It’s been a great week of development so far. I could’ve written a blog post earlier but I haven’t been taking my end of day breaks to write these like I was doing in prior weeks. Anyways, let’s dive in.
The Past
The original Morbus was a bit confusing when it came to inventory and weapon slots. You had 6 (?) slots and each slot was for a specific type of weapon.
Slot 1 Crowbar
Slot 2 Pistols
Slot 3 SMG’s
Slot 4 Rifles
Slot 5 Utility items
Slot 6 I think also utility items?
There were a ton of different guns in Morbus so you’d run up to a gun, try to pick it up, and have zero feedback on why the SR-4 Phaser is actually an SMG and you already have a R22 Automatic Compact SMG in slot 3 so you should go pound sand.
It also created weird restrictions where you would have to choose between carrying a grenade OR a medkit, and maybe you want both!
I didn’t want any of this confusion in this iteration of Morbus.
Requirements and Goals
I had these principles guide me when designing and inventory system for this version of Morbus
- Allow flexibility of loadouts
- I want players to have variation in what they’re carrying around
- Restrict the number of “big” weapons
- Ideally a player should only be able to carry a single “big” gun
- No arbitrary slot restrictions
- If a slot is for a big gun, then why can’t I put a smaller gun in it?
- Allow for multiple utility items
- Grenades+Glowsticks+Medkit+XXX should be possible
- Simple
- Needs to be intuitive to learn
- Strategy
- Certain loadouts should enable certain strategies
Where we ended up
This is an experiment, it’s not final, and playtesting will reveal if it makes sense, BUT, I am pretty happy with things at the moment. Let’s start with a video before we dive into explain it.
Let’s break down what’s happening;
0:03 I pick up a pistol, we see me using my scroll wheel where it shows a weapon select where we can see my hands or the pistol
0:07 I pick up an M4, we see my inventory flash for a moment to show where it ended up in my inventory. And then when I scroll we see a simpler version of just my weapons. Scroll then Left Mouse Button selects the weapon to select it.
0:15 By pressing Q I open my Inventory Menu. I see 4 “slots”, with slot 1 having my hands, slot 2 having my pistol, then an empty slot 3 with 2 spaces in it, and a Slot 4.
We can also see next to each Slot a few boxes. These boxes are a secondary representation of the “size” of a slot. We see that Slot 3 is Size 3 so it has 2 spaces in it.
I drag my pistol from Slot 2 into a space in Slot 3 and then back into Slot 2.
0:19 I pick up a glowstick and we see it was placed into Slot 3. I readjust my inventory and move both my Pistol and Glowstick into slot 3.
0:24 I click 3 on my keyboard, which toggles between my Pistol and Glowstick since they are both in Slot 3.
0:29 I reorganize my inventory so the Pistol is in Slot 2, Glowstick in Slot 3, and M4 in slot4.
0:35 I walk up to a shotgun with my pistol drawn, I cannot pick it up since I don’t have slot space. When I take my shotgun out I see underneath the nametag “E SWAP” (Hold E to Swap)
If I tap E it still says “No Slot Space” but if I hold E then i pick up the Shotgun and drop my M4 on the ground.
0:46 I walk up to a MP5 on the ground. I pull out my glowstick in Slot 3. I then hold E to swap the glowstick out for the MP5.
The MP5 is 2 sized weapon. We can see in my inventory that Slot 3 is now completely filled.
0:55 I just continue to swap stuff and mess around with the system for awhile
1:10 I have a glowstick from Slot 3 selected. Slot 3 is currently filled with two items (size of one) making it completely filled. When I approach an MP5 (size of two) I can hold E to swap.
This swap will drop BOTH items in Slot 3, picking up the MP5 into Slot 3.
1:15 You can drag items out of a slot in the inventory view to drop them
1:23 This is I think the coolest thing ever; I open my inventory menu and then when I mouse over items in range it displays their name.
I can then click down and drag those items from the world into my inventory slots.
Why I like this
I like to base game mechanics off of realism. If I pick up an item in a game, where does it go? Depending on how “realistic” a game is, it could just disappear from existence until you need it, to it goes into your backpack which has finite space and weighs you down.
On the slider of “not real” to “very real” I want Morbus to be “plausibly real-ish.” I think a horror game is scarier if it’s a bit realistic. If it wasn’t realistic then why would it scare me? How can I relate this experience to my actual life and the danger my actual life would be in if I were in that situation? Or something like that.
Anyways, this is a long way to say I was thinking one day about “In Morbus, where do weapons in your inventory go?” “Wouldn’t it be cool if they showed up physically in the world on your player model?”
In Morbus, seeing someone run around with no weapons is big alien energy and could almost warrant an instant shoot on sight. If I were able to visually see another player’s inventory it could give me more evidence on why I should or shouldn’t trust them.
Okay so if I want to put a players weapons on their character then there’s only so many places we can put weapons.
More realistically I think there are 3 prime places;
Each thigh and the back.
To gamify things we can say that one thigh can carry more than the other, and the back can carry the most (big gun) so this breaks down to 3 slots, each of a a different size.
To keep things simple we say: Small (Thigh) / Medium (Thigh) / Large (Back). And if you get stuck up on the different sized thigh slots, perhaps there’s a perk or a class that gives two Medium sized thigh slots?
This served as the foundation of this system. Give the player 3 slots, each of a different size; 1, 2, 3.
Rifles and big guns would be of size 3 so they can only fit in the back slot.
Pistols and utility items would be of size 1 so they can fit anywhere. If a player wanted a Pistol + Rifle they get 2 utility slots.
Submachine gun like weapons are size 2. So if a player wanted to have one of those they could have 3 utility slots on their back if they wanted. Or they could have 2 different SMG’s and have 2 utility slots, or 3 if they don’t have a pistol.
6 “slots” in total, with lots of different ways on how to fill them!
The most confusing thing is the distinguishment from a “Slot” (Thigh, Other Thigh, Back) and the “Sub Slot”/”Size”/”Space” in each slot which distinguishes what and how much can go in it. I’m still working on terminology but I just call them Slots and Sub Slots right now.
Right now ammo is free. You can pick up ammo of a type if you have a gun that uses it and there’s an arbitrary limit to how much ammo of each type you can carry. I’m debating whether this should change. Maybe ammo should take slots, maybe you get more slots then?
Other ideas
There are a lot of other inventory systems we could explore. This is going to be our “1.0” inventory system to try out. We can throw the whole thing out if it’s too confusing.
A “simpler” system could be to do something like give the player a 6 slot grid inventory, then let them organize it and assign items onto hot bars. It’s very RPG like though so i’m not the biggest fan.
Inventory systems like this are often times slow and cumbersome.
DeadSpace also did something kind of like this, but you could have 4 weapons and then your inventory was just things like ammo
Ammo management in DeadSpace was really stressful (and fun.) I’m torn on whether I make ammo a resource you have to carry around and takes up space. It makes inventory more complicated but allows for further expression of strategy for players.
Weight
Item weight (that causes your character to slow down) hasn’t been implemented yet. It might just be that weight is based on slot usage, or individual items could have different weight values.
Conclusion
I’m excited to see how this inventory system will land with players. I doubt this will be the final iteration of it but I’m excited to take this system into the first playtest.
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