Inventory design

There is a lot of things under active work currently, but instead of waiting until we'd be done with all of them, I decided it would be smarter to do a bunch smaller posts as things get ready to be shown! 

The picture above is a mock-up of the new full-screen inventory design that is optimized for our re-written (but still not finished) inventory system. Let's take a look at each element individually:

Tabs:

Our new inventory system works by essentially putting items into other items, like you would put items into your backpack in real life. However instead of regular backpacks we have special advanced multidimensional technology that explains "the hammerspace" and doesn't make us model various backpacks on creatures.

(I once had a dream where I was a Wyvern and I had to wear a backpack to transport something over air. The only way I could figure out how to do that is to put my legs into the loops and hold the backpack tightly between my thighs. I could have grabbed it with the feet though, but I needed to walk as well)

The slots in the tabs allow you to put such inventory technology in, which will hold your items inside.

There are also different types of inventory augments! The only filled slot here is for equipment that you can put on hot-slots, and augments for weapons and abilities. Soon I'll also make designs for other tabs, which are for Crafting and General items inventories. 

Each inventory holds the items of specific type and provides different functionality while keeping your inventory organized - crafting ingredients will go into the crafting inventory where you can craft things, where products, such as food, and general scrap/junk will go into the other one, where the UI will provide the simulation stats and an ability to select items for consumption or just insert them into other orifices (for fun or medical reasons, when simulation comes into play)

The two remaining tabs are for Knowledge Tree and Collections and they as well act similar to inventories, however, truth to be told, we have to think and develop that part more still ^^.

Weapons: 

Its important to remember that the weapons/tools in TGOR are not items - they are summoned from your Aura (the forcefield environmental protection system that your character has), so you can never lose them, they stay with you after you unlock them. 

The item augments are then inserted into those slots, which make weapons perform better, faster, stronger. And in some cases they also act as internal magazines, housing ammunition. You can change the weapon loadout only at your home base, however you can swap an augment on the go.

Also, this particular weapon UI layout is inspired by a rather popular recently-made game... so, umm... I'm not taking ideas, I'm just learning from the best!

Hot-slots:

After placing usable items in those slots, it provides a way to quickly reach them without opening the inventory, with just one button press. Useful for healing, buildable, or throwable things.

Abilities:

Abilities are the active skills that player can perform with a press of a button. For example, you start with a regular jump, that's what you character does when you press the spacebar, however later you can upgrade it to double-jump, or even a jetpack.

Abilities are very similar to weapons, they are also a part of the loadout, and they accept augment items that improve your traversal capabilities. 

Mods can also easily introduce new things to swap to. 

Items:

Instead of a regular grid inventory, we decided to make a big flashy scrollable bar at the bottom of the screen with all your items displayed that belong to the specific tab/inventory! This bar makes it better for quick drag-and drop operations to manage augments, it's also controller-friendly and visible from afar. 

The item mechanic doesn't allow stacking, 1 item takes 1 slot, doesn't matter if they're all of the same type, they will still consume a slot each. 

And you might be skeptical about this, thinking this would create more frustration with inventory management... However, we're doing that to avoid this exact issue, so let me explain:

Usually games with crafting systems expect the player to have a lot of items to craft or achieve something, especially at the late game. 

It all comes to the balance of the systems: items can be made meaningless and recipes can require hundreds of crafting components, however there are games that successfully simplified that formula, Subnautica for example. Their inventory system doesn't allow stacking, but to counteract that, all the recipes are simple and easy to remember, usually not requiring more than 4 items at once.

Same for gathering, when you mine a rock, instead of getting 10 stones, you'd get 1, and the crafting system is balanced in such a way that 1 stone is just as plentiful as 10 in another game.

Also one more point against the formulaic way of doing Item stacking with slot restrictions - it doesn't make a lot of sense because it rewards collecting items of the same type while punishes you for having the variety, and that's kinda what we're going for here instead of grinding the same thing.

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Also one last thing, here is the old inventory design for comparison:

It still looks decent, but it's much smaller and located to the side of the screen, icons are small and it's just difficult to make comfortable if you play on controller.  

There is an even older UI design from the previous builds, but I'm not even going to show it here as its quite ugly xD. With each iteration we're drastically improving the game on every aspect!

Thank you for reading, i hope you enjoyed to know more about the inventory system! 

And thank you for supporting the development each month, there more exciting things for us to share soon! Also, have a side-stepping Hizathri :P