Building an RPG-Style Inventory

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inventory-system.c3p

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Published on 16 Jul, 2020. Last updated 30 Jul, 2020

The project relies on a few files to function properly. The first of these is a JSON file which holds all of the information about each item including ID, name and description among other things. The items in the file are organised in alphabetical order to allow for item sorting in the inventories. The first object in the file is purposefully empty to ensure that the inventory still displays correctly.

Along with the JSON file, the project uses a dictionary to keep track of how many of each item the player has. The dictionary has a key for each item, the value of which changes as the player picks up or drops items. This is then displayed in the inventory alongside the item description.

The remaining project files are all arrays – one for each inventory category. You could create them at runtime, but for testing purposes, I find it easier to have the arrays as project files so you can edit them easily using Construct 3's array editor. The array objects associated with each array file are also stored in a family (Inventories), with a few instance variables – CategoryName, CategoryID and InvPages.

Once the game has been run once, and the player has picked up or dropped an item, the current state of the arrays and ItemNumbers dictionary are saved to Local Storage so when the game opens for a second time, the pre-existing data can be loaded into the game instead of fresh project files.

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  • Hi Laura! I'm struggling to understand where the images for the items are being pulled in from. I don't see it mentioned in the tutorial. Could you please explain? Thanks!

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      • Laura_D's avatar
      • Laura_D
      • Construct Team Community Manager
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      • (1 child)

      So, both the ItemShowcase and the ItemSlot objects have animation frames for each item. Then, in the JSON file, each item has an ID and these ID numbers dictate the order that the frames are stored in on the Showcase and Slot sprites.

      The Slot images are set from these ID numbers in the Inventory Category Settings event group, and the Showcase images are set during the UpdateInv function.

      Does that help?

  • Thanks for the tutorial Laura! Just a question, is there any reason you specify the items on a JSON file?

    Feels to me that it would be easier to manage if they were created individually under a folder or family since we load the json to memory anyway, unless there is a performance gain I'm missing.

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      • Laura_D's avatar
      • Laura_D
      • Construct Team Community Manager
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      • (0 children)

      I've not done any testing in terms of performance, but for me, it was down to preference. I didn't want to have loads of different objects even if they were nicely sat in a folder! I assume it would still work using a different object for each item, but I've not tried it!

  • we know that CategoryName is an instance variable of the array(inventory) but where did ArrayName come from?

    edit:o, i just now know it, we can add a thing called parameter in the function.

  • i hope the no. of events is not greater than 50 cause i havent bought construct yet. maybe i can cut down some events for strings.

  • eu nao comsigo fazer um inventario

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