Inventory Management & The Life of a Lump of Coal

It's about time I figured out ⛈️ Inventory Management ⛈️. It feels like every survival game I play I spend half the game with a storage menu open putting things away or hunting for the ingredients to a crafting recipe. After every 5 minute adventure I just about have to spend 10 minutes running around my base freeing up inventory space so I can go and do the fun stuff again.

I wanted to see if I could simplify down the heart of what those inventories are there for and make the relevant game loops more engaging along the way.

Any storage that can store anything will eventually become filled with junk. So a corner stone of my design is that your character will not be able to store resources directly. Instead you'll create vehicles to transport them. While vehicles can also get bogged down with junk, I like the idea that the character is never encumbered and forced to clean up the mess before they can do anything else. You can always leave the vehicle behind to deal with later.

I also wanted there to be precise and intuitive menus for when you need them but to let you do as much as possible without them.

Let's take a look already.

A lump of coal starts its existence when it’s mined from lodes you’ll find in the ground.

Once you've got vehicles you can bring one to load up the resources.

Bring them to your destination and you can dump them back out.

Any buildings that need these resources will consume them when they’re close by.

Here you’ll see a Burner Mine (red building) collecting and consuming a lump of coal. The mine then begins mining the lode of stone beneath.

These resources will be automatically sent to storage but at the moment they are dropped on the ground.

Here you can see me shoving a load of stone and coal into a Loading Bay (yellow building) which sends the resources to any nearby Warehouses (blue building).

Once you are ready to transport resources from point A to point B you’ll bring a vehicle to the Loading Bay and open the transfer menu.

If you drive away from any available transfers you can instead eject precise amounts.

With resources back out in the wild collisions are enabled again. Crashing around with the loose resources feels pretty good.

Manually moving everything around sounds exhausting so for the most part producers and consumers will be connected through networks of combined storage buildings.

Resources had a lot of potential to wade through to pick out the most essential elements. I believe I've captured something here that's simple and fun while managing to reinforce the bits of my game that make it special.

Bonus gif!
Here’s a happy little accident that emerged but now I’ll make sure sticks around.

Whoo! Impromptu bomber runs, that’s gonna be a fun way to wipe out enemies.