Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Giving Items

In last week’s report, I finished creating the pickle jar, sped up the perceived loading of the game, and started the work of enabling the player to give items to another character in The Dungeon Under My House, my non-violent, first-person role-playing game and my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project.

I continued working on the feature of giving items.

Sprint 2024-28: Giving Items

Planned and complete:

• Give items to entity

Unplanned and complete:

• Show quantities of items in inventory

Unplanned and incomplete:

• Show item on counter on actual counter in kitchen

Last time, I was trying to figure out what giving an item should look like. That is, I had concerns about manipulating inventory contents and dealing with situations in which the inventories are too full.

Ultimately I decided to allow the player to select an item from the party’s HUD, then attempt to give the item to the other character.

If the other character has room, then they accept it.

Even if you ended up giving them nothing, but doing so is kind of rude.

If they don’t have room in their inventory, then no items change hands and they say they can’t take the item.

I will eventually need to add definite and indefinite articles to the scripting code sooner rather than later. These conversations sound too stilted and awkward.

Meanwhile, I also added a trigger to start a specific script when you give your parents the jar of pickles.

I created a new kitchen counter Furniture object, which has room for one Item, and that scripted sequence adds snacks to the inventory of that Furniture.

You can see that there are actually 6 snacks available. This is the first item that has a quantity associated with it.

Right now, you can only take all of them at once, but I want to work on allowing the player to choose to take only one if they want.

Specifically it would be great to hand out the sandwiches to each member of the Explorer’s Club, ultimately finishing the Snack Quest. And of course eventually I’ll make Quests a formal part of the game, too. B-)

The next thing I am working on is showing the snacks on the kitchen counter so you can tell an item is there to collect. I can see this same feature being applied to shelving and cabinets to allow the player to see what is available in some Furniture without having to open it first, if it makes sense for the contents to be visible.

Thanks for reading!

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