I’ve been spending a ton of time off in the weeds working on multiplayer, server, authentication stuff, that really, truly, does not matter. It’s irrelevant right now, and it’s boring to stream. So I’ll work on that in my off-stream time.

For the stream, I decided to take a step back toward gameplay. You know, the thing games are made for.

Today I started taking my first crack at inventory. I’ve been getting a bit of analysis paralysis about this one because it’s such a huge idea with so many moving parts. Every time I started to think about it, it started to feel bigger, and I didn’t want to waste a bunch of time developing one system only to rip it out for an entirely new system.

And then I realized I’ve been doing that this whole time anyway and that it’s totally okay if this game doesn’t release until 2030 and I’m stuck ripping non-working systems out until I stumble on a working one.

So I set up a bunch of skeleton UIs and classes for inventory, and got to writing stuff I knew I’d keep no matter what: Adding items to inventory, removing items from inventory, populating an inventory window.

Tomorrow I’m going to start with implementing a single usable item: a health potion.

Then I’ll expand it to include some other kind of usable item. Maybe an item that grants a buff. Whatever changes come from that, I’ll abstract out to common classes.

That’s where inventory will rest for a while, because up next, I think, is combat.

We’ll revisit items when it’s time to add grenades, though.