The next few tasks of level 1 will require the player to first collect something from the cabinet, then return to the workbench to use these items and the doll and progress to the next part of the task.
At the moment, there are 3 things the player will need to get from the cabinet; a pair of new eyes for the doll, a jar of eye paste/glue, and a pot of paint.
As part of this, we realised the player will need some sort of inventory, so they can move items back and forth between these areas an a way that is different from how picking up tools works.
Initially, during the tasks to collect eyes and paints from the cabinet, we planned to have it so that upon clicking the items the mouse cursor would change to that item (same as the tools on the table). But since the cabinet requires a bit more navigation, I wasn’t sure about this, and felt that visually it might look and feel a bit strange and play awkwardly.
I decided to test having a temporary inventory of sorts, only one slot big, that would be displayed in the bottom right of the screen when at the cabinet and the table (but it would need to be positioned above the UI arrows).
When the player picks up an object like the eyes or paint that needs to be moved from one place to another, it will appear in this slot and disappear from the game world to show that they have collected it.
I thought about having the player be able to drag items to and from this inventory slot, but I’m not sure how dragging from UI will work as so far all my draggable elements have been world space game objects. Instead, simply clicking on the doll with the correct items in inventory could work and be much easier so I will start with this. This inventory system might not be very easy for players to understand without any explanation, so this might need to be revised after playtesting.
Current version:
After some testing and discussion with Sam, we agreed that we like the simplicity of this system as well as the look, but we did decide to make the inventory smaller and properly in the corner of the screen (so it wouldn’t obstruct the view of the cabinet doors too much), making it only appear when zoomed in on the cabinet so that it doesn’t get in the way of other parts of the game.
Laura Alford