choose to devote a part of the screen to the inventor y all the time.
Players find this easy to work with, although it tends to remind the player that she's
using a computer, and unless you sacrifice a lot of screen area or implement a
scrollbar, the inventory area can't be very big.
Most designers choose to give the player an inventory mechanism that she can
open and close on demand. She should be able to do this with a single keystroke or
button click. The mechanism should not obscure the whole screen—that feels like
a major mode change and tends to compromise suspension of disbelief. The game
should allow the player to drag objects into and out of the inventory bag or box
quickly and efficiently.
The Longest Journey
included convenient shortcut keys that
allowed players to change the object currently being held in the avatar's hand
without opening the inventory box. Allowing the player to manage the inventory
with such shortcut keys also means that you won't have to create animations of the
avatar picking up and dropping every possible item in the game.
Asheron's Call
, an
online CRPG, includes
pick up
and
drop
animations but doesn't actually show the
object in the avatar's hand.
Most adventure games feature inventories, but not all.
Loom
, which was designed to
be especially accessible to people who are not already familiar with adventure games,
doesn't require the player to keep an inventory. Instead, the player performs all
actions in the game by spinning musical spells on a distaff, which is the only object
he carries (see
Figure 19.11
). Although short and considered by die-hard adventur-
ers to be too easy,
Loom
remains one of the most imaginative and beautifully
executed adventure games ever created. (Note, too, the clever pun: The game com-
bines the idea of a walking staff, a distaff, and a musical staff in a single object.)
