Frayed Knights 2 Development Update

Jay Barnson has published a new development update for the Frayed Knights sequel on his blog, which includes detail on some UI and systemic tweaks he did to the title while porting it to Unity.

Here’s a snip:

No More Party Inventory

Since I’m still leaning towards having unlimited character inventory, there’s really no sense in having that leftover ‘˜party’ inventory from the last game. This was another holdover from early development of the first game that I should have nuked before it had grown roots. The only thing that emerged from that complex design was the recognition that you could equip items in combat from your own inventory, but not from the party inventory. Originally, it was going to be possible to do it from the party inventory, but was going to take a lot more time. and it was just a dumb, useless, extra-player-input-required rule. Without things like encumbrance or item limits, there’s functionally no difference between an item being in the party inventory or another character’s inventory. It’s a pretty redundant place. So I’m getting rid of it.

I Will Gladly Pay You Tuesday for a Hamburger Today

The evolved use for the ‘˜party inventory’ was to stash stuff you didn’t really want to use but planned to sell to a merchant. Now, in FK1, I had some early code where merchants would have different buy-back rates and so forth. That’s going away in FK2 stuff sells for constant prices. And rather than having this abstracted supply of ‘˜stuff’ you somehow managed to haul with you from the dungeons (I always imagined you buried it somewhere and hauled it into town later), why not just abstract out the whole selling process? Now, (discard) and (sell) have been combined into a single function you can sell at any time. You don’t get the money until you visit a merchant, at which time everything you’ve dumped into the sell box since the last time gets converted into coin. This allows you to keep your working inventory uncluttered, and you don’t really need to go visit the merchant until you need to buy something, or actually need to pick up your money.