Inventories and UI

Its Christmas time and the team is enjoying a more than deserved break. Sometimes, you must let them leave the cave for a while to enjoy some fresh air and the warming feeling you get when sunlight hits your face. Also is the right time to reunite with their families and friends, who might have missed them dearly.

In the meantime, I have decided to spend some time updating the blog and the social networks. I will share with you (Mom and whoever else is reading this), some thoughts I had during the process, and why I took some decisions the way I did… Just noticed that the game has not been released yet and I am already apologizing.

Anyhow, moving forward, let us talk Inventory and UI. Deciding how the inventory/UI should look like took me longer than expected. Nostalgia and all the fuzz about retro gaming coming back made me consider seriously using the classic point-and-click action list and inventory with the well-known, open-close-push-pull-look-use-talk-give-pick, but at the end, practicality prevailed. The reasons for the new inventory/UI where:

• Leave more screen free to enjoy the unique aspect of our scenarios.
• Make the game more playable and quicker (easy for newer generations that would not know what to do with a rubber chicken).
• Avoid the “non-obvious” way to play the verbs, which sometimes can leave you frustrated.

Therefore, the UI will have only “action” and “look” sometimes less is more. One thing that you will miss is that feeling of “I can do whatever I want in this game (not really)”.

Another issue of this system is that it becomes “easier”, when the player knows that there’s only two options, there’s only two choices (see what I did there? J ). Therefore, this will be compensated with the story and the puzzles.

In this game, I am going to give the player an easy way to interact with the character and the environment, so removing the focus from a huge list of actions and options and placing it on the story and the gameplay.

Therefore, as a nostalgic player, I will miss the old UI and Inventory but sometimes is good to let some progress in.

The second issue was with Betty, the first version of the character was wearing only a dress, so I could not think of anything original to use as “background” for the inventory. Therefore, we left this part to discuss it in the future.

Luckily, when we were making the final changes on Betty’s appearance the problem solved itself. I will not say how it will be right now, but you will find out soon.

Now on a more serious note: If you are reading this, please help us spread the word about this awesome game we are doing and about the development blog, together we can make it better!

– Jan