In this Dev Log I talk about adding Items and Shops to my RPG game. I want to be able to show images of the items in the shop, and tag new items with the NEW tag for easier identification.
New Features: Items And Shops
All adventure games need items to represent armor, weapons, jewelry, and other things the character can wear, use, or carry in the game world.
Typically these items might be swords, shields, potions, and amulets, but with a little imagination, you could make all kinds of things.
Why not lasers and powered armor?
I'll need a handy Visustella plugin to help me with this:
- Items and Equips Core - This plugin provides enhancements for Items and Shops.
Using this plugin, I will add images for the Items and visual tags to show what Items are new in the inventory.
I will also change the name of the Item menu to 'Inventory' using the Terms database.
Adding Item Images
There are many controls to help with placement and formatting.
I had to play around with the offset settings. The image space was 154x138 pixels. I don't know if that's the scaled size or if it's a fixed size. I'll need to do more experimentation to see.
Image and Placement Settings |
|
Item With Image In Shop |
Yay! Looks great!
Next, let's see if we can get the NEW label to work.
Adding A Tag To New Items
Tagging new items in your inventory with the NEW label helps players find new stuff in their inventory. Thankfully, the Items And Equips Core comes with that feature built-in.
I had a difficult time getting it working at first. I thought it wasn't working, but after adding more items to the list, I could see that just selecting an Inventory Category cleared the NEW tag from the first item on the list.
Special thanks to the helpful people on the RPG Maker Discord servers who made the suggestion that lists with single entries might be getting tagged but immediately cleared.
| Item With New Tag |
Well, that's all for today's Game Dev Log update. We've accomplished a lot and managed to get the Item images and NEW item tags working.
Join My Game Dev Journey!
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If you want to follow my production progress, check my blog at MakeYourOwnRPG.com.
You can also join the CyborgPrime Discord server, where I post my progress and interact with the community.
Click here for more articles in this series about my indie game dev journey.
Your Turn. What Do You Do?
Do you like to see item pictures or is an icon good enough?
Share with us in the Comments section below. I'm interested in if items need detailed images or if you prefer to leave it to your imagination.
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