Temple of The Roguelike Forums
Development => Design => Topic started by: Pickledtezcat on February 20, 2014, 03:21:01 AM
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I'm hoping you can help me with generating a list of potential in game items.
I just looked through the Dawn like tileset and there's a good selection in there, a lot of which I already have, but maybe I'm missing somethings.
Anyway, for me, and for other people gearing up to make a roguelike (fantasy genre) what kinds of items need to be prepared? This doesn't include furniture and man sized items such as fixed lanterns or chests.
So far I have:
- armour- many different types and variants
- clothes- different variants
- capes/cloaks -different variants
- robes- different variants
- hand to hand weapons- different types and variants
- ranged weapons- different types and variants
- helmets, hats and hoods- different types and variants
- shields - different types and variants
- lanterns and torches- different types and variants
- rocks- different types and variants
- ranged weapons ammo- different types and variants
- books and scrolls- different types and variants
I think I need:
- food - different types and variants
- medicine- different types and variants
- potions- different types and variants
- potion ingredients- different types and variants
- crafting ingredients- different types and variants
- tools- different types and variants
- rings- different variants
- amulets, necklaces and bracelets- different types and variants
- boots -different variants
- gloves- different variants
- musical instruments- different types and variants
- small containers- different types and variants
- wands- different variants
- glasses- different variants
- money- different amounts
- gems - different types and variants
- treasure- different types and variants
What am I missing? Can you think of other things to add to the list? Generic fantasy RPG gear, or specific items that would be cool.
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Garlic, stakes, crosses, silver everything. Gotta fight those vampires off.
I hope you don't plan on using all those different item classes in one game...
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Dude a big RPG is going to have TONS and TONS.
We tend to think of them in terms of use categories or slots. Equipment slots, hand or weapon slots and bag slots.
Consumables: Potions and scrolls. Take item slot
Melee Weapon: Item slot or 'hand' slot.
Ranged Weapon: item slot or 'hand' slot (or ranged slot in some games)
Armors: Body slot, also can be in bag and take an item slot.
Trinkets: You can wear a bunch of these, rings, amulets, earrings, bracelets, etc...can take up slots as well in your bag.
Sometimes there's a 'light source' slot.
It just depends on what you are making really.
I've never done a game with slots except for card games. But the concept is fun. If you have too few slots it gets a bit samey, but with more slots you can really customize, with too many it starts to wash out your slot decisions because 1 slot out of 15 doesn't do much.
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- Stuff for navigation: maps, compass, astrolabe, sextant, pocket watch
- Traps, snares, caltrops
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Body parts perhaps?
Your categorisation looks a bit weird. E.g. you have 'treasure', which can mean pretty much *anything*. And then you have glasses (?) which is kinda very specific and not very common I guess. You have crafting ingredients, and then you have potion ingredients (brewing ingredients?). Are the latter actually different? Etc etc
I think you'll have an easier time brainstorming for the specifics if you nail down your categorisation a bit better.
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Books, hammers and nails, trapped chests, puzzles, musical boxes, magical bottles, shrunken heads, carpets, ponchos, pies, pills, instruments, thimbles, stilts, philosophers' stones, tobacco, tea, chains, ropes, crampons and snow shoes, grappling hooks, ladders, keys and padlocks, lockpicks, masks, dowsing rods, disguise kits, hourglasses, juggling balls, anvils, crowbars, nets, fishing rods, saws, quills and inks, pendulums and divining equipment, tents, umbrellas, brooms, mirrors, perfumes and soaps, glue, magnifying glasses, spyglasses, brooms, shovels and pickaxes, bird cages, folding chairs …
As always,
Minotauros
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double shovels (like shovel, but with digging implement on both ends), games need more double-items.
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Body parts perhaps?
Your categorisation looks a bit weird. E.g. you have 'treasure', which can mean pretty much *anything*. And then you have glasses (?) which is kinda very specific and not very common I guess. You have crafting ingredients, and then you have potion ingredients (brewing ingredients?). Are the latter actually different? Etc etc
I think you'll have an easier time brainstorming for the specifics if you nail down your categorisation a bit better.
Thanks, sorry they are categorized by effect, so treasure is a useless heavy item which is very expensive and can be sold for a lot of gold, ditto gems but they are not heavy. Glasses will help spell caster to read ancient manuscripts, (it's early renaissance technology, but some RPGs allow firearms so what the heck). Crafting ingredients will be used for repairing weapons and armor or making new, non-magical ones. Potion ingredients may be eaten as food (with some possible bad effects), but crafting ingredients can't. Tools have a small set of types (such as medical kit, lockpicks, repair tools, mapmaking kit, potion brewing equipment) which allow access to a new ability (if you don't already have the skill). Musical instruments will have an effect later but for now they are light weight treasures, being fairly valuable but not very heavy compared to a huge bejeweled Ankh.
I guess for general roguelikes you could break the lists down in to further categories, or include some things all in the same list.
For my items there is going to be just one class of item (the item class) which has all the possible attributes or flags (such as damage and AC or gold piece cost or casting requirements) but won't display them if they are not compatible with its type. That way I can use one single static data dictionary to produce the items for the dungeon and they will then be stored as unique keyed objects in a saved dictionary. The roguelike Cogmind is doing a similar thing (http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2014/02/data-driven-development/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=data-driven-development). One benefit is that it makes it easier for me to program the inventory or player equipment slots system. I don't have to write one system for putting on armor and another for picking up a sword.
It's a system I've used before, but not on this scale so we'll have to wait and see if it all goes wrong. :)
Books, hammers and nails, trapped chests, puzzles, musical boxes, magical bottles, shrunken heads, carpets, ponchos, pies, pills, instruments, thimbles, stilts, philosophers' stones, tobacco, tea, chains, ropes, crampons and snow shoes, grappling hooks, ladders, keys and padlocks, lockpicks, masks, dowsing rods, disguise kits, hourglasses, juggling balls, anvils, crowbars, nets, fishing rods, saws, quills and inks, pendulums and divining equipment, tents, umbrellas, brooms, mirrors, perfumes and soaps, glue, magnifying glasses, spyglasses, brooms, shovels and pickaxes, bird cages, folding chairs …
As always,
Minotauros
There's a lot of interesting, but perhaps function less items there. I have been considering having a bunch of useless items in the game just because you don't always find useful stuff in a crate in a forgotten dungeon. For example carpets and brooms. I played a neverwinter nights mod years ago which had such items in it and it was quite interesting as you weren't immediately sure if the set of ornamental plates you found was a plot item or just junk. In other games if you find a child's doll or a certificate of ship worthiness you can be sure someone back in the village wants it so you might as well bring it along even though you haven't been given the quest yet.
Other stuff does sound interesting such as ropes and hooks or crowbars, shovels (double or otherwise), fishing poles and nets, which would require some coding to make them usable.
Of course traps...
Thanks to everyone else for the suggestions. It's filled my brain with ideas.
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There's a lot of interesting, but perhaps function less items there. […] For example carpets and brooms.
Yes, definitely a bunch of junk in my list :) I just recompiled an old brainstorming file I had lying around; posted for random inspiration. I think a bit of junk is ok for a RL. OTOH, some items that seem useless at first consideration may have potential uses. Brooms can be used as improvised weapons, but they can also have magical properties – witches' brooms spring to mind. As do flying carpets[1]. Carpets could also have wand-like effects (if you shake them), and/or they could work as "runes": similar to Rogue's "scroll of scare monster", which repels monsters if you put it on the ground.
As always,
Minotauros
[1] Then again, to quote the admirable poet Tor Ulven: "Who needs flying carpets, if you've got an ashtray or an old rind?"
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My VoI has carpets. They can be put on floors to hide traps (which are visible otherwise). Also some carpets are magical (flying, affect beings standing on them in some way, trapped, teleport, etc.)
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My VoI has carpets. They can be put on floors to hide traps (which are visible otherwise). Also some carpets are magical (flying, affect beings standing on them in some way, trapped, teleport, etc.)
oh, hiding traps would be a good use for carpets.
I hear a lot of alternative uses for items, it must be difficult for the game designer to think of them all.
The first time I played D&D we went to the local store in the village to buy some gear, everyone else was looking at the weapons list, but I asked the DM what hammer, iron spikes and wedges were for, and being only 12 years old (we both were) he let the cat out of the bag by explaining that the wedges could be hammered into door frames in a dungeon to make the area secure for sleeping, though you'd need a crowbar to make sure you didn't accidentally nail yourself inside a room with no way of getting out.
I love all that classic roleplaying game stuff, like a 10 foot wooden pole (for warding off rust monsters), 60 foot of rope (for roping the party together so you don't die by falling down a pit trap) or silver daggers (for lycanthropes and vampires). It's the kind of thing you just wish you'd brought along when you find that you need it.
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Make NPCs a type of item. Let the player stuff a goblin right into their pack.
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I think a lot of game developers look at this particular thing the wrong way round: they first add tons of items and then start to think how to use them. Wrong. You first think how items are going to be used by monster or in the game world and then you add them, one by one. Better yet have a support for that particular type of item in the engine, considering most of the things that can happen.
Trust me, I've done this mistake in large scale.
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Agreed.
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Definitely agree with Krice. Which is precisely why it may be (depending on the individual developer's neurological wiring, I guess) a good idea to start with a huge list of potential items to sift through for ideas, before you start implementing anything.
As always,
Minotauros
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How about belts? The nice thing about belts is you can put slots on them for holding things you want to have ready for immediate use. A utility belt system allows you to have a large inventory without losing the strategic element of item management, plus it lets you avoid the typical use cases for macros.
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This is from my own project. It is an outdated and incomplete list but it might help you out.
I advise you to create families so you can browse items in your game with filters, assuming you are including a large diversity of item types.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/o60bqj7ghdaa71m/Item%20List.jpg (https://www.dropbox.com/s/o60bqj7ghdaa71m/Item%20List.jpg)
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I think a lot of game developers look at this particular thing the wrong way round: they first add tons of items and then start to think how to use them. Wrong. You first think how items are going to be used by monster or in the game world and then you add them, one by one. Better yet have a support for that particular type of item in the engine, considering most of the things that can happen.
Trust me, I've done this mistake in large scale.
I think Krice hits the jackpot here. Think of an item and simulate its usage in the game, think about all the variables it will use and how they will be used by the game's engine, this will also help you categorize the item itself. As Krice, I also made that same mistake. I once had a specific category and class for body parts, which later on I came to realize that it would work exactly as my ingredient type item; I was developing a pointless object structure that was already available through my ingredient type class.
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Yeah, that's why belts are awesome.
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This is from my own project. It is an outdated and incomplete list but it might help you out.
I advise you to create families so you can browse items in your game with filters, assuming you are including a large diversity of item types.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/o60bqj7ghdaa71m/Item%20List.jpg (https://www.dropbox.com/s/o60bqj7ghdaa71m/Item%20List.jpg)
Thanks, I think I have nearly all of those ones now.
I think it's always best to start out brain storming lists.
Things in a game are not real things, they are just signs of things.
If I find a skull in a game, it's not really a skull. It won't break if I drop it. My character won't be creeped out about touching it. It won't decompose. I can't get DNA from the teeth.
Actually it's more likely to be a key, or an ingredient or a junk item or a bonus item or even food. It could be any of these and any of these usages could easily use something other than a skull to represent themselves.
Some things lend themselves better to a particular use than others however. A sword is most often a weapon, a knife sometimes a weapon or sometimes a tool. A jewel is usually a treasure item, but may easily be a puzzle item, required to solve a particular puzzle. The semiotic relationship between signifier (visible in game object) and signified (the function of that object) is pretty loose in games. This is especially so in ASCII roguelikes where @ is a player and % could be an item and "G" could be a giant or a goblin or a gargoyle.
Sometimes there is a particular mechanical link that fixes how an item must be used. For example, the belt might need to be "worn" before you get any use out of it. A potion needs a certain key press to "drink" it. But in many cases the difference between two items is almost unimportant. If you don't have drinking restrictions or item damage then scrolls and potions are nearly the same. They both start out unidentified and trigger an magical effect when used. Scrolls might require a special skill to read, or not.
How the designer decides to separate the usage of various items is up to them, but once you start introducing mechanical limitations to an object then it needs to be a separate class.
One game might have
magical_items(scrolls, potions, wands, etc..)
Where each is activated by the use item action and any potion can have the same sort of magical effects as any scroll or wand, and there is no item damage (like your scrolls being damaged in fire or water)
another game might have
scrolls()
potions()
wands()
etc..()
Where there are restrictions on what kind of magical effects each item class can have, their might be different actions for using each type and each type might have other restrictions.
But before you decide on those things you need a pool of possible themed item types so you can draw from them. You don't have to use everything on the list, but it's good to have a list to start with. Same with monsters, skills, spells and everything else.
Many items have restrictions of convention inherited from the roguelike genre, but it's really OK to break these conventions if you feel the reward of fresh game play is worth the risk of confusing players who are used to a certain convention. If the usage of an item is not clear and there isn't any help to describe how to use it you could end up with a useless item.
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Good reading.
Could you show me your list once you think it is complete? It might help me out with some items that I'm having difficulty categorizing.