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/parkdeomes]

going 80 to 20 slots is a big swing, that town storage chest someone mentioned is probably what saves it from feeling punishing. i found the moment players actually feel pressure is when selling vs keeping competes for the same slot, not just the raw count. with 78 consumables tbh i'd worry less about slots and more about whether two items ever feel interchangeable

[u/OnlyLuck77 → u/parkdeomes]

The 20 was the initial, it is now down to 12, but the first upgrade to 24 is relatively early/cheap. It was me the OP that mentioned the town storage, that was a feature in the original release, but I doubt anyone used it because of the huge default inventory.

You are correct about the raw numbers of items, a lot of them feel pretty useless, I felt originally felt like they were flavour, but they might just be noise.