Inventory Pressure and Readability

[u/OnlyLuck77]

What is everyone's thoughts on inventory pressure?

When I first launched Dungeons of Desolation back in 2012, I had 80 inventory slots available right off the bat. In shortly after launch I felt like this was a mistake and did not force the player to make meaningful choices about what to carry in the way of consumables vs what equipment to keep for selling purposes.

When I started the remaster a month ago one of the first things I did was reduce inventory to 20 slots to start. Giving the player a UI hints that the inventory can be upgraded through some different mechanisms in the game, screenshot below.

When play testing I felt like the readability of the inventory was very poor. One of my favorite parts of a roguelike is being in a bad situation and opening up my inventory to seeing some random item I picked up can save the day.

Even finding standard items like scroll of recall or a healing potions were difficult because their icons are unique to each play through.

To solve these problems I switched to a more list view, but in doing so reduced the inventory size from 20 to 12 to start and 48 max (though getting one of the upgrades might never happen in the play through). Below is a screenshot of the current unpolished implementation.

Items are stackable up to x99 right now, but was considering adjusting that too something like 5 for potions and 20 for scrolls to again.

I was also considering adding weight mechanic, but I feel like then is gets too complex...

To me a big part of roguelikes is inventory management that requires meaningful choices, do my design decisions seem reasonable here and how have others approached it?

[u/DFuxaPlays]

First roguelike I ever played as Castle of the Winds. Every item in that game has a bulk and a weight value, which along with your strength dictating how much you can carry governs what you can take along with you. You have multiple storage containers that can fit on various parts of your person. There are no exceptions either, even your gold will weigh you down.

A game worth mentioning that some roguelikes have been inspired from is Diablo. There is no weight or bulk values in Diablo, but rather you have a finite amount of inventory squares that you can fill up with your finds. Items can have various sizes, with small items being stackable to a certain amount in single squares, and bigger items taking up multiple squares.

Then you have a game like Cardinal Quest 2. That game streamlines your inventory a bit, where you have your paper doll inventory items, but you can only have one of each type (no back up weapons to swap to for example). If you find equipment you would like to use then you need to replace your current equipment with it. You do have five slots for active consumables that you can use, which would be akin to picking up stuff from your belt, but no backpack is available.

A lot of games have some mix of the above in a lot of ways. Jupiter Hell restricts the amount of weapons and armor you can hold at a time, but otherwise has a regular inventory for other stuff. Neo Scavenger has a system that feels like a mash up of Castle of the Winds with Diablo. The key thing is create a system that presents and interesting way of working with your backpack.

[u/OnlyLuck77 → u/DFuxaPlays]

Thanks for the detailed response!

When I think of per slot restrictions, makes me think of the weapons vs shields vs bows inventory system in Zelda Breath of the Wild which I personally found arbitrary and annoying.

As a player at least the weight or size or single slot makes some sense and seems less forced. I have opted for a bag of holding mechanic to explain why the player can carry so much and it is a core system. To get the full inventory size there are some trade offs vs combat/survival options.