The Legend of Zelda: Forgotten Gates

I'm running pretty low on well-established design aspects of the game to talk about, so this month I'm just going to mull over something I've been pondering lately: sooner or later the game is probably going to need more weapons. e.ea I don't just mean the game as it's currently presented in the available demo, where each hero starts with a single weapon (and in Link's case, a shield) and they use just that. I mean I'll have to fill things out a bit further than I have planned so far. Right now my design documents hold ideas for new, stronger weapons that can be found in the various locations that will be visited. For example, in the oriental-style land of Yamakage, longsword wielders will be able to find katana, dagger wielders will be able to find butterfly knives, etc. It's actually a little sparse as-is; most weapon types only have a single extra weapon to be found in each land beyond Hyrule, if even that (Yamakage currently has no axe-type weapon, for example). I came up with the planned weapons waaaaaaay back towards when I first started this project.

Besides just having a bit of variety, the main reason I've been thinking lately I'll need some more weapons is so that enemies can drop cheap ones. Right now all weapons have decent durability, lasting for 20 uses (in my development version that is, equipment deterioration is a feature I haven't released in a demo yet). If I have enemies frequently drop weapons like that, equipment deterioration won't mean much because the player will always have more stock than they can use anyway. However, if most enemies drop lower-quality weapons, with both less power and less durability (I'm thinking 5 uses), suddenly we have a meaningful economy. Should you keep your strongest weapons equipped all the time, or use up the junky ones on weaker foes, even if it means taking an extra hit or two, to make it less likely you'll shatter your good sword in the middle of a boss fight? What if there's a shop in the quest, is it worth selling all your accumulated low-tier weapons for one high-tier weapon? If Shemri is in the party, should you just use the junk weapons as fodder for her Throw ability, or meticulously use them to the point of breaking first?

This would also allow me to match the weapons more organically with the enemies fictionally. Breath of the Wild did this with bokoblins and moblins using primitive weapons of wood and bone, lizalfos being more likely to have actual metal (but still comparatively shoddy) blades, guardian robots having special forerunner tech weapons, etc. I could occasionally even have the enemies themselves become weapons after defeated -- for example, deku babas become deku sticks -- although mechanically the only difference there is that you can't disarm the enemy during combat.

The downside, of course, is that more weapons means more work. X) I'll have to create animations for each hero capable of using a given weapon, sometimes more than once since some special skills involve weapon usage. It should be relatively easy copy-paste-modify work on the whole, but it's not non-existent. Also, while I did leave some room in the game database for expanding weapons, it's not that much -- just 10 total weapons of each type. That felt like plenty when I was only planning on around 5 weapons of each type at most, but I could easily exceed that if I'm making weapons out of monster parts and the like. If I have to rearrange the item database to make more room, I'll have to be very careful to update anything affected. I've already been burned before by that sort of thing, even though I do my best to use variable values instead of direct references to database stuff.