HTD Day 3

For this week we got more great art from Kevin plus we start talking about looting.

Dan and I thought a lot about not only loot in the game but how you loot items in the game. We both agreed that when the enemy dies they should drop some money for you to collect. Also if they were going to drop an item of some sort that a small treasure box will drop and open up in the ground revealing the item.

First the question is how do you get this item from the ground into your bag. Well the first thought was adding more interactivity by clicking on the loot. But we the more we thought about it the less it made sense. If everything you defeat drops a least some coins then you should have to constantly click on the screen. We don't want that so for this game every item that drops will be automatically grabbed for you.

This created a new problem. If you loot everything then your bags could potentially be filled with things that you don't want. The solution to this was to create a "temporary bag", every time something drops (coins, armor, etc) it will automatically be placed on this temporary bag that has unlimited space. At the end of the level and any time during the level you can then transfer any items from your "temporary bag" into your real bag. Anything not transferred into your real bag will disappear the next time you start a level.

The other thing we thought about was to make sure to show you what you had looted without interrupting the flow of the game. When something drops and is automatically looted you will see an icon that will represent the item go into a bag. The icon will let you know what type of item dropped (chest pieces, helm, etc) and how rare the item that dropped is (poor, common, uncommon, rare, etc).

Lastly I leave you with some prop art for a cave level that Kevin worked.

Dan will be around later to post some more things

HTD - Okay now for HTD. I think most people would agree that while auto-looting is very helpful and convient that clicking on a hard earned chest and having it explode with loot is both awesome and satisfying. For this purpose We will also have chests that come with the level and aren't necessarily drops from enemies. Like they might be hidden somewhere on the map, guarded by bosses, or in plain site but inaccessible at the time, etc. These chests will be loaded with stuff and you will need a key to unlock them. You'll get the key from doing something related to the chest. So if it's guarded by a boss it's likely the boss drops the key, if it's in plain site you'll probably get the key from one of the mobs you fight on that level. We also want some chests that you may see all the time but can't open at the time. You might have to do quests in order to obtain the key or perhaps get it off some uber boss later on and then go back to that mysterious chest you could never open to find out what's been in there all this time.