Ideas on Inventory, Equipment, Pickups, and Loadouts

Posted on by
Reply

For the last week, I was very seriously considering the option to make Iridium Moons not as a 3D ImSim, but instead going for an ASCII or tile-based 2D Mystery Dungeon approach inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Caves of Qud. This would massively reduce the workload on creating assets, which in turn would make a huge open world at the scale of Morrowind and Kenshi that spans multiple planets and with very intricate resource management and survival mechanic a feasible option, given my resources and know-how. Which is a very tempting proposition. But at the end of the day my own imagination is just always very visual. And while I am struggling with keeping up the motivation to get the needed practice with Blender, the prospect of working with shapes, colors, and lighting to show fantastical places and environments to other people is just way too compelling for me to give up on. Even if this means the game as a whole has to be a lot smaller (because of the work needed to create the assets and build levels) and the mechanics a lot simpler (because they will need to work in real time and first person with a much more basic interface).

In the end, I think I will continue to pursue my original ideas for my game, as the concept still feels very strong to me, and should result in a kind of gameplay and sense of experiencing the game world that mirrors my favorite parts of my favorite games: A game with the general scale and open-world story progression of Fallout in first-person 3D graphics comparable to Morrowind, with the dungeon crawling gameplay of System Shock 2 and the approach to stealth of Thief. Last month I’ve been playing Dread Delusion, which took me 40 hours to complete, and I think a game with a similar scope and similar style of presentation should be quite realistically accomplishable for me. (Even though it was made by many more people with much more experience and skill. But I have all the time it will take, and no labor costs or office rent.)

The problems I want to avoid

One thing I always had a big hatred for in open-world RPGs is vendor trash. Low value items that you find in random chests, crates, trash cans, and corpses scattered through the game world whose only purpose is to be dumped at the next merchant you come across to get a pitiful amount of money for. This game mechanic is nothing but pure padding, busywork, and distraction. It’s the reason to get you to open hundreds of containers in the game world to create a little bit of excitement about the hope that there might actually be something good in it that you are going to use. And to make you run back and forth between the exploration sites and the next town to free your inventory space. It very quickly becomes a mindless chore that just wastes your time, and also really doesn’t make any sense for the character you are playing.

A closely related issue, that not all people have, but I know many others are quite bothered with as well, is that in many open-World RPGs there is often barely any reason to spend all the money that you made through the mindless busywork. Pretty much any weapon or piece of armor that you can buy in a store can also be found somewhere for free. And generally, the best items can only be found on enemies or in dungeons and not be bought at all. And players know what. So for a lot of players like me, buying better equipment in stores feels like a complete waste of money. There are a few games I’ve encountered in my life where starting equipment is really bad and finding the good equipment for free can take quite a long while. Stalker specifically comes to mind. Going from an MP5 to an AK-74 is a complete gamechanger, and when you see one in a store and have the money, it’s one of the best things you can do with your money in the early game. But as a first time player, you probably won’t know how much better this gun actually is until you get one. And so I image many first time players won’t spend their money on it and wait to take one from a dead NPC.

And of course the third element in this unholy trinity of items and inventory management is crafting. Metro Exodus is the only game with a crafting system I enjoy, because it only has two types of crafting components. Metal parts and chemicals. And you use them to craft basic consumables like ammunition, health packs, and gasmask filters or to repair worn out weapons. But more typically in open-world RPGs, you collect dozens of different types of flowers, berries, animal skins, teeth, antlers, metals, minerals, and whatever. And because there are so many types that are not interchangeable, and many of them can’t just be collected anywhere in 2 minutes when you realize you need them, you are compelled to always collect everything you see. It’s very much like vendor trash, but so much worse because you’ll be keeping all that crap throughout the entire game instead of regularly dumping it all out. And as mentioned with buying items from stores above, generally the items you can make are just worse than the unique items you can find on boss enemies or as quest rewards.

I really do love equipment and loadout customization a lot. But I loath vendor trash collecting, crafting component harvesting, and saving up millions of money that I have no good incentives to spend. All these things are just padding that makes the players do things the character they play would have no reason to do, and it makes you spend hours looking at inventory screens and trying to figure out which items have the best weight to sales price ratio to always carry the maximum amount of value while having your carrying capacity maxed out. Going through the logistics optimization minigame several times while inside a dungeon full of enemies because my inventory is full is one of the worst pacing killers.

Some ideas on loadouts

When it comes to collecting valuables, spending money, and managing your consumables, the most interesting game I’ve come across is Thief. Thief differs from the other games relevant to this topic here by being not only not an open-world game, but by being split into several non-continuous levels between which your inventory resets. At the end of each level, all your consumable items that you still had left are lost. At the start of the next level, you get a new basic set of consumables that the developers thought would be useful for the level ahead, and you have the option to buy some additional consumable items with the money you made from all the treasures you’ve stolen in the previous level. And after you made your selection and start the level, all the unspent money left over is reset as well. (Presumably all spent by the character in the indeterminate number of days that passes between each level.) This is of course a balancing mechanic, making it much more predictable for the level designers what items players will have at the start of each level. But it also gives players a good incentive to not hoard all the items they have and all the money they made because they “might need it later”. Because money not spend at the start of the level or items not used by the end of the level will be gone anyway. But you still want to go looking for all the loot, because just those two additional water arrows it might pay for might come really handy in the next level.

Now for my own game ideas, the ability to go explore different locations in any order and to come back later with different equipment like in a Metroidvania is a pretty high priority. And so the Thief approach of resetting the inventory between levels is not an option. But the idea of having the player select a limited loadout from a larger pool of optional equipment when leaving the home base to head out an explore a location is one that I find really interesting and compelling, and I think has some real potential for an open-world exploration game.

Instead of limiting how much stuff the players can bring when entering a ruin by a budget of money, the loadout when leaving the home base can be restricted by weight. And not just a maximum weight limit, but a gradual weight penalty. Players can bring as much or as little tools and supplies as they want, but the more stuff they bring, the more the weight will slow them down. This weight penalty can be applied to movement speed, jump distance, stealth, exhaustion, and combat. The more equipment you bring with you, the more tools are available to you to deal with the obstacles and threats you encounter. More powerful weapons and stronger armor can be huge gamechangers in combat, as is of course additional ammunition. But is it worth the decrease in mobility and stealth? And as a scavenger of old machine parts, you will also have considerable additional weight to deal with on your way back out. So what pieces of equipment will you definitely bring along, and which ones might you leave at home?

This is for every player to decide, and this is not a simple yes or know answer. This is something that is for the players to figure out and find what works best for their own play style. And being entirely equipment based, everything can be switched around and mixed up at any time. You don’t have to lock yourself into any specific play style by spending experience points to permanently improve specific character stats. And it will also likely lead to countless situations in which you curse yourself for not having brought that one piece of equipment that you thought you didn’t need, or seriously question why you brought all this stuff that’s completely useless.

Some ideas on money

Collecting valuables is fun. And when the game revolves around acquiring hard to find  spare parts that are of great value to people trying to keep ancient machines running,  and customizing your gear to your own preferences is important, simply not using any kind of money would feel out of place. There’s got to be money in the game, and meaningful ways to spend it instead of just watching a number on the interface go up and forgetting about it.

In many games, various consumable items exist in several different grades of quality. The higher qualities are more expensive but have a greater effect. And when the gameplay is significantly affected by carry weight, a high tier item that can provide the effect of several low tier items but still have the same weight has a meaningful increased value to players. Being equipped with higher tier consumables means that players can take more tools with them on an adventure and collect more salvage before they have to turn back to sell off their finds. In way too many games, players have to increase their characters’ stats to keep up with the higher stats on enemies in later areas of the game, with the gameplay staying basically the same. My idea is to instead allow players to go anywhere they want, and instead make character advancement about becoming more efficient and flexible at exploration. Movement becomes faster, the risk of engaging in firefights becomes lower, and having more tools at hand means more shortcuts can be used.

Taking inspiration from the default base loadout for every level in Thief, I like the idea that players have unlimited access to standard rations, standard medpacks, and lowest tier pistol ammunition at their home base. When players go completely broke, they can always return home and stock up on basic supplies to continue their search for more valuable salvage. But these free supplies are not very effective, so they probably will have to take a lot of them with them, which makes them slower and progress a bit more tedious. I think this could be a good incentive to go exploring beyond just the current main objective in a location, as a bigger haul means the next adventure will take less work. I also see the options that if players’ save up larger amounts of money, it can be used to upgrade the supply boxes in their home base. Instead of only having unlimited free Tier 1 medpacks, the upgrade now lets you stock up on as many Tier 2 medpacks as you like.

This would necessitate that stores don’t buy these consumables at all. But I actually quite like the thought that stores don’t buy regular loot at all. High value salvage parts sold to spare parts dealers could be the only source of income. Collecting all the weapons and armor of all dead NPCs and hauling them to a store, possibly over several trips, always feels to me like a more high value version of vendor trash. Characters in adventure movies or books never do that. And while it’s a common staple of D&D style fantasy world, Iridium Moons is my own original setting where I can simply establish that the general store in a peaceful farming village has no interest in purchasing 50 rifles and 20 suits of combat armor. Second hand arms traders probably do exist in the big hidden pirate ports, but in a game about scavenging old industrial machine parts these simply won’t be visited by the players.

But I think having mid-tier weapons or tools available for purchase in town wouldn’t hurt. They can be there for players who want to spend money on a better pistol, a rifle, or a nightvision scope now instead of waiting another 5 to 10 hours to find one that is free. Or you can keep playing more carefully for the time being and save the money for other things, if that’s more your play style. It’s up to the players to customize their equipment to their play style.

Recap

To sum up this long-winded rambling with my key notes for equipment and inventory mechanics in my game:

  • Character progression and customization is entirely item based. Players don’t gain XP to permanently increase character stats.
  • The primary equipment limitation is weight. Additional weight reduces movement speed, jump distance, stealth, and endurance, decreasing the pace of making progress.
  • Higher quality items generally have the same performance as standard items, but at a lower equipment weight.
  • Standard consumables can be restocked at the home base for free, higher quality lightweight items have to be purchased in town or scavenged on adventures.
  • Rare high value spare parts taken from old machines are the only form of treasure that can be sold for money.
  • Some mid-tier tools and weapons can be purchased, but also found as pickups. High-tier equipment can only be found as pickups.

Worldbuilding Ground Rules

Posted on by
Reply

One of the major annoyances and frequent nuisance of flawed worldbuikding is the introduction of new rules for what non-realistic things are possible in a setting that contradict things that have already been established at an earlier point, or whose existence should have significantly changed how characters behaved in previous scenes. This is most commonly a problem with long running series that have dozens of writers and nobody checking scripts for such inconsistencies. But it also happens frequently to series written entirely by a single writer, and then it is particularly annoying and distracting.

The proper way to prevent this from happening with a fantastical setting is to establish the rules for how the non-realistic aspects of the world work before creating the plots that will revolve around them. The audience or even the characters don’t have to know all the rules from the start. But the writers need to create clarity for themselves what things are possible or not in their world, so they don’t retroactively invalidate the resolution of earlier moments in the story. This does not just apply to technologies or magic spells, but can also include social pressures and power balances that will likely affect how different characters can act in various conflict situations and get away with it.

All of the things shared here are information that is openly known to well informed people in the Galia Cluster, and available to any player characters.

Space Travel

  • Ships move faster than light by moving through hyperspace, where the speed of light is much higher and acceleration requires much less energy.
  • Ships in hyperspace are completely isolated from any signals and are undetectable and unable to communicate.
  • Hyperspace is still influenced by the gravity of any objects with mass. Hyperspace jump drives must overcome the gravitational force between the ship any other objects, which requires keeping a minimum distance from planets and stars.
    • Military ships (and pirates) tend to have more powerful jump drives that work relatively close to planets. Commercial cargo ships have much more cost efficient drives that require a greater distance from planets to work. This makes it possible to intercept cargo ships in the hours before landing and after takeoff.
  • Travel times to the next inhabited planet can often be over a week. Travel between the homeworlds and outlying colonies can range from weeks to months, and crossing all of known space on commercial ships can take more than a year on slower ships and indirect routes.

Space Settlement

  • Most people never leave their own planet.
  • Over 90% of all people live on the homeworlds and a small number of major colonies over 100 million people. The majority of inhabited planets has only a few million people or less.
  • Societies capable to migrate to other star systems tend to have very high living standards and very little population growth, making it actually difficult to find people interested in settling new remote planets. People usually accept a lack of existing infrastructure and limited access to most goods if they are paid very well to work in newly established outposts.
  • Space colonization is driven almost by the mining industry. While almost all elements and minerals can be found in huge quantities in most star systems, space travel is cheap enough to make it the most cost efficient for companies to only extract the most easily and cheaply accessible resources on a planet and then move on after a few decades.

Weapons and Combat

  • No laser or plasma weapons.
  • No force fields.
  • Starships almost never explode from combat damage. Instead, battles generally end when a ship loses the ability to continue firing or maneuvering, or loses all power. When losing a battle, crews will usually abandon disabled ships to become prisoners, and blow up their ships themselves to prevent them being salvaged by the enemy.
  • Interstellar warfare consists almost exclusively of interfering with trade by capturing enemy cargo ships, and attacking enemy cruisers and starship bases that can protect commercial ships against attacks.
  • Major interstellar powers do not compete over natural resources, which are abundant everywhere, but over trade of manufactured goods. Planets are of strategic importance because their location and infrastructure allows the stationing of ships that can protect or interfere with trade, or more rarely because of the manufacturing capacity of the local industry for certain critical goods.
  • Planetary invasions of homeworlds and major colonies are almost unheard of, as the costs of transporting and supplying armies large enough to conquer and occupy a planet with a populations of hundreds of millions of people are exponentially more expensive than maintaining ground forces to defend against such an attack.

Psychic Powers

  • Psychic phenomenons are caused by interactions between the psychic and the electromagnetic fields. Waves in either field create waves in the other field as well. The electrical signals in the nervous system of living creatures can cause waves in the psychic field, which then cause electromagnetic effects in the surrounding environment.
  • The interactions between the electromagnetic and the psychic field are usually very weak, making psychic phenomenons very faint and subtle and difficult to record and measure.
  • Interactions between the fields become greatly amplified in the presence of the mineral midorite.
    • All the known intelligent species evolved in regions of space where midorite is extremely rare. The reason for this remains unknown.
    • Because of the near complete lack of midorite in the home systems, where the vast majority of people lives and all the largest science institutions are located, psychic phenomenons remain relatively little researched, and reports of their potential power from remote mining worlds widely regarded as greatly exaggerated.
  • Most psychic phenomenons are produced by large groups of people being under prolonged severe stress in areas rich in midorite or heavily contaminated with midorite dust from ore refining. These mostly tend to produce sensations of lights, shapes, and sounds, electrical disruptions, and magnetic anomalies, but in some cases are reported to produce echo-like reflections of people and events that haunt the location.
  • Extensive mental training can give people the ability to deliberately produce directed psychic effects through their own brain activity. These psychic powers primarily allow a limited perception of other people’s thoughts and to affect the emotions and sensations of others. For some people, these insights into other peoples’ thinking allow them to make quite reliable predictions about their future actions and behavior, which some see as a form of premonition or divination.

Inspirations and Influences

Posted on by
Reply

Everything about Iridium Moons is all about wanting to make the things that I would love to have in a game, but nobody else seems to be making in the styles that I think would be the most amazing. As such, it’s greatly influenced by a number of older works that all contributed to shaping my image of the most wonderful game. With it probably still being many months until I have any images to share of my own creations, and possibly years until I could show any videos, I think that sharing the various works that inspire me and influence Iridium Moons the most might be a good way to give some kind of general idea of what I am trying to make.

Game Design Influences

  • Fallout (1997)
  • Thief (1998)
  • System Shock 2 (1999)
  • Deus Ex (2000)
  • Morrowind (2002)
  • Stalker (2007)

Very early on, when the vague idea of maybe making my own game coalesced into something of an actual concept, the thought that kept staying in the center of my ideas was “a game like Morrowind, but with game mechanics for exploring dungeons like in Thief”. And that’s been sticking around even when I decided to not go with a High Fantasy setting and go for a retro-futuristic Space Fantasy instead.

Even with modern tools and resources that are available for free, making a game with the size and amount of content of Morrowind by myself is out of the question if I want to release it somewhere in the next 25 years. But the same approach to towns and dungeons and NPC interactions would also work on a much smaller scope. In 24 years of playing that game, I still have never seen more than half of the map. I feel Fallout 1 and 2 are good examples of very similar quest design, storytelling, and open-world exploration, but at a much smaller scale. Making something that is the size of Fallout, but as a 3D ImSim instead of an Iso-RPG feels like something I could realistically complete.

And a good example of what that could look like is probably Stalker. Though that’s probably still more maps and larger maps than a completed Iridium Moons might have.

Visual Design Inspirations

  • Moebius
  • Ralph Bakshi
  • Jim Henson
  • Ralph McQuarrie
  • The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
  • Flash Gordon (1981)
  • Return of the Jedi (1983)
  • He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983)
  • Dune (1992)
  • The Dig (1995)
  • Albion (1995)
  • StarCraft (1998)
  • Morrowind (2002)
  • Knights of the Old Republic (2003)

Many movies and shows in the 80s had a really cool approach to depicting alien and fantastical environments that unfortunately disappeared in the 90s. Morrowind is the last popular example I can think of, and it’s the main thing that makes me love the game so much, even though I think its game design really isn’t very good. But this visual style was still around in many places when I was growing up, and I always thought it looks really cool. And we really need to see more of it again.

Music

Music is going to be the most difficult part for me because I won’t be able to make any myself, and the going rates for commissioning 30 minutes of music is more than I make in a year. Maybe there’s some future in which it could be crowdfunded, or by some miracle another hobbyist wants to donate some music that just fits my own idea of what the game should sound like. At this time, it’s impossible to say what’s going to happen in that regard, but here’s what I imagine playing in the background of Iridium Moons. Some of these are from sources that really aren’t great, but I think the composers at least did a wonderful job.

  • The Empire Strike Back (John Williams, 1980)
  • Return of the Jedi (John Williams, 1983)
  • Dune (Toto, 1984)
  • Ewoks: Battle for Endor (Peter Bernstein, 1985)
  • Dune (Stéphane Picq, Philippe Ulrich, 1992)
  • The Dig (Michael Land, 1995)
  • Outcast (Lennie Moore, 1999)
  • Tamriel Rebuild (ASKII, Rytelier, 2020)
  • Rebel Moon (Tom Holkenborg, 2023)
  • Dune: Awakening (Knut Avenstroup Haugen, 2025)

So what is Iridium Moons?

Posted on by
Reply

Iridium Moons is my first attempt at learning how to make videogames all by myself, using only free software and resources, and with barely any existing knowledge or experience with either programming or 3D modelling. 15-20 years ago, this would probably have been impossible. But now with Godot and Blender, and all the available free documentations and guides, this is mostly a matter of putting in the time and keeping up the motivation. And having somewhat realistic expectations of how much work a single hobbyist could actually do. While I’ve been going into this with very few technical skills, my main hobby for the last 15 has been creating my own material for pen and paper RPG campaigns. And for the kinds of videogames I am interested in, there’s actually a very significant overlap in overall game design, specific game mechanics, storytelling, and purposeful worldbuilding. Which I think might be just as valuable. I also did some level design, item design, and scripting for a Neverwinter Nights server 20 years ago, which does provide me with a general understanding of the basic concepts of videogame architecture.

The concept for Iridium Moons is probably not a good choice for learning the basics of Godot and Blender. But for me, being really in love and excited about the thing I am working on is very important to stay motivated. Making something purely as a practice piece to gain skills that I will need to later start working on the thing I really want to make isn’t working for me.

Iridium Moons is intended to be some kind of first-person 3D ImSim game focused on outdoor and underground exploration, resource management, and stealth, with elements of investigation, set in a retro-futuristic Space Fantasy setting. The player is a salvage explorer who specializes in tracking down and recovering spare parts for century old machines that are operating well beyond their specified usage limits and selling them to customers who can not afford to upgrade their equipment to more modern standards.

The world of Iridium Moons is a remote star cluster that was heavily mined for rare minerals for nearly 200 years, but been abandoned by the large interstellar mining companies for the last three generations. Some of the original workers stayed behind on the planets they were born and grew up on even after all the large mines had closed, and their descendants created a new rural and largely agrarian society among the abandoned refineries and factories and worn out machines that were left behind. Back in those early days, spare parts for machines and equipment were literally lying around everywhere and of little value. But after more than half a century of being left to rust, many pieces and components have become quite rare and very valuable, making it a very profitable business to know where specific pieces can still be found and recovering them for clients desperately in need of them.

The player character is not a strong hero, and the objectives of the game do not revolve around fighting off a great enemy force. Instead, the intended approach for getting into ruined mines and refineries is to fix up old machinery to gain access to blocked off areas while trying to avoid drawing too much attention, and evading any pirates, bandits, or dangerous alien creatures that might be nearby. In that regard, the planned gameplay has a strong resemblance to Stalker and Thief.

But the world in which these exploration adventures are set is one heavily by pulp Space Fantasy from the 80s, which themselves was already heavily referencing even older space adventure stories from the 50s and 60s. Star Wars being of course the main example, as well as Flash Gordon and Masters of the Universe. I am a huge fan of the works of Moebius, Rralph Bakshi, and Jim Henson, whose style of presenting fantastical worlds has been sadly out of styles for decades now and gotten very little attention in videogames. Similarly, I intend to go for a graphics style strongly reminiscent of the Raw 3D graphics of the late 90s like in many PlayStation 1 games, or Quake, Thief, and Half-Life, with realistically proportioned but very low-polygon models and unblurred, low-resolution textures. But combined with modern lighting and shadow techniques. I find this art style very visually appealing, like 3D pixel art, but it is also a very labor efficient approach that should help significantly with making the creation of large number of 3D assets manageable for a single person.

Going for a game that covers both outdoor and dungeon exploration in an open-world manner is certainly ambitious, but I believe that with the chosen art style and freely available tools for Godot, this will still be manageable in a reasonable amount of time. As for the game mechanics, the free COGITO template already provides most of the basic mechanics for a typical ImSim, which should greatly help with making it a working game even with little experience in programming of any kind, and make the whole undertaking somewhat more similar to extensive modding than creating a new game completely from scratch.

Relaunching Iridium Moons

Posted on by
Reply

As you can see, there’s nothing here on this site yet. I originally created this site for a Space Opera RPG setting I came up with back in 2021 but had not been using it for the last three years. I have now started working on a Space Fantasy videogame in Godot, which is set in a greatly modified version of that original Iridium Moons setting, and so I am bringing back this site as a place to write about random things about the design process that are to long to post on Mastodon.