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All About the Money

  • Milennin
  • 08/19/2015 01:37 AM
  • 413 views
Last week I showed the Brands interface. This week I got two more interfaces to show:

Blacksmith
Blacksmiths not only will extract Brands from your weapons, they can also sell you new and shiny gear. However, I needed something better than the regular shop interface... so, I made one myself. The Blacksmith shop interface is, just as the Brands menu, designed to be visually appealing, without being overwhelming. It needs to show all the right information at the right time and be intuitive and fast to navigate.
I decided to split the shop into two sections, one for armour, the other for weapons. The centre part is where all the important information goes, such as showing what character you're buying an item for and what the stats are on their current gear compared to the piece you are selecting.
Once you bought a piece of equipment, you can immediately equip it onto your character if you want. To save those precious seconds from having to open your main menu.


Herbalist
Herbalists are pretty much just a general store. They sell basic consumable items and can buy your unwanted stuff at low prices. I also needed a custom interface for this one, since I want to limit the amount of an item the player can carry at a time. The basics of the interface are the same. Regular goods go on the left, equipable trinkets go on the right. And everything in between is used to show useful information.
The stock of regular goods is automatically updated as the player buys, sells and uses the items that are listed in the shop. The current limit is set at 5 numbers of the same item, so once you reach that limit or go beyond it, the shop will be out of stock until you get rid of some of that stuff you're hoarding.


Gold Gain
So, my philosophy about gold gain in FADE is that players should never have to worry about grinding for gold if all they want is upgrading their armour and weapons every time they get to the next town or village. Even if a player takes the shortest path through the game and picks up no extras along the way, they should still be able to upgrade their basic gear.
Any and all extra money that's found can then be spent on Brands, Trinkets and Consumables to make life a little easier. It's unlikely you will be able to buy everything and still have a bunch of leftover money by the time you reach the first village and can start spending, even if you did find all the hidden gold spots and grinded a little here and there.
The goal is to keep the player poor. Money should be spent, not hoarded. Money that goes unused is a waste, and it takes away from its value if a player can just continue to hoard while still being able to buy everything in stores. This way I hope the player will feel a bit of excitement when finding some extra gold.