Sprint 3: +.25

 It took a lot of work to try and make the inventory get anywhere close to what I want. Half the issue with it is that I didn't have a solid idea of what the fun in it should be; I forgot that, with the resident evil inventory system, fun wasn't necessarily the goal. The goal of the inventory system there is to limit what the player can do; it is a genuine impossibility to be adequately prepared for every situation thanks to the limited inventory, and some weapons are made weaker or more powerful based on their storage requirements and even the size of their ammunition.

Following the philosophy for a grid inventory system would then result in a +1 feature that's mostly defined by what the player /can't/ do, which doesn't give us much design space. It's also not really a restriction that opens us up for fun.

My first effort at making the inventory system work.

So, I decided to abandon the structure and make the inventory entirely mesh and collision based. The only limit to how the player can store their items is if the item can fit within bounds without colliding with other items. This gives the player a significant challenge, while giving them a chance to think of out of the box solutions. It also allows us to use Unity's built-in ontriggerenter functions to solve collision problems. I would like for items to have their properties change depending on what they're stored next to and for how long, and this gives us an easy way to get that designed.

I had to change a lot to make this work, including how the items were prototyped. I kept some of the code to make the item storage space, a kind of scrollbar meant to keep items the player discovers clearly seen and easily dragged to the inventory space.

I also created a sell space, where players can easily drag their items over to sell them with the funds going directly into the player's income.

With functional selling, 3D scrollbar, and a much larger inventory grid. Items give bonuses to income if they stay in the inventory, or sell for a lump sum based on a random value and the amount of income the player has.

This is the rough edges of the inventory system, there's still a lot to do, and this is still the thing I'm most willing to go to the mat for even if it's been hard to figure it out. I truly believe that if I make this inventory system at least 20% as interesting as it should be, with full functionality, this would be an interesting feature to have in an idle game and a definite selling point. It gives the user things to collect, it rewards the player by giving dopamine boosts as the game takes longer and longer without giving the player upgrades, and overall it's a good fit for the power curve of our game.

I also started shifting towards having our art team make models. We got playtest feedback indicating that people would actually like to see art, under the argument that our setting can't really be visualized without some form of art assets. We've taken to playtesting different aspects of the game. if we get feedback that it's fun, and it works, we start documenting it with art and only go back to it for bugfixes. Only when we know we're not going to have to majorly overhaul something to find the fun in it should we move on with art.

I will also start regularly porting new features to the play store and getting more people added to the playtest list. I need as much data as I can in order to do something right with this game, and I'm happy to look for it among our target audience. This game is going in the right direction, probably.