NEP Dev Update #5: Progress on items and inventories

by Cuchaz

This post is part of a development update series about my upcoming indie game, Non-Essential Personnel. I'm going to challenge myself to regularly post one of these every Friday.

This week I've been working a lot on network synchronization and inventory manipulation. I'd love to do an in-depth blog post about how networking works in NEP, but I think I'll save that for later. For now, I'll just show some pretty pictures of the game.

But this time with videos!

My video capture software appears to be cropping the videos very strangely. I'll look into fixing that next time, but now we can just deal with missing a few pixels at the bottom of the frame. Maybe I can splurge on bandwidth and record at a higher framerate next time too. =P

First up is the pickaxe item. Use it to break solid block into not-solid blocks. This item makes a bit of a mess out of the landscape.

Here's a shot of the pickaxe in action!

Then you can pick up the mess you just made with your trusty shovel. This will put the pulverized blocks into your inventory where you can eventually use them for Things and Stuff. Mining stone blocks isn't terribly exciting for now, but we'll get to mining for actual ores eventually. =)

And here's some scooping up of rubble with the shovel.

The inventory/item system is mostly working now too

The videos let me show off the fun GUI animations, and they give a better sense of player interaction than just the screenshots. This one shows how the player inventory works. It basically works the same as every grid-based inventory system ever, so there's nothing too exciting going on here.

You finally get to see the wooshy menus now too!

What the video doesn't show is a lot of behind-the-scenes work that synchronizes the state of the inventory between the client and server, and saves the intentory on the server so all your items are still waiting for you when you get back.

That's it for this week. Next week, I'll work on creating more things you can do with your blocks once you have them. Right now, they're pretty useless.

Of course, having a two-step mining-then-shoveling process to mine solid blocks will get annoying pretty quickly. Wouldn't it be great if we had better tools in the game to automate that process? Stay tuned to NEP's development to find out all about the wonderful world of player progression game mechanics. =)