Today, I was working on a major system of the game: Goodies. I had to come up with a name to differentiate them from items like trees and trash cans - Goodies are items that you pick up and carry. There are a few main types of Goodies:
- Junk items. They may have a use in making other things, or they may not. They're just stuff you carry around.
- Jellybeans. They can be slotted into your weapons to boost those weapons. Weapons begin with 1 Jellybean slot, and get up to 5 as they level up.
- Equipment. Like in any good ol' RPG, there's gear you can wear. As an oddity, in this game, you don't care what kind of gear it is. You could wear 3 hats at once, if you want. You just get 3 gear slots, and equip any 3 equippable items you like.
- Food. You make this at restaurants that you buy, from various items you find. It sits in your inventory, where you can click it to eat it. When eaten, food gives you a long-lasting boost of some kind, but you can only be digesting 2 foods at once. No eating more until one of them is fully digested! Or maybe it replaces the older of the two you already have, which makes more sense (in a gaming way, less sense in a reality way).
There won't be randomly generated items, just handcrafted bits of wonderment. But there will be an awful lot of those, with more added every so often, because the online system makes it easy to do so! Then hopefully people will want to auction these off and get the right gear to suit your particular skills and style. I often think of all this stuff in terms of how Kingdom Of Loathing works. Imagine this game as that game, except that instead of just clicking "Fight", you run around shooting like crazy in fantastical action craziness. Of course, it's also equally inspired by 12 other games, so don't imagine too hard.
And no, it won't show what you are wearing on your character. Many reasons against that! I know it would be cool, and I'd like it myself, but there are a lot of reasons why it's entirely unfeasible.
One of the things I like in WoW are the items that have random chance effects ("Procs"). Like I just got a trinket that has a 3% chance when I get hurt to give me 500 armor for 15 seconds. So that's something I'm focusing on here. It's a lot more fun to decide between an item that can give a damage boost when you get hurt and an item that can speed you up each time you beat an enemy,* than it is to decide between one that gives you +2 damage and one that gives +2 armor. It's also much less precise, and nobody can really say exactly what the one best path is. Just like the food buffs, you might have several of those effects on you at any time, if your Jellybeans or Equipment caused them. You can have 5 buffs total on you at any time, and the 2 foods are included in those 5. That only applies to time-limited buffs. You can have any number of permanent effects on you at once (like the armor your hat provides, the accuracy you gain from some eyeglasses, or whatever).
*I know that sentence shouldn't have a comma there, but it was just much too long and messy. I'm sure there's a better way to write it overall. Perhaps you can have a grammar contest in the comments!
