Prototyping the Inventory Management Mechanic
If I'm able to build the game I'm envisioning in my head, it will be a turn-based inventory management roguelite dungeon crawler. I've started building the inventory part of the game and I'm happy with the results so far.
I'm using Claude as a mentor. It helps point me to the right documentation, provides best practice solutions so I'm creating good Godot habits from the start, and—most importantly, since I'm familiar with JavaScript—I ask it to translate what I know from that language to GDScript so I can better understand. I can go into more detail about using Claude as a mentor in a future post, but I just wanted to make it clear that Claude does not write the code for me. It doesn't even spit out code snippets for me to copy and paste. I think AI should be used as a tool and never as a complete replacement for a human bean.
To get started, I needed to answer one easy question after another: How do I make a square? A ColorRect. How do I make a vertical stack of ColorRects? Put them into a VBoxContainer. How do I make five of those stacks sit side-by-side with one another? Put them in a GridContainer.This went on for a while until I came up with something like this:
If you can imagine pixel art instead of colors, you can see a sword next to a shield, and then a magic staff on the right end. The active column cycles automatically each turn, and at the end of each player turn, the player automatically uses any items in their inventory that are in the active column. So, for example, on turn three, the two blue squares in the active column represent 2 block, and the single red square represents 1 strength damage—meaning the player gains 2 block and deals 1 damage.
I still have a lot of unanswered questions about this mechanic and how it will weave into the other half of the core mechanic: level traversal. Still, I'm impressed with what I've created so far and eager to get back into it!