Maya can drink potions?! Reworking the inventory (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

The polls will be closing in a few days, and I can see that there are still some votes trickling in every day. It will be interesting to see how much they can alter the current ranking or maybe just push the advantage of the front-runners even further. Well, one thing is for sure: soon enough we will discover who are the 4 lucky winners!

So while that is still going, I have been working on a couple more things for the base game (aside from the two new skills already mentioned in a previous post), one of them is that Maya will now have a proper animation for when she consumes a potion. I'm also removing the small/medium variants of potions, since I don't think they are too useful anymore. In place of that, I want to have new types of potions that could grant temporary buffs or powers to Maya.

The thing is that, eventually, I'll rework how the whole item/consumable operates, so this is as good place to start. I also want to add trinkets and accessories that Maya can equip; these could grant small passive bonuses to attack/defense/speed, or even be accessories that can grant special effects.

While working on those ideas, I realized that having only 4 slots of inventory would be too limiting, so I'm increasing that max to 8, in anticipation of all the potential new items. I'm already reworking the inventory screen and the belt feature (which you can see a work in progress screenshot above) to account for that change.

But a problem arose in that I'd need to have a unique keybinding for each of these 8 slots! While this worked decently for 4 slots, things would get too cumbersome with 8 different buttons for item usage, and it would also cause problems for when I eventually implement proper controller support, since buttons are obviously limited there.

Therefore, I'm also reworking how the usage of items will function from now on: I'm retooling it into a more compact form.

It will work like this: a single button for item usage, and two buttons for cycling the slots such as next/previous. The user interface will only show 1 "square" that displays the currently selected item, and then players can either use that item, or cycle the list forwards/backwards to highlight a different item.

The end result of those changes is that there will now be some player effort required to skillfully cycle between their equipped items in the midst of a frantic boss battle. And now that potions will have a drinking animation, players will also have to think strategically to find the best window of opportunity in order to use those items, either for attacking or defense.

All in all, it's been actually super fun coming back into the depths of the game's code (after years of hyper-focusing on sprite/animation work and constant new enemies on every update). Refining those old systems into better forms is something that I really wanted to do for the longest time, so I'm looking forward to doing more of these across the whole game's systems and mechanics, improving the overall gameplay feel of MKM into a better game!

Best Regards,
Mega