Day 13: Inventory Concepts (Patreon)

Long-term fans of the game may remember the time when I proposed a "skirt-based inventory system" - an inventory interface which would depict the protagonist spreading apart her skirt to reveal the murder tools that she was concealing underneath it:

https://yanderedev.wordpress.com/2016/06/20/community-feedback-wanted-new-inventory-system-proposal/ 

For those who questioned my motives in designing such a system, I wrote a long blog post explaining my reasoning:

https://yanderedev.wordpress.com/2016/06/21/june-21th-bug-fixing-build-and-additional-thoughts-regarding-yesterdays-proposal/ 

My summary was:

"Yandere Simulator isn’t the type of game that would have a bland, boring, uninspired inventory system that looks like it could be found in any other game. Yandere Sim is the type of game that would have a unique inventory system you’d never find anywhere else; an inventory system that, yeah, might offend or alienate someone, but that’s exactly what gives the game its personality."

It was still a really controversial proposal, though, which led to a third blog post on the subject:

https://yanderedev.wordpress.com/2016/06/23/further-thoughts-on-the-new-inventory-proposal/ 

Ultimately, the entire topic resulted in a lot of very annoying discourse, so I stopped thinking about it for a long time. However, occasionally, I did request concept art for alternate inventory designs.

One concept was to have a "ring" of items appear in a circle around the player, similarly to the latest games in the Hitman franchise.

One variation of this design was to have Ayano pinch the edges of her skirt and slightly lift them up (as if she was performing a curtsy) and then have the "ring of items" come out from under her skirt.

Another concept was to have a horizontal scrolling list of items, similar to Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom.

In the end, I feel like changing the inventory system at this point in time would require way too many changes to dozens of different scripts, and would drastically change the way that players have to play the game, so it's unlikely that I will be changing the inventory system at all. However, I'll likely continue to think about alternate inventory designs for a long time, simply because it's an interesting mental exercise to figure out the best way to depict an inventory - both in terms of making it convenient for the player, making it believable, and making it consistent with the themes of the game.