Passive items

[MrN830]

Item pickups that modify your character but do not add a new button press.

Variety of effects, check the doc.

Are picked up automatically on contact, no inventory management, no capacity limit.

[bates64]

From the doc:

Passive Items: Items that do not enable an additional action, only modifying an existing one. They do not require any specific button press to take effect, rather, they express their influence constantly/without any intervention. No capacity limit, you can pick up as many as you want. Auto-equip - no inventory management.

[bates64]

I'm thinking that upon your first pickup of a new item type (per-save, not per-run), the game should pause and explain what it does -- need sfx, art for this. Time allowing it would be really cool to have a short looping example video/demo that shows it in action, like Into The Breach has for its attacks.

[bates64]

Cloak effects and passive item effects can both use the same internal system, they're just shown in the UI / on the player differently

[MrN830]

I think passive items will be a bit too inconsequential for them to merit videos - perhaps we can do that for the active ones. For passives we can definitely have an explanation, though, here are some examples of how we could do that. I'll make a mockup soon. i was gonna find more but you get the gist

[bates64]

Looks good, I agree. Only hangup would be: do you only ever get passive items in safe zones (e.g. their own rooms)? If not we should probably pause the game until the user dismisses the explanation

[MrN830]

my current thoughts were that yes: you only get passive items in safe rooms. either we could pause the game or just have it up for a few seconds no matter what player action is.

i think it would be good to show the explanation every time they pick it up, just as a refresher instead of just the first time. pausing every time would probably get annoying so i'd say the message would pop up and go away either when a set amount of time has passed (5s or so) or when they leave the current room, whichever happens first.

[bates64]

No need to pause then :+1: Conditions sound good

[bates64]

UI-wise, how do we plan to show the potentially limitless number of passives that the player has?

I'm thinking something similar to Splatoon 1 where abilities that are currently having an effect are shown in the corner (e.g. 'Magnetizes currency to you' has its icon appear at the top of the screen when near currency). We could show all the held passives on the pause screen or something (with hover over to see explanation)?

[MrN830]

I think it would get pretty busy in a combat situation with a bunch of icons coming and going, which could be somewhat distracting (just a bunch of icons flickering in and out and shifting/appending). I think the pause menu list would be good though, and potentially some indicator on the main screen would be helpful, at least it could show how many you've collected.

also another somewhat unrelated thing to keep in mind is because runs are going to be fairly curated because of the mostly static map, we can set a "soft" limit on the number of passives: if the map only has X potential reward rooms, we only need to account for approximately that many passive items in the UI. that number is probably gonna be pretty high though (like 15+)

[MrN830]

Another option: the message appears as long as you're standing in front of the item before you pick it up