{"id":14800056,"date":"2015-10-25T18:20:57","date_gmt":"2015-10-25T18:20:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/?p=14800056"},"modified":"2015-10-25T18:21:15","modified_gmt":"2015-10-25T18:21:15","slug":"tracing-the-tendrils-of-item-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/?p=14800056","title":{"rendered":"Tracing the Tendrils of Item Management"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the things I learned while working on\u00a0Dead Secret<\/a><\/em> (big announcements coming soon!) is how complicated item combinations can be. \u00a0Combining items is a pretty standard Adventure game mechanic. \u00a0You allow the player to collect parts of an item from different locations, then combine those items into a new item that is necessary to progress. \u00a0Combine the herbs to make more powerful health items, combine the batteries with the flashlight to make it work again, combine the secret decoder ring with the mysterious page to read it. \u00a0If you’ve ever played any Adventure\u00a0game you’ve probably combined some items at some point.<\/p>\n

Horror games have used item combinations as a core puzzle mechanic since the very beginning, and it’s easy to see why. \u00a0Adventure games abiding by the puzzle dependency chart model<\/a>\u00a0allow the player to work on multiple problems simultaneously, but often need a synchronization point\u00a0to gate progress. \u00a0Keys and locks get boring pretty fast, and item combination gives designers a way to make these synchronization points more interesting.<\/p>\n

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Item management in Resident Evil 2<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

This all sounds simple on paper, but of course the devil lurks in the details. \u00a0In early\u00a0Resident Evil<\/em> games<\/a>, item combination\u00a0became part of your inventory management strategy. \u00a0In those games your inventory space is quite limited, so often you needed to combine items (shells, herbs, etc) just to free up inventory slots. \u00a0Inevitably there came a moment where you desperately needed to collect some item but didn’t have enough space for it, and item combination became an organizational tool. \u00a0Inventory management is a wonderful sub-game in the\u00a0Resident Evil<\/em> series, but from a production perspective it’s expensive to build. \u00a0You need UI to select items and combine them, some logic in the items themselves to determine when items and and cannot be combined, and maybe even some smart way to explain why certain item combinations are not good. \u00a0Resident Evil<\/em> eventually implemented a number of changes to mitigate\u00a0some of these complications. \u00a0For example,\u00a0later games allow you to use a health herb without actually collecting it to get around the problem of death via full inventory. \u00a0Resident Evil 4<\/a><\/em> has hands-down the best inventory management system ever, but it’s also the most complicated to build.<\/p>\n

More importantly, allowing player-controlled item combination\u00a0makes it harder to communicate\u00a0puzzles to the player. \u00a0If you want the player to combine the blade with the whetstone to sharpen it, then combine the sharpened blade with the hilt, then use the completed knife\u00a0on the rope, you need to invent a reason that the blade can’t be used on the rope without the hilt. \u00a0You need to tell the player that the blade is too dull when he tries to use it on the rope without sharpening. \u00a0You need to invent a reason that the sharpened, completed knife can’t be used to cut other ropes, or as a weapon to stab the bad guy. \u00a0You must consider the possibility that your player doesn’t know what a whetstone is. \u00a0The more expressive your item manipulations become,\u00a0the more the player will attempt complicated interactions. \u00a0It’s on the designer to come up with ways to respond to those attempts to avoid player frustration.<\/p>\n

For\u00a0Dead Secret,<\/em> my goal was to keep item interactions as simple as possible. \u00a0In early design iterations items could only be collected or applied. \u00a0This kept the interface and communication requirements pretty reasonable. \u00a0But as we built out the game this simplistic item model became restrictive, so\u00a0we changed it to allow for automatic item combinations. \u00a0When you collect all the necessary pieces of an object, the inventory system automatically does the combination work for you. \u00a0This approach has some pluses and minuses. \u00a0On the plus side, it keeps the UI simple but still allows for multi-step puzzles involving items that can be collected in any order. \u00a0This is particularly valuable in VR, where traditional user interface modes (e.g. the “pause screen”) don’t translate very well. \u00a0On the minus side, it removes the sub-puzzle of figuring out which item combinations make sense. \u00a0More importantly, it removes a degree of puzzle dependency control. \u00a0If parts for an item can be collected at multiple places, the item can be put together at any of those locations, and that has ramifications for progression. \u00a0There’s one spot in particular in\u00a0Dead Secret<\/em> where we had to do a bunch of work to accommodate this complexity\u00a0in the dependency graph.<\/p>\n

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Inventory management in Dead Secret<\/i><\/p><\/div>\n

Overall I’m pretty happy with the system we ended up with in\u00a0Dead Secret<\/em>, but it isn’t nearly as simple as I had initially planned. \u00a0Items can be collected, automatically combined, used as one step of a multi-step puzzle, and even automatically used up. \u00a0There are items that can be applied in\u00a0multiple areas, items that can be used independently, and items that are entirely optional to collect. \u00a0There are\u00a0secret items that have no icon and no presence in the inventory screen. \u00a0A seemingly simple design has turned out to have all sorts of tendrils, extending deep into the mechanics of the core game. \u00a0Even so, the item system in\u00a0Dead Secret<\/em>\u00a0is much simpler than many other Adventure games out there.<\/p>\n

Once you dig into the details, items and inventory system design is fascinating. \u00a0Seemingly minor changes to item usage rules can change the way a game feels dramatically. \u00a0Item collection, inventory space management, item upgrading and crafting, single-use items, items-as-weapons, disposable items, items that degrade, item boxes, item merchants–the derivations go on and on. \u00a0It’s probably a topic worthy of a lengthier post.<\/p>\n

In leu of that, I’ll pose a question instead. \u00a0Take your favorite Adventure game, horror or otherwise, and consider the item system. \u00a0If you removed it entirely from the game, how much game would be left?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the things I learned while working on\u00a0Dead Secret (big announcements coming soon!) is how complicated item combinations can be. \u00a0Combining items is a pretty standard Adventure game mechanic. \u00a0You allow the player to collect parts of an item from different locations, then combine those items into a new item that is necessary to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14800056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dead-secret","category-game-design"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14800056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14800056"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14800056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14800061,"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14800056\/revisions\/14800061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14800056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14800056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14800056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}