Taking Inventory

When I drafted this blog last weekend, I wrote that with the Gunmetal Arcadia Zero launch out of the way, I could sit back and let it percolate through Greenlight for a few days or week. But thanks to your votes, by the time I’m publishing this, Zero has already been greenlit and approved for release, and it will be launching on Steam next Tuesday, November 15. Here’s the store page where you can (and should!) add it to your wishlist.

With that out of the way, I’m getting back to my previously scheduled course of action. November is Items Months, and I’m off to a pretty good start, having converted all the existing upgrades from Zero over to in-world items that can be found in chests.

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The next step is going to be converting melee weapons to this form, which should be a fairly straightforward process. From there, I can start moving into the uncharted waters of new things items can do. Some of these are obvious, like “stat boost” sort of items to increase damage output, foot speed, jump height, and so on. Others, not so much. Like I mentioned in Tuesday’s video, I’d like to have more types of activable items besides subweapons. These could apply affects to the player themself, allowing for temporary boosts to damage, a chance to suppress incoming damage, a conversion of ammo to health, or any number of other actions that might be useful in a pinch. I’d also like to prototype more abilities along the lines of the vertical stab attacks facilitated by the combat bracers, but these are the riskiest sort of addition and necessarily the most likely to fall off the table. Not only is it very late in development to be adding new player abilities that could potentially introduce new bugs, but any new action would likely require new animations for all five existing playable characters. With only about three weeks left to work on items, I feel like it might be wiser to prioritize other work. But if I find myself with spare time at the end of the month, it could be worth a shot.

I almost certainly won’t have time to address it this week, but NPC vendor stock is also slated for refactoring soon. Ordinary shopkeeper NPCs currently offer every item in the game, while faction NPCs offer a subset. In the future, each NPC will have a small selection of randomly assigned gear, chosen from the same pool that can appear in treasure chests. I’ll also need to rebalance item cost at this time, as the values I chose for Zero are not applicable in the context of this game.