We’re 4 weeks past the last dev blog and progress has been steady, I’ve completed the inventory system along with a few bonus items.

Inventory

Player inventories consist of 28 slots, plus 8 equipment slots:

• Weapon
• Shield
• Amulet
• Ring
• Head
• Chest
• Leg
• Boot

Items can be equipped and removed. Inventory items can be destroyed, and stackable items like coins will stack. For better inventory management you can drag and drop items to new slots.

I haven’t decided if there will be extra storage like a player ‘bank’ for extra inventory slots. That can always be added later on if needed.

Lastly, when a mob dies it will show the loot dropped and you can add it directly to the inventory.

Abilities

As I wrote in the last post there will be 6 player skills, and every ability will belong to one of the 6 skills.

I’ve implemented a new tab to view the currently usable abilities, and equip/remove them. The abilities are grouped by skill in separate collapsible sections. I didn’t implement drag/drop swapping for the 5 ability slots, but I may get to it later on.

Art

The art style is something I have been debating since this project began. I am nowhere near artistic, so my initial plan was to use AI to generate images to represent the monsters and items. That kind of worked, but the images took a while to get right, and often looked too realistic – see the image in dev blog #2 as an example.

The past few weeks I’ve instead been looking into buying art and have found the perfect fit. An art studio named A-ravlik creates amazing 2d game assets, and I’ve just purchased 300 of their characters for use in the game. Here’s a couple examples:

What’s Next

The next stage in development is to implement the dungeons, which will act as the core gameplay loop. I’ve decided on a linear progression, where players will need to complete a dungeon before moving onto the next.

Each dungeon will have several floors, each consisting of different room types. Most rooms will involve combat, but the others will consist of traps, treasure, NPC interaction, restoration rooms, and possibly hidden areas. Each floor will have a boss, with a final dungeon boss at the end.

Combat is being slightly changed to support multiple enemies in a single encounter. Right now it will be sequential – defeat the first to fight the second – but I may change it so they swap in/out during combat.

This is a large chunk of the project and will require lots of backend changes to support the different room types and encounters. I’m hoping to have 3 room types and the combat rework completed in 6 weeks time. With any luck, I’ll be posting here sooner.