Making inventories great

What's up gamers! I hope everyone is doing great and had a fabulous holiday over December.

I took a nice little break around November, coding things like Mandelbrots, and playing games like Ark (love it, 2k+ hrs).

Now that I am well rested I came back to the project with fresh eyes, and man I love when I can do this. After developing for so long you will find ideas getting stale, and you might get a bit lazy. When you come back after a break you see all the bad and good of your project.

And so with that, what was the first thing I wanted to work on? Inventory!

It's a super complicated feature in my game, most think inventory is simple - but if you want to use grids like dead desert, stacks, crafting etc then inventory can become a real headache!

Since coming back to development the changes I made were all quality of life and bug fixes to inventory; so here's a list for those interested, things that might equally effect an inventory you are developing.

Making a good inventory

• Items now stack up to a certain number
• Items which stack can be split
• Items which stack, can be combined by dragging one on top of the other
• Items which stack have a simpler command for developers, if I say "add 100" and the max stack is 10, it will add 10 x 10 items to the player inventory.
• Tooltips change depending on the item you're looking at, providing the most important information
• Double clicking an item moves it into the inventory you have open and vice versa
• When you are dragging the UI or an Item, the tooltip no longer gets in the way
• There are slight "deadzones" in the UI between item slots for example, these should not exist and so grid slots are slightly bigger in code, than they appear visually